Sculpty Ends and Seams

heyas;

i'm looking for some help and methods for building sculpties that reduce the crap-cap syndrome that they have. i tried this thread, but it seems to be more concerned with textures than the look of the object.
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=217879

now here's what i know, from playing with the new in-world sculpty tools. (check under the sculpty map for 'mirror,' 'invert,' and 'sculpt type.' ...if you dont see them, you need a newer viewer.)

SPHERE: links the top vertices together, and links the bottom vertices together.

CYLINDER: leaves holes between the top vertices, and between the bottom vertices. (ie: unlinks them.)

PLANE: unlinks the top and bottom seams AND the side seam.

TORUS: links the top seam TO the bottom seam.



what i have been doing is modelling from a cylinder (to get a square map with no triangular ends), and hand-pinching the top and bottom vertices together to get rid of the holes where the crap-caps appear.
to avoid the sphere-pole texture pinching, i thought i could squeeze the vertices together into a flat seam.

http://bldsong.net/imgsrv/rhinoseams.jpg

if you look at the picture... the inset in the corner shows my obj file. the front of the rhino's snout is the pole, stretched into a vertical seam.

in second life, its smashed flat into... garbage. it seems to me that to avoid crap-caps the best strategy is to hand-close your pole vertices and use the cylindrical mapping. however, that is not helping.

note the two rhino heads in the image. on the left is spheremapping. on the right is cylindrical mapping. (if you look at the front of the jaw, a separate sculpty, you can see on the right it had a hole where the cap was.) there is no hole indicating the cap, so apparently i have succesfully closed my seam... so why is it still crap?

thats what i want to know. :/

Are you using Blender? If so the problem may be due to the resolution of your mesh. My scripts need 2 pixels per face so if you want to bake a high detail model straight to a sculptie map, then you need to ensure the map is high enough resolution. Otherwise you can end up with all four vertices of a quad face being baked to the same pixel.

The final position of that sculptie point then depends on the vertex order of the face. Whichever corner is drawn last is the one that counts. As this order is very unlikely to be consistent across the mesh, you end up with bumps and other oddities on the sculpties. The way around it is to bake to a larger image and then reimport and rebake to 64 x 64.

So if the rhino is around the 128 x 128 faces mark, you'd bake to a 256 x 256 image to get smooth and accurate results, then import that map and rebake to 64 x 64 to get the final sculptie map.

Most exporters FAIL at the top and bottom positioning of spheres and position the top and bottom verticle at the SIDE of the tube (where the first column of vertexes is) instead of in its CENER, because it doesnt calculate the center.
some exporters even merge the first 2 rows of verticles into one.
All this stretches the triangles textures to that side, a clear sign of BAD shaping.

There are (ingame) editors that are capable of setting top and bottom correctly and centered.

In early days the manual solution was to start with a plane and to reshape that plane into a CLOSED sphere. The best even used trigonometry to create a perfect sculpt-shape.
In modern days the manual solution is to create a sculp-sphere, re-import a correct-sphere-shape into the editor and to manipulate that one per vertex.

heyas;

im using lightwave to model, and blender to do the sculpt. yes, domino, with your scripts. what are the steps to bake a higher resolution sculpty map with those, and then how do you rebake it to shrink it? (pretend you're talking to someone who doesnt know where ANY buttons in blender are :X )


i have noticed that sometimes lightwave seems to 'lose' some vertices on its uvmapping when i subdivide. but it didnt lose them on the rhino jaw, and its end is still crappy. but i will see what i can do with this problem.

I'm going to assume some knowledge, otherwise I'll have to use screenshots and I don't have a suitable mesh for the example. Just let me know if any steps need clarifying. So here's what to do:

1) Import your file from lightwave.

2) In edit mode make sure all faces are selected (a key)

3) Open the UV Image Editor and create a new image, say 512 x 512 (or whatever the mesh needs)

4) Pick Render - Bake Second Life Sculpties from the menu.

5) Save the sculptie map from the UV Image Editor

6) Do file new to clear the scene

7) Do File - Import - Second Life Sculptie and pick the saved map from step 5.

Check the sculptie, it should now look how it will in SL. If all is ok then continue

9) Apply the multires level 3 - this makes assigning a new image easier

10) In edit mode make sure all faces are selected (a key)

11) Open the UV Image Editor and create a new 64 x 64 image

12) Do Render - Bake Second Life Sculpties

13) Save the sculpt map