SculptGenMax for 3ds Max 9

No. Good catch. I should have changed that. You don't have to move them as a group. I'll update it.

I am sooo delighted that you wrote this script. What a wonderful tool. Thank you so very much. ~grin~..I am having a great time with it and will be busy for days.

The attached pic is of the first bits run through the plugin in (ver 2.2)

I will download the newest version instantly.

Thanks again Shack for the excellent work.

Outstanding.....

Shack would be there a possibility to raise the count of vertics used to maybe for example 62*64 ?? ^.^

Just goofing a bit around with a bit more complex shape and now i have to see 31*32 is a bit less vertics to complete it , maybe a good guess to add an field where the user can input the number of vertics used and let the programm run from those parameters ? So the user would have the choice how many vertics he uses? Dont know if this is possible to implement, just a guess.

Cheers

Mike

I feel your pain, but this is a built-in limitation of sculpties. As Qarl says, if you need more detail, use more sculpties.

One reason for the limitation is that LL wants sculpties to have about the same runtime impact as a regular prim, so that the existing prim limits will still be valid. It turns out that a sculptie and a torus have approximately the same number of vertices.

Thats sad, i still wonder anyways how this head sculptie was made with so much details coming into game i always have a lots of detail loss when i do a sculpt.

Cheers

Mike

I know what you mean, Michael. I started this project in part because I wasn't getting very good results with some of the other methods and I hoped that this would give much better results. It hasn't exactly materialized for me yet.

There are several issues going on here: (my apologies if you already know all this, but others might not)

1. One issue is the number of vertices. That's not likely to change. We have 32x32 = 1024 vertices.

2. Another issue is JPEG2000 compression. All textures uploaded into SL are compressed and the compression algorithm that's currently being used is lossy, meaning that it loses information while it is compressing the image. So the texture that's on your harddisk and the texture that you have in your inventory are different. There are subtle differences here and there--colors are slightly changed. If you (as a human) look at the two textures, they look the same. That's why compression works well with photos. But to the computer, the subtle differences in color mean variations in the position of vertices. This is the primary reason that a 256x256 texture looks better than a 64x64 texture. There isn't any more useful information in the 256 texture, but it produces a better result because it doesn't get corrupted as badly as the 64 by compression.

3. Another issue is the number of bits per pixel. Scultpties currently use 24-bits of data for each pixel in the image. That's 8-bits for red, 8-bits for green, and 8-bits for blue. Red represents X. Green Y, and Blue Z. Since an 8-bit number can vary from 0 to 255, that only gives you 255 distinct values that X, Y, or Z can have. So, it's possible for two different points in your 3ds Max model to get converted to the same point in the sculptie if they are near each other. Essentially, this is a type of rounding error. It's the same thing if you have two decimal numbers such as 1.1 and 1.4. If you store them as integers, they are both just 1. This is part of what was happening with your staircase when you had proportional turned on. In that situation, 255 values weren't enough to precisely specify the position of every point, so the result looked very mangled.

2 and 3 are problems for all sculpties, but they tend to look much worse on a sculptie that has flat surfaces and sharp angles. That's one reason that things like heads tend to look a bit better. The variation isn't as noticable. Edit: and maybe organic textures don't get hit by compression errors quite as much. (don't know, but it's possible)

Anyway, if Qarl would fix #2, your stairs would have looked fine (with proportional off). Qarl has said he's willing to work with us on this. He's even indicated that he might be willing to address issue #3 by increasing the number of bits from 8 to 16. That would make your stairs look good with proportional.

Qarl, I'm waiting...

Because sculpties are pretty low resolution you're going to want to have plenty of detail in your texture (to make up for lack of detail in your sculpt map). Applying a meshsmooth modifier and then rendering a diffuse or complete map from that will do wonders for how your sculptie looks in SL. Bake the sculpt map from the low resoltion mesh, and your texture map from the high resolution. Meshsmooth preserves the UV mapping so they should work together well.

