Creating sculpted prim from multiple primitive shapes

From what I can see with the free tools at least, in order to create a sculpt texture for SL, you can only start with a single basic shape such as a sphere or cylinder and edