Sculptie Stairs - HELP

I've been trying for over a week to build Sculptie Stairs using Blender without any success. I can build sculptie:
Martini Glasses, wonderful Rocks, giant musrooms, etc.
They all come out as expected and the TGA file uploads just fine and when I put it on a prim it looks like it should.

Sculptie Stairs are another matter, it looks okay in Blender and the TGA files upload (at 10 L$ a pop) but when I put it on a prim, it is just a rounded box without the expected steps. I'm at my wits end.

Are there any tutorials for building Sculptie Stairs?

If anyone has any suggestions, recommendations or details that I've overlooked, I'd greatly appreciate any pointers.

Thanks in advance.

preview the sculptie before actually uploading. Select Sculpted prim for image type in the upload preview.

bake ambient occlusions first (some bug in blender).

Remember that for edges to remain sharp, you need two close together.

I don't know that I've made stairs in blender. I think I would be tempted to extrude them in tokoroten after so much frustration.

Or buy them.

This is only needed if you are using the material method of making sculpties. This workaround isn't needed if you are using my import / export scripts from /8/60/203571/1.html

The scripts make it easier to test sculpties too as the import shows how it will look in sl.

IBME, I've not made sculptie stairs in Blender yet. I'll have a think of a good way to approach it and do a demo. Watch this space.. A screenshot of your mesh and UV map in Blender for the stairs might help me spot what the problem is if you can't wait

Here's an over my shoulder session of creating a base sculptie to use for steps. This type uses a plane mesh and is designed to sit on a ramp. The bottom (where the ramp will be) is left open on purpose so all verts are available for modeling the steps. You should also scale down the exported tga to 64 x 64 before reimporting into Blender (I skip this step in the video).

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/steps.swf

Domino - I've looked at several of your clips and have downloaded your Import/Export scripts. I haven't yet looked at the clip you mentioned in your last post above, but I will as soon as I finish this post.

I didn't want to delay saying THANK YOU very much for all of your efforts to help me!

If there is ever anything I can do in return just let me know.

use scuilptie paint for making stairs ..in sculptie paint program you can make stairs in minute..) http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/sculptpaint/

Yeah, Sculptie paint makes pretty decent stairs for something that's free.

Domino, I just can't keep up with you! Heh!

I have managed to make the 4 step sculpty stairs and they came out pretty good.

I have been trying to make a larger staircase 9 steps, and all I get are stairs that look like they have been in an earthquake!

See attached:

I am sure it has something to with the fact that I don't know what I am doing, but suspect it has something to do with the Bounding Box settings. If I make any changes to those dimensions, it really mucks things up, so I just leave them alone.

Hi Yrrek,

I'm looking into that problem. It's partly due to using a non-power of two for the number of stairs. This mean the UV map lines aren't perfectly aligned with the pixels. But even so, the discrepancy is worse than I'd expect. I'll post an update when I know more.

Update: It is just the UV map as far as I can tell. If you import a sculptie then load a texturing grid into it's UV Image window you can see how the squares line up. If you compare this to your stair model you should see where you need to realign things.

Thanks Domino. For once it may not be my fault, heh!

Yup! That is the problem. Just made a perfect 16 stair staicase.

You are wonderful!

I just can't wait to see what you have up your sleeve!

Thanks Domino!

I tried to attach a pic. but the forum is borked.

Up my sleeve? Hmmm.. Guess that would be the sculptie texturing grid I've just finished.

http://dominodesigns.info/images/sculptie_grid.png

Red, Green, Blue, Grey are LOD levels, yellow are poles on a sphere sculptie. I highly recommend loading this as the UV Image when manually unwrapping something. See how it looks with an imported (plane type) sculptie to see where to place the UV points for best results. The noise on it is to help prevent moire patterns freaking your eyes out