Sculpting a face in Wings3D - Need advice

In step 3, you want to select s02; not s01 again. Sorry, I didn't include that in my original instructions, I could have sworn I typed it in but ... :-/

What the remapper is doing is finding the equivalent vertices between two models by linear distance, to tell how the vertices have been reordered. So when you create the remapping file, you want to be sure the target you select is different from the sculpty currently loaded. If you select the same sculptmap, it will be comparing one model against itself, and the resulting remapping.dat will basically be identity - nothing will be reordered because the vertices haven't moved.

Ahh, there it is! I can confirm it does work. The faces are somewhat jagged, and the vertices are a little out of place, but the object retains its shape, and it shouldn't be that hard to tweak it back to some semblance of smoothness. This is going to help quite a bit. Thanks again for putting it up for me to try; if you'd like, I can post some screenshots to show you the results.

Sure, i'd be happy to see what you've done with it

Hey thanks for explaining all this, up to this point blender was the only one I knew how to bake directly from.



I made yet another rounded cube and it did actually work it was pretty lumpy inworld. But I just did a mine for a quick test as you can see from the uv job.
I didn't bother fixing the gap, it was great to just get the idea.
For most of this type of challenges it is definitely worth the trouble to learn
blender among other alternatives it is definitely more cost effective.

Thank you for the feedback, Inifinview. Wings 3D has extensive facilities for creating and manipulating UV maps, so it seems like there should be potential here. But I admit, the whole process of going through the UV map seems cumbersome to me. Perhaps if I learned Blender and saw how it worked, I would understand how to make this more useful in Wings.

If you like what Blender does, and are at all inclined to help improve Wings, what would need to be changed to make this general technique worth using in Wings?

Original:

http://img156.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=09146_sculpty01_122_725lo.jpg


Cut:

http://img184.imagevenue.com/view.php?image=09151_sculpty02_122_236lo.jpg


Remapped:

http://img141.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=09152_sculpty03_122_435lo.jpg

At the time of my last post I think I made some assumptions that were based on my familiarity with blender. On that cushion I had already subbed it a few times, my comments
were mainly about the hassle of adjusting my uv to cover. However it appears that you can
uv a basic shape and then go ahead and sub it and make other changes outside of the boundaries of the exporter and still succeed in producing a sculptie. Which is similar to what
blender allows you to do and also simplifies the process greatly.

So I made a random cylinder thing in both programs real quick just making sure to do certain operations outside of the boundaries of the exporter and once you have your wings add ons
correctly in place and set it really is a simple matter to bake a map. I got interrupted and was unable to finish the tests so I am uncertain of the parameters of my results so far.
But you are absolutely right there is definite potential in this approach. I hope my comment
didn't sound flip, it seems to now looking back on it.

I learned how to model in wings and am very fond of it. If the end result of the sculpt is as good as what I get in blender I'll be thrilled.

You have put a ton of effort into this btw, excellent work!

It makes me curious, do you work for Wings?

Either way I am happy to help wings get better if I can, I have certainly gotten my money's worth from that program!!

Thanks, Infiniview. No, I don't have any affiliation with Wings. (I don't think there is any commercial venture behind it.) I'd never heard of it until I went looking for an open source modeler that I might adapt for making sculpties. I'm not even a "booster" in the sense that I try to convince people that it is better than Blender or commercial programs. I've just kind of adopted it for support in making sculpties as part of my spare-time learning a little about 3D graphics.

And yes, this is really orthogonal to the exporter plug-in, so none of the exporter constraints need to be observed. I'm pleased by your thoughts that it might actually be useful. I look forward to hearing how to use it effectively, and what I might be able to do to make it better.