Is it possible to produce a lossless sculpt from within Daz3d's Hexagon? if so How?

Ive tried a number of tools and Hexagon seems to be the only one I can gain a thorough understand of to create shapes within however ive discovered a lot of inconsistancies, there are several shape types you can start off with editing to assist you in producing a sculpt within hexagon to be exported to Hexagon, despite this they all have a varying number of points between the faces, now sculpts being composed of a 64x64 image, shouldnt there be exactly 4096 points regardless of shape? not every sculpt starter prim designed for secondlife in Hexagon seems to reflect this, ive heard from a few individuals secondlife actually only reads 64x63 of the image so this would reflect 4032 points, but it seems no matter what in Hexagon if I export to a sculpting format for secondlife it always gets downgraded to 3970 points in the shape, while some of the sculpt options in Hexagon do start off with only 3970 points some start off with only 4096, but nonetheless no matter which shape I start with when exporting from Hexagon(I avoid using anything in the tools menu as that does not support sculpts and will break the export even more so than it already is), but using just the basic manipulator tool, and exporting to sculpt format and reloading in Hexagon I can see loss is always incurred unless I save in Hexagons native file format which of course secondlife cannot use. also I am aware that if your texture for upload to secondlife(the sculptmap) is not within a certain filesize per resolution scale that the upload will incur dataloss but save as a sculpt in Hexagon and reloading within Hexagon is showing im having data loss before uploading

so the question:

-does anyone here use hexagon?

-of the secondlife prims within the hexagon editor which one is most optimal for producing a sculpt and will incur the least loss upon save

-if you do use hexagon are you getting lossy results?

-if you are not getting lossy results is there a certain sculpt option you start with or procedure you follow?

-if you are not getting lossy results are you using a different program to handle exporting to sculpt and doing all your editing within Hexagon? and if so which program?

-if your not getting lossy results do your sculpts have a lot of fine details or not?(it seems fine details get smoothed/wrinkled out)

Final note:
Id prefer to stick with using Hexagon as Ive tried a number of other programs and cant seem to get any results with them or the tutorials for them, if anyone knows of a method of producing something in Hexagon and producing a sculpt with the same details as in the editor please share, I know its possible to get what you see in some editors as some sculpters use multiple sculpts in their work and are able to get their sculpts to connect edge to edge with linked together within secondlife and have an almost seamless final presentation of their work(the felis avatar by uchi desmoulins for example[not sure what editor he uses though]), Ive been able to create in hexagon as the tools for that just make sense to me and it comes naturally(its almost just like editing in SL except your working point by point)

Not all sculpties are created equally to all other creation methods.

Some of the stats your quoting are specific to other sculpt creation methods.
Hexagon is set up in such a way as to allow you to start and finish your sculptie all from within
Hexagon. The sculptie output of Hex is determined by it's sculptie exporter.
Each program that has a built in sculptie exporter has its own rules.
So the requirements you may have read about using Wings or Blender or AC3D are not the same as the requirements you need for Hex. Keep in mind that each method have their own
rules for what you can and what you cannot do.

On the DAZ Hexagon wiki there are some rules and suggestions as to what tools you may use.
I don't personally count vertices when making sculpties, I just go for the look and feel with my final result. I would not limit myself too much with the tool use as there are a number of very cool things you can do with those tools.

Despite the fact that you may have the "lossless upload" box checked there is always (at least the last time I checked) some loss/change in appearance from what you get looking at it in your sculptie editor.
Mostly sort of a sanded down look. So the problem concerning loss is most likely not coming from Hex but the translation that takes place during your upload to SL.

Most of the hex SL shapes work pretty well for me, however sometimes I will use a cube and
just smooth it and pull it to whatever shape I need as the cube has more initial vertices.
While some of the other shapes come with alot less vertices and it can be a bit clumsy adding
vertices in Hex.

I love using Hex for sculpts, one thing that I am impressed with is that as long as you keep your UV map very even that is just try to make sure all your lines are pretty evenly spaced
then it will hold textures very well.

Some time ago there was another method that was supposed to accomplish true lossless
uploads. I forget what the name of it was. You could try searching "lossless sculpt upload"
or some combination thereof in these forums.

Good Luck.

as I said in my post, I have been made aware of what causes a lossy upload, and also I then went on to say im saving my work and reloading it before uploading and this save and reload is showing data loss is occurring before the upload, Im just simply saving my work, and reloading it in the editor and there is major loss of detail with things becoming smoothed out and wrinkled my sole purpose for stating being aware of the lossless upload option is because there is a major detail loss, I have also stated that I am avoiding the use of specialized tools within the program, while your response is well written out for a person having upload issues just saying "Im working in hexagon my sculpts end up garbled on SL" it is not the case. I am stating that the sculpts I am working with are being garbled upon export from hexagon and making an inquiry here as to why

sorry for your time but your response does nothing to answer the question I had, I am replying hoping maybe another hexagon user will see this question is unanswered and be able to answer this inquiry

I guess I didnt understand what you were getting at then.

What are you exporting to?

Do you mean your saved files of sculpties? Are you comparing the difference from when you
export a sculpt as tga file then reimport it into hex?

Or are you basing your evaluation on what is shown in the little preview window just prior to upload?

If it is the first, then I could see what you mean. Importing any tga sculpt file into hex it always looks rumpled and needs some smoothing to get back to where it was.
But if your trying to use this as a method of sculpt preview I am fairly certain that that is not
what you want to use for the purpose.

There are other options for sculpt preview.

As you mentioned if you save your sculpt as a hex file you can bring it back in perfect shape in hex yet that does nothing for a preview.

If it is the preview that you are after then you might want to try sculpty space for its preview
function. I think there may be some others out there by now as well.

If you have been using the little SL sculpt preview window, personally I have never really trusted those. I just upload them to SL for the best most actual test of what the output is.


Edit to add:

Just reread your post on the section of your reloading your sculpt. Why are you reloading your sculpt that way?

Similarly to the export script the import script will have it's own rules for how it achieves this.
None of which we are privy to. If your reloading for an idea of how it will look in SL.
I would just say that is a bad idea.
If your reloading because your not done with your sculpt then I would highly reccomend saving in hx. format

I have always approached my sculpts created in Hex with care just before export.
As the export and import process have their own vagueries I roughly equate with throwing something into the wash.
And I suspect that reimporting or reloading as anything other than a hx. file will damage your sculpt. You will get your best result if you refrain from exporting until you have your sculpt
just as you want it in hex.

http://i31.tinypic.com/331j9jb.jpg

I am re-opening the saved sculpts ive made in Daz3d and observing the degretdation in detail, this degredation is persistant after upload and cant be cleaned well

Thats just a simple example but it seems anything once ive got it manipulated into the shape which I want goes through a level of degredation enough to be disruptive

the left is just the before and after of a cube primitive there is already some visible degredation and it was just a save and reload

the picture on the right is a candle top it becomes quite cubey and chunky in the shape and all the smoothness of it becomes totally lost

attention to detail is a major thing for me and ive seen some work of other sculpters who can create detailed objects similar to these without such a loss of detail by the time of upload

the felis avatar ive seen by uchi desmoulins has several sculpts joined end to end, if he had loss of detail such as this gaps would appear between the sculpts in his work


the candle was created with a sculptie cylinder in hexagon and the top was simple made by using the standard translate manipulator, and the scale manipulator the most basic of tools built into hexagon, Ive made several other things and I get similar disformation in all of it regardless of simplicity or complexity of the object, however Im gonna eventually be trying to use this program to do things of similar detail to the Felis avatar I mentioned above, so degredation of my work has to be kept absolutely minimum, before saving the candle it had 4096 points to it, after saving it in a format secondlife could use that was deduced to a mere 3970 points, I know high detail levels can be retained as I have seen it in the work of others, but is this program capable of it? if not can a third party program handle exports and help me to retain the detail

for right now im refraining from creating anything that might take days of work in this program as I need to be able to output something simple and have it retain its detail

Looks like your making some nice models.

Having a look at your model it appears to me you are stretching your vertices aways.
It looks like the appendage coming out of the center of the top of the cylinder is part of the same object as the cylinder. And you also want a good amount of detail along the top of the
edge of the candle. In this case I would use a separate prim for the wick. Then you can devote more of your vertices to the edge. As a general rule of thumb the more defined you want an area to be the closer together the vertices should be.


There are a few sculpt artists out there that use somewhat arcane techniques that allow for such things as a whole fence section with multiple boards and cross members all made with
one prim. I know that Amonym Marvin does stuff like that. I spoke to him once on the beta grid and he said he was doing it entirely in Photoshop. Not sure what methods he is using these days.

I have never learned that method it seems to really maximize the use of all vertices though.
But it also requires that the texture be custom made for the object. If you apply a normal texture to something like that it would look terrible.

I also noticed from your picture the damaged part. That looks just like what a tga. sculpt file looks when you reimport it back into Hex. If you are doing that as part of your work flow I
strongly suggest you stop. The best thing that is good for is recovery in the event you did not save your file in hx. on an important sculpt.

Most of my time is taken up creating textures. When I make sculpties I like making them in a
manner that they are easy to apply normal textures to.
One of the great things about Hex is that the textures set very nicely if you make sure your
uv map is fairly even at the time of export.

For more detail you could use more sculpts on the same object or you could go the route I mentioned above. One way around the "sanding" that takes place on upload is to use clever textures to provide the illusion of more geometric detail.

saving in TGA is not part of my work flow, I cant work with multiple Prims that way, everything I work on is saved in Hex, and output as TGA when finalized, that candle top you see there is part of a dish set with multuple matching prims, I think for now Im going to stop worrying about the degredation that occurs because a friend of mine told me the degredation of the conversion to TGA format doesnt matter and did a demonstration for me, ive been worrying about the line jagging that occurs simply when I convert from Hexagon to Targa format and was given a demonstration that shows no matter what there is greater degredation that occurs within the viewer

In the demonstration I was asked to upload an image, apply it to a sculpt, and then use file > save texture as to save it back to my hard drive upon upload I was asked to observe that certain details would become lost, upon saving it to my hard drive again oddly enough all the detail that had been lost was back again, aparently the viewer smooths things out a bit more than sculpting specification for the image file and I dont have to worry about detail loss when converting to Targa format which leaves me to wonder how some people can get them to line up edge to edge perfectly

guess the loss of detail when converting to Targa doesnt matter anyways because there is such a loss in detail on the viewer any damage done by the conversion from the editors native format to Targa becomes un-noticable

I guess from this point on having seen this theres no further point in worrying about that small loss of detail, and at this point I guess it answers my question.

The loss of detail in Hexagon is much less than the loss of detail in the viewer after upload(despite the texture upload having not lost information)

Thank you for your assistance in this matter


EDIT: Ive also been given another tool now called sculptyspace, it will assist me greatly as it shows what a sculpt will look like upon upload meaning I can keep tweaking details now until its gotten just right

Maybe i am a bit late here, but i think, that your observed loss of detail is simply caused by the fact that you can only use 256 allowed and equaly distributed vertex-positions along each axis of your sculpty.

To make it more clear (i hope) imagine the bounding box around your sculpty. Then separate each axis into 255 equal length distances along the bounding box edges. Doing this you create a 3D grid of size 256*256*256, where each grid point defines a valid position for a sculpty vertex.

You see, that the allowed vertex points "naturally" lead to a significant degredation of your sculpty surface, except you are prepared for this effect. Then you can simply model your sculpty taking the sculpty grid into account and then you can get precise sculpties.
Note that the effect gets worse if your bounding box is stretched to one axis. The long axis will suffer from the highest loss in precision and you will have to be prepared for that.

You even can see the effect in your own image. The cube shows you exactly how the grid-points get shifted to valid positions.

So in short: while you are editing in your tool, you can move your vertices around as you like, but once you export as sculpty, whichever exporter is used, must obey the sculpty standards and thus must shift your vertices to valid positions. Hence importing your sculpty will typically (not necessarily!) show a degradation of precision.

If you like, you can look at these videos where we have explained to some detail, how to deal with sculpty precision:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/04/precision_sculpties_lod
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/16/the-arch-example

Although these videos are made for blender, the theory is the same for all tools, so you might find some unexpected answers here

cheers,
Gaia