How do I smooth out a sculpty?

Using Maya, I just made a sculpty that has some spirals at one end. However, they aren't circular as they should be in-world: they kind of look like spiral squares. Is there any way to smooth out those corners? I'm not familiar with what's compatible between Maya and SL, and it looks perfectly smooth in Maya. Is it possible to manipulate it somehow in PS (blur it or something) to achieve a softer look? Can anyone recommend a program that might help without my having to recreate the object from scratch?

Here are some common pitfalls, no particular order:

1. Avoid using polygons. The Maya sculpty exporter is optimized for NURBS. If your source model is polygonal, that can lead to all sorts of problems. For best results, NURBS are the way to go.

If you're already experienced with NURBS modeling, great. But if you're not, it can take a little getting used to. Don't let that stop you, though. Like anything else, there's a bit of a learning curve to it. But it's not rocket science. It's just a question of absorbing a slightly different set of rules from what you might be used to from poly modeling.

That's not to say polygons can't work. They can. But the procedures you need to follow to ensure reliability are frankly not worth the time in 99.99% of cases. NURBS work "right out of the box" by comparison.

Maya subdiv surfaces don't work at all for sculpties, by the way, so don't even try.


2. Make sure you're using sculpty-compatible topology. Each object that is to be a sculpty must be a single contiguous rectangle, with a perfect UV space. Do not use modeling procedures that could fragment the surface topology, and/or the UV space, such as extrusions, booleans, etc.


3. Sculpties themselves are sort of like origami. Each one is made by beinding and folding a flat plane in 3D space. You'll have best results by building your source models the exact same way. Start with existing primitives (spheres, capless cylinders, toruses, planes), and deform them into the shapes you want to make. Avoid things like lofts, extrusions, booleans, etc., which can over-complicate or fracture the topology.

That's not to say things like lofts can't work. They can. But you have to be exceedingly careful to do things in the proper order, or you'll end up with geometry that isn't sculpty-compatible. Deformed, primitives, on the other hand, will ALWAYS work.

This might all feel a little backwards to you, if you're not used to modeling in this fashion. But once you get used to it, you'll find there's nothing you can't make from deformed primitives just as easily (or in many cases, more easily) as you could from using the more "forewards" techniques you're probably used to now. Again, it's just a matter of absorbing a few new techniques.


4. Avoid overly high-resolution surfaces. Remember, every in-world sculpty has just 32x32 quads in it (except for oblong sculpts, which are a slightly more advanced topic). It's generally not a good idea to use more than 16x16 sections and spans in your NURBS source model for each one. If you need more detail than that, then add additional sculpties. Don't try to cram too much detail into any single sculpty.


5. NURBS display level 2 will give you the best sense of what your sculpty will look like in-world. If you're using level 3, then your source model will appear too smooth.


6. Here's where most people go wrong at first. The presence of history and transformation nodes will often interfere with the exporter's ability to get a clean scan of the surface. Always remove history and transformation nodes from your source models prior to export, or there's a good chance your sculpties will come out distorted. Here's how:

i. Select the object(s) you wish to export.

ii. Edit -> Delete by type -> History

ii. Modify -> Freeze Transformations

iv. Modify -> Reset Transformations

v. Edit -> Delete by type -> History


7. For best results, output sculpt maps at 64x64px.



If none of that solves the problem, then please post some screenshots of both your Maya source model and the resulting sculpty, so we can see exactly what's going on.

Thanks for getting back to me! I'm guessing what must be going on here is that the sculpty is too high detail. I tried all of the other suggestions and nothing changed; although changing the nurbs view to a rougher one did put some "points" on it, it didn't approach the squarish thing that came out on SL. If only I could make sharp angles when I'm trying! Anyway, although I have made sculpties with higher than 16 spans in the past, maybe I haven't put so much detail into them. I had added the extra spans in hopes of actually getting a curve out of the thing. Bleh. I hate the idea of redoing it and putting more spans at the bottom because it's meant to be a piece of hair, and the texture will look awful stretched out that badly. Guess I'll just scrap the idea. Thanks again - all of those pointers will definitely help with any future troubleshooting! ^_^

If the problematic part of the sculpty is very small in relation to the overall size, you might just have run into the spatial resolution limit.

The reason is that three 8-bit color channels of a sculpty map each have 256 shades, i.e. 256 positions on the x,y, and z axis that make up a cubic grid. Every mesh vertex lies on a point of that 256x256x256 grid.
Sculpties with small details often run into the problem that vertices lie between these grid positions. Since these can't be represented on the color range, they get rounded to the nearest allowed value, i.e. snapped to the nearest grid position.

The only real way around it is splitting the sculpt into multiple parts.

Seems to me you just need to check the lossless box when you upload.