Wings 3D Bounding Box Issue

Been using wings for a while, but i recently was making some curtains with a 32x32 quad plane mesh, i folded the mesh and pinched the ends close. i flattened everything on the axis and i scaled it all to the BB. Now in wings its tight in the default cube BB but when i bring in world the BB extends beyond the sculpt. I never ran into this type of problem before and im thinking its the mesh type maybe? Any help would be appreciated.

Wings allows you to define a Bounding Box, which you can then use to reposition/rescale your Wings model. But the Sculpty exporter is not influenced in any way by the Bounding Box setting. Thus, there is no reason to expect a fixed relationship between Wings' Bounding Box setting and the actual bounding box in SL.

You don't say what export options you used, but it sounds like you unchecked the default "Allow recentering". If you leave that checked, the exporter will encode the sculpty bitmap so that it takes up as much of its SL bounding box as it can while maintaining the x/y/z ratios. This sounds like what you were expecting to happen.

If you do uncheck the default "Allow recentering" option, the exporter will use the Wings' coordinate center origin as the center of the sculpty. This puts the sculpty off-center and hence introduces more quantization error in the location of the vertices. Unless you have a specific reason for wanting your sculpty to be centered away from center of its bounding box, I recommend you stick with the default option. (Which is why I made it the default.)

I know that in one of his tutorials, Daniel suggests that you routinely center your Wings model in an off-center bounding box and override the default "Allow recentering". I never quite understood why he felt this was a better method to use as a default. But it's perfectly legitimate to do it that way, as long as you understand the implications.

Thank you for the response, i tried locating the default "Allow recentering" option, but i dont see it in prefrences or any other menu. The way i export is through the export > secondlife sculpt.bmp. As for settings on the exporter i never seen or knew if there was a a way to set up the exporter options. How would i acess these options?

Also i been trying to figure out how to bring in a picture for a background "source" to model from, if theres a special thread or link to a site where they discuss wings and other options i would appreciate that as well, i backed away from blender and sticking more with wings because of the ease of use.

NM i found the option hehe, and yes allowing recentering is checked. now i kept playing with the curtain i built with with a plane, and i resized it 2x the size of the BB and it seems to be closer to the outer edges of the bounding box, still about a 1 meter gap from the BB at full extension of 10 meters. Thing that gets me is i just did a set of baluster a week ago and the BB is tight. Just seems to be this plane, i would be glad to send you the file for you to see yourself , and i thought it made sense what you said about the centering. But it is checked.

I looked at the sculpty you sent me, and I see that I mis-diagnosed your problem. I had been thinking your sculpt was filling something like half the bounding box, instead of something like 95%.

When sculpties were first introduced, it wasn't possible to completely fill any dimension of the bounding box, so that wasn't the criterion I used when I coded the export algorithm. With the current Wings exporter, no sculpty completely fills the bounding box, although it's usually less noticeable than in your example. In fact, I think you are the first person to ask about it.

But in release 1.19, Qarl changed the client so that sculpties with a full range of values (0 to 255) in a dimension will completely fill that dimension of their SL bounding box. This is a useful feature, and when I update the exporter (which I expect to do once the next batch of sculpty changes, scheduled for 1.23, is in beta), I will modify my encoding algorithm accordingly.

If I correctly understand your desire, you can import a sculpty plane (this is in addition to the sculpty you are working on) and use your picture as a texture for that plane. Directions for importing and applying the texture are at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Wings_3D_Exporter#Texture_previewing.

The "official" forum for Wings is http://nendowingsmirai.yuku.com/. That can be a very good source of information for more advanced users. But because sculpties have constraints that most Wings users wouldn't know about, a beginning sculpty builder would get lots of inappropriate advice there.

Personally, I wish more people who have gained some expertise in making sculpties with Wings would help improve and expand the SL Wiki pages. There are currently only two for Wings (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims_with_Wings_3D and http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Wings_3D_Exporter).

As for discussion forums, this is the main place. The Lindens don't want to create more specialized forums, like one for sculpties, let a lone for making sculpties with a particular tool.

I did recently ask Pavcules Superior to create a Sculpty/Wings 3D forum on PK Pounceworks (http://pkpounceworks.com/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=60&func=showcat&catid=4). The intent was to provide a forum for people who don't have access to the SL forums. So far, there's been no activity, but I've not attempted to advertise it either. But if a coummunity does develop there, it would certainly be more focused than the general builders forum here.

Thank you, yes thats a good idea, apply a texture to a flat plane and use it as a background image.

As for the sculpty i sent you, thank you for taking a look at that, the only reason this is an issue is i made like 7 styles of the curtain, pulled back and pleeted differently. And each one i bring in if i set them to say 6 meters on the z axis, all 7 curtains different sizes, and when i script them to swap out for interaction, the sizes differ and ehh, you know what i mean lol just dont look good. so thats the main problem with the sizing being somewhat"random" as i tweak each curtain and scale to BB.

i did have some type of consitancy when i scaled them like 200% larger then the bounding box, and they seem to have come in a little closer in size.

Again thanks for your help and the links as well. ill see if i can find a work around if so ill post it.