I see the problems Shack, sadly. Chip your explanations, also in the other thread make me as a beginner in 3D Software feel lost. Can you IM me inworld eventually so i can ask you my questions life and in my native language, which should be the same as yours =).

And here we go again, another render view and ingame view on my new "worst case scene" *chuckles*. Shack if you want see the .max file please PM me, don't want to post it here.

Cheers

Mike

Shack,

Okay here are my test examples of the SculptGen vs 3D Texture method. I'm going for as much fine control as possible. The in world sculpt is 32 segment high to it is kind of hard to compare. But in this image here...

first sculpt is made using the Max Script. The second is my method using the 3D texture. The third one is where I offset the UVs by half the output pixel size or snapping the UVs to the center of the pixels in the UV Unwrap. So if I am rendering a 128 I have a image setup 128x128 grid setup where I snap down all the UV to every 4th pixel. As shown here....


This is basically the same as your method I thought except yours is 31 segments and mine is 32 this is all very confusing to me as to why things work and don't work.

But once it all works and under control you can have fun. 1 prim fence.

Gearsawe, could you elaborate a little bit more about these spiral images. I'm just having trouble understanding what they are. Have you taken the cylinder and stretched it out into a spiral?

yes the two points are the ends. and each ring of verts around the cylinder is a bend in the spiral. I might be messing something up. going to try and zig zag pattern like a thin wire going back and forth. My texture thing is still buggy. depending on which way my UVs are mapped I have to offset them differently.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how that fence is topologically the same as a cylinder/sphere. I'm guessing the black pixels make the 'holes'? So the 3D mesh would be a single closed surface, but the black pixels shrink those vertices down into the center?

If I understood that right... that's brilliant Certainly increases the options for what you can do with a single prim.

Think of a sculpt as a balloon animal one that allows you to pull it thru itself. where each set verts going around the cylinder allows you to twist or pinch it.

First class.

Thanks!

Just uploaded new version 0.3.1. Download it from the OP.

This version has one new feature. It adds X:, Y:, and Z: boxes to tell you the prim size that you should use in SL to make the sculptie appear proportional to what you have in 3dsMax.

NOTE: if you have the "proportional" checkbox turned on, then the X:, Y:, and Z: fields are disabled, because this has already been done for you (see explanation below).

**** PROPORTIONAL: A brief explanation ****

In the first image, you see a rectangular box shape in 3ds Max.

Obviously, we want it to have the same shape in SL and if you check the "Proportional" checkbox in the SculptGenMax, then the resulting sculptie will have exactly that shape.

If you scale the resulting box sculptie to size [10,10,10], it will still have that shape and it will be as big as SL will allow.

But there are cases when this can cause problems--most notably when one of the dimensions of the object is much larger than the others. A tall, thin object, for example.

In order to preserve the proportions, SculptGenMax has to sacrifice precision on the smaller dimensions. In the case of the box sculptie, which is large in the x and y dimensions, but small in the Z dimension, the sculptie's Z dimension has only 15% of the resolution that it has in the other two dimensions. This means that instead of having 256 possible values for Z, there are only 38 possible values. This can significantly distort the sculptie.

If you think you have this problem, you can always turn off the proportional feature, but then the sculptie will lose all of its proportion. The box sculptie would show up as a cube.

That's where the new X:, Y:, and Z: boxes come into play. The second attached image shows the new dialog with the X, Y, and Z values for the box sculptie. In this case the values are 0.999991 x, 1.0 y, and 0.149999 z. If you upload the sculptie and then type in these values for the size of the prim, you'll get exactly the same shape that you had in 3ds Max. Then, you can use the white scale boxes to make it bigger while preserving its shape.

And in fact the biggest size for the box sculptie in this case would be 9.99991, 10, 1.4999. Contrast that to the 10, 10, 10 max size that we had when proportional was turned on.

I know this isn't the best explanation. But hopefully it helps.

Shack,
with your script I was able to get control of the row of 2nd to last row of verts. I altered your script to produce a 128x132 image where it used a 33 rows x 32 cols. After that I photo shopped it removing the first row of pixels and the last 3 rows of pixels after that it is perfect. Also I added the check box to flip the image. Now if you make a 32 segment spline then set it to renderable it works absolutely perfect. only problems is this will not work for a 32x32 image. The spline produces a mesh that runs in the opposite direction. Which is why I needed to ability to flip the image.

So when making a 128 image it needs only 2 pixes for the top and bottom rows all other row being 4 pixels. If you can do this it will be a perfect script. also something to to think about for when other sculpt prims come out

You Rock!

This is great news, Gearsawe!

Edit: Nevermind, I think I'm on the trail of this!

Okay, just to be sure that I'm creating the right kind of object.

1) Create a cylinder.
2) Convert to NURBS
3) Then I expand the "NURBS Surface" in the modifier stack and select "Surface". Now, I can select the top and bottom of the cylinder and delete them.
4) Select "NURBS Surface" and in the Surface Approximation subpanel, I select Tessellation Method regular and set U steps and V steps to 32.

Something like that anyway. The point is that I can look at the Editable Poly that that converts to and see how I need to code this. The thing that I saw immediately is that the Editable Poly has 33 rows of vertices.

And that made me remember something that I had seen somewhere else where someone was talking about why 32x32 bitmaps look so bad and saying that there were actually 33 rows in a sculptie. And then I went back and reread Deanna Trollop's posting about this. And what she says (if you do the math) is that there are 33 rows and 32 columns.

What all of this means is that there is a subtle bug in my current implementation. It shouldn't be hard to fix, but it's there. Hopefully, I'll have some time tomorrow to finish thinking through this and post a fix for it.

BTW, thanks sooooo very much Gearsawe for your work on this. Not only has it uncovered this bug, but it has helped to bridge the gap between my theoretical understanding of NURBS and doing it in practice. I'm in your debt!

I'm using this exporter in 3dsmax 8 with no problem except if I use a mirror, or a symetry modifier, the exporter only exports half the image, even if I convert it to a solid editable mesh, still same problem. Anyone have a solution or any ideas why it would have this problem?

I've noticed one other thing with TGA there looks to be some compression turned on when saving. When I open the file in photo shop and play with the contrast I can see there is some compression in the 4x4 block on a 128. is there some behind the scene setting some where for saving the TGAs?

Not sure, I'll look into it when I get a chance.

Progress Report
-------------------

I *was* missing a row. I made an incorrect assumption at the beginning that the 32x32 bitmap was a complete representation of the sculptie. It isn't, it's missing a row.

So, anyway, I've fixed that and it's working now with one more row.

But there are a couple of other things I want to finish before releasing it.

For example, I now know that the top and bottom rows of the bitmap only have one data point in them. So, I want to change the topology of the mesh to a sphere.

And then, I want to make sure that it supports a NURBS sphere.

I don't think there's much work to do there, but it might take me till late Tuesday to get it completed and tested thoroughly.

Edit: Oh, and I'm killing the smooth feature. All it does is make the texture look pretty to the human eye. There's no real value there as far as the quality of the sculptie.

if you can keep both for sphere and cylinder that would be great, for when they add the cylinder later. Also the way it works now of you can start with a spline and loft a shape along a path. So maybe an option asking which topology you are using. Sorry for asking so much, but you are really done a great job.

this is very cool

good work

dear Shack,

would like to know where "OP" is. Can you give a link. I'm interested trying it out.


Thank you very much for your help

cg Htchcock

"OP" stands for "original post." I.e. Post #1 of this thread. You'll find the link you need there.

-L

Dear Locke,

I did'nt know this before. Now I'm more cunningly . Thank you very much.

cg Hitchcock