Sculpted stairs tutorial?

I am looking for maybe a blender tutorial on making open stairs. ( where each step appears to be a separate piece) I guess it would use the sam tecnique as a sculpted ladder.. with the holes.. I dont know how ya get holes in sculpts.

Snap a row of vertices to a single point. Do the same for the next adjacent row. Now you'll have what appears to be two surfaces connected by a line. In SL, that line won't be shown on-screen, so the two surfaces will appear to be separate objects.

If you're looking to do a bunch of individual steps that appear to be unconnected, you'll want to fold one section of the surface into a cube, collapse the next two rows, fold the next section into a cube, collapse the following two rows, etc...

Just keep in mind that although you save prims this way, over making each step out of a cube, you also increase rendering cost significantly. Sculpted stairs will create a lot more lag than cube stairs.

O.K... ya confused me LOL Im totally new to sculpties so far Ive found blender to be the one that works for me.. uprisings cus everyone says its the hardest to learn.

And in the latest (backward step) viewer, they will look horrible for ages until the map loads fully. I am thinking of throwing all mine away, they are so horrible!

Incoming text tutorial for Blender

It's not letting me post it. Is there some word I'm not allowed to use due to bad coding?

Hosted offsite:

http://www.secondcreators.com/stairstute.txt

I think "select" is one of them. At least I did, but then how could I post this? Duh!

I think it's something like... can't post X word if you have Y word later in the post.

I dunno. That needs fixing >.<

Yup, it's X followed by Y. You can't put "from" after the word "select" anywhere in the post, no matter how much text is in between them. There are several other combinations that also don't work. There's a complete list on the Technical Issues forum and on JIRA. I don't have links, sorry.

Thankies, Chosen ^-^

Bleh. That's no fun.

Tute, reworded for posting:

First of all, you're probably going to want something more workably cubic than any of the sculpt meshes, so let's cover that.

(NOTE:: I never pay attention to lower levels of detail, as I never see them. It's bad, but it's true. I'm not going to be doing this in a manner optimized for lower levels, as I don't care to figure out exactly how.)


First, make sure your scripts are installed. If not, just let me know, and I can link you a video on where to find and how to install them. I'm assuming you have a basic understanding of Blender and the associated scripts, for this tute.
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Alrighty, start with a cylinder sculpt mesh (Type 4). Tab into Edit mode, and choose vertex selection mode. Change your view so that you're looking down through the hole of the cylinder with NUM7.

Since it's 32 vertices around, you'll be creating a cube with 8 vertical edge loops per side. To do this, press B for bounding box selection, and select 8 connected vertices on the ring (Really 8 rows all the way down). Start with the top, so select 7 symmetrically, then add one on either side to make 8.

Now, press S for scale, then Y to constrain to the Y axis, and type 0 on your numpad, to align those 8 rows into a straight segment. Move on to one of the sides, select 8 vertices, and scale to 0, this time pressing X to constrain to the X axis.

Continue in this fashion for the remaining two sides.

You'll notice that it's not quite a square not, a bit lopsided, so we need to fix that. Select a full straight side, and continue the selection to include the vertex row on the next side. I'm starting with the left side, connecting with the bottom. Then Scale again, just like before, on either X or Y axis to flatten out the sides, and give an even square. The outermost vertices will be farther spaced than the rest, but that's fine for this use, so we'll just leave them.

Now if you rotate your view, you'll see that you have an open cube. To close the ends, change your view to a side-on view (Either NUM1 or NUM3). Use B for bounding box selection again, and select the entire second to top or bottom ring of vertices. Press SHIFT+S and choose 'Cursor->Selection'.

Now select the very top or bottom ring, and press SHIFT+S again, this time choosing 'Selection->Cursor'. You should now have a closed cube.
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Now that you have your cube, you can separate it into multiple 'parts' and move them around for your slat-stairs. To separate it into segments:

Select any two connected rings of vertices (Horizontal, so that you aren't getting the poles in your selection) and press S for scale, then SHIFT+Z to disallow scaling on the Z axis, and type 0, then enter. Snap the pointed bits to the closest ring, like we did with the top and bottom of the cube.

Note that for cubic sections, each slat needs to consist of at least 4 edge loops, or else it will be more of a diamond shape. Split it into however many you need (Up to 8 sections with this method, with one section twice the size of the rest), and move them around, rotating as needed, with G (Grab) and R (Rotate).

Then, simply bake your sculpt map (Render - > Bake Second Life Sculptie while in Object mode, with the UV/Image Editor visible) and bring it into Second Life!

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=297899