Blender Sculptie Importer - Attached

hi everyone, what is the best program to use for making high heels shoes in 3 parts the heel the sole and the shoe, thank you

I just tried the import/export scripts for the first time.

The sculpty types seem to be mixed up. When I specify type sphere it imports as a torus and vice versa. Also, when looking at the output in the console it listed my sphere as PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_PLANE.

Finally, when baking the sculpty derived object it silently fails. There's no error messages in the console window, just the "llSetPimitiveParms(...." message and the time taken to not bake my object.

It hates me!!



ps - I'm using the latest version of the importer and Blender 2.44.

Check top post for updated versions of all scripts. Sorry for any confusion, I thought I'd fixed this once.. Lost the fixed versions when I moved over to Linux so redone them.

The EAC unwrapper is vastly changed again. It now works off the view rather than prompting for an axis and only works on selected faces. The latest Blender SVN has new features which will give a better way of turning arbitrary meshes into sculpties anyway, so EAC is going to be redundant soon

If you upgrade to Blender 2.45 (or a SVN build) then multires is stable enough to use these:
http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/second_life/starter-sculpties.zip

Makes it easy to check LOD while you work

The types seem to be fixed. But it still fails to bake and I can't find that unwrapper anywhere.

"uv unwrap menu"? Where is that? Is it in Blender?

I'm using Windows XP, the updated scripts and Blender 2.55. I'm also wearing my Homer Simpson underpants.

I'm a mac user trying to apply these scripts to the program, I've read the information on
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Advanced_Tutorials/Python_Scripting/Export_scripts#Creating_a_script
I have no clue how to follow it. I keep staring at it in hopes that it will begin to make sense, but to no avail. I have asked several other mac users I know, to see if they had any ideas. I'm still stuck not knowing what to do. I don't know how to link a path, or how to find these "hidden" folders. If anyone could help me I would be greatly appreciative. If a fellow Mac user, that has blender and has figured out how to link, apply, whatever the scripts would either post here, IM me on yahoo at dark_angels_wrath, or contact me inworld by the name of Raven Quine. Thank you in advance for any and all possible help you may have.

Yeah. In Face Select mode the unwrap menu comes up when you press U

If it's not showing there try going to user preferences, file paths and hitting the re-evaluate scripts button next to the python path.

The baker doesn't save the image, it just bakes the sculptie map to the image the faces are assigned to. If you aren't getting any errors on the console, then it should just be a case of going to the UV Image Editor and saving the sculptie map.

How do we add additional vertices in Blender when we use the NURB-sphere mesh? I made a long cylinder rounded oval, and want to put additional vertices along the edge, currently there are only 3 points...i can increase the number of rows of points by subdivide, just want columns to increase....cant seem to find it in the manual.


Thanks

V

Has anyone ever made a basic sphere, plane, cube, and cylinder for blender import? I tried to make them with sculpty paint but they came out lumpy.

I'll keep looking.. just thought I'd ask.

Sculptypaint will offer too complex an object as well from my experience.. at least it was for Wings3d. If you take the map generated from sculptypaint and resize it to 32x32, it would be perfect though.

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/second_life/starter-sculpties.zip

The Cast operator in blender has a cube option so using that on a sphere will complete the types you asked for

How would you create an item like this:

http://www.bar-stools-barstools.com/ProdImages-cdls/R-201.jpg

?

I visited an SL store that was selling sculpty chairs. They look a lot like the picture I linked, complete with vertical slats in the chair back. I checked, and he's not using transparent textures or any other such trickery; the slats are 3-dimensional.

I can't see how you could model something like this from a sphere, plane or cylinder. I can model it easily via extrusion, but can't then unwrap it for baking.

(I'm not trying to compete with the chair guy; I just want to know how he's doing it. I'm not having a lot of luck pushing the starter sculpties into different shapes.)

There are a few different ways you could do this. The method in DanielFox's wings tutorial for geometric sculpties could be used in Blender too. Basically you use strings of 0 width faces to connect the different parts. This will have problems at lower LOD levels though, so it's not the approach I would use.

I'd use a mix of modelling and texturing to give the same effect but with somewhat better LOD reduction. You'd model the slats so that a flat section goes between them,then mask that out with alpha. The flat section would be in the middle of the gap between slats kinda like []=[]=[]=[]=[] where the equal signs are the flat transparent section and the mesh is a single loop going around the entire thing.

It really depends on whether you are going for low prim or quality, It's hard to make a case for using sculpties on a piece like this (except perhaps the seat) if quality is your goal because of the LOD issues.

Thanks.

I've been wondering about that too, I've tried to create things in Blender using Daniel's method but it has been very unsuccessful so far. Scaling rings to 0 looks fine in the program, but the sculpt doesn't turn out as it should in world. The first image shows this with a 33x33 sphere shaped into a cylinder.

The second was using one of Daniel's shapes imported as 128x128, which is significantly better, but still far from how it should be. It looks fine if I import it into Wings3D, but that's not very useful as it can't be exported out due to an "unsupported mesh size" error.

If you have any suggestions as to how to get it working with Blender, please let me know!

Thanks.

Thank you very much for your amazing work.
Do you have plans to extend your scripts to support textures on the sculpties as well? Or is that already possible in Blender with your scripts?

Vaelissa, I think you are seeing the LOD artifacts I mentioned, basically the LOD routine skips rows of vertices, so if those are the ones scaled to 0, you get things like your first image. The only way to minimise those is to scale multiple loops to 0 on just 2 axis. I'd not previously played with this and when I tried there were still minor artifacts which might have been aliasing issues. I'll look more closely at this and see if there's anything I can do to improve things.

Stan, yes you can texture as normal in Blender then bake the texture to the same UV map as the sculpties. When doing a full bake, you'll need to setup better lighting - the default light isn't enough. I use a dome light setup with the equator line of the dome also removed. This gives good shadowing as though the sun was directly above so it works well with the additional shading SL adds. You can also add additional multires layers to the sculptie and model finer details to bake into the texture. For some stuff it's quicker to draw a displacement map than try to model details, but you need a pretty high resolution mesh to get good results.

Strange problem:

When using the "Bake Second Life Sculpties" script, I'm prompted for the "Sculptie Bake Options" in a dialog. Well and good.

After clicking "OK" I get the "Sculpt Type" popup menu for setting the sculpty type, etc. I've noticed that if I inadvertently move my mouse pointer out of this popup without choosing an option, the popup disappears and the bake proceeds, but nothing happens. Choosing "Bake Second Life Sculpties" again results in the initial "Sculptie Bake Options" option box appearing, but the "Sculpt Type" popup menu does not reappear as expected. All future attempts to bake the sculpty fail silently.

Python gives the output "Skipping: Sphere - sculptie type is NONE" (for an object named "Sphere," of course.

There appears to be no way to get the bake to work on a given object once this has happened. The "Sculpt Type" popup never reappears for that object. I've tried Duplicating the object, as well as saving the file and Appending a copy of the object into the new file, but neither works.

Am I doing something wrong? Is this fixable? I have a model into which I've put a couple of days' work, and it won't bake.

The bake script adds some logic data to the object, it's a bug that this is still added when you navigate off the dialog as this is the Blender way to cancel. You've basically stumbled across how I plan to add additional prim types

You can fix your current objects by going to the logic panel (buttons - the pacman like icon or press F4 key). There you should see options for LL_PRIM_TYPE and LL_SCULPT_TYPE. The prim type should be 7 for a sculptie and the sculpt type should be 1, 2, 3, or 4 for the different types of sculptie.

1= Sphere
2= Torus
3= Plane
4= Cylinder

Just fix it manually by changing the numbers and it should bake without a problem. Or you can delete both values and the next time you use the bake script you'll get the dialog again.

Thanks for the answer, that's exactly what I was looking for.
I assume that there is no algorithm yet that reorders the vertices such that certain parts of the sculptie can be selected where the resulting texture should be detailed. I know it would be complex to implement such a solution, but indeed very useful. I will try to implement that and already started to read your code. But it is already clear that a lot of questions will arise, and so I would like to ask you already now, if you would help me with the questions about your code.

With the limits of the sculptie format it would be very difficult to do an automated solution for this. However as the baker uses the UV map, all you need to do to assign more vertices to a particular area is to scale it larger on the UV map. All the usual Blender techniques apply, I've got pretty good results by pinning the edges and the scaled area then using the LSCM unwrap to recalculate the rest. You do need to have marked the seams if using LSCM though otherwise even pinned edges will move.

Feel free to ask any questions you like about the code. The bake script in particular is pretty ugly, I really should rewrite that triangle fill routine to be more Pythonic

Do you compile your own version of Blender?

If so get ahead of the curve by applying the addMultiresLevel patch:

http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=8145&group_id=9&atid=125

and you can use this version of the import sculptie script:

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/second_life/import_sculptie_svn.zip

It'll give you three levels of LOD via the multires feature on an imported sculptie.

I've updated the SVN import script to 0.14 - this still needs a specially compiled Blender with the patch applied as mentioned in prior post.

The first version, while placing all vertices according to the sculpt type, actually imported everything as a plane. The update has a completely new mesh generation routine that correctly handles wrapping on both axis. This means that plane, cylinder and torus types are fully imported with 3 levels of multires.

It's not possible to do sphere's 100% as the multires would subdivide the triangular faces at the poles rather than adding quads. The edge seam is handled correctly, but poles are still done with a bunch of vertices all gathered to one point. Just remember to use brush select (B key twice) when selecting these to move them.

If anyone besides me is using this early preview script (hopefully the patch will be incorporated before the Peach release of Blender) let me know whether a non multires sphere would be a useful addition or if the vertice bunch works well enough for you.

It was suggested to add parameter checking to my Blender patch, in the process of doing that I also added the ability to add multiple levels in one call. I've updated the svn sculptie import script (now v0.16) to match the latest patch and also fixed an obscure bug where some uv faces would have the wrong rotation. I've added a torus sculptie map to the zip, so along with my starter sculpties, we now have all 4 sculptie types with multires as a starting point

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/second_life/starter-sculpties.zip
http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/second_life/import_sculptie_svn.zip
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=8145

Great news! My patch was commited to Blender trunk early this morning, so from here on in any released Blender builds will support the new import script. If you are running Windows or 32 bit Linux you can already get a build from http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=114603

64 bit Linux and Mac users will still need to compile their own, well at least until the next build for their platform appears on http://www.graphicall.org/builds/index.php

Quick demo video of torus based sculptie creation: http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/multires.avi

Congrats Domino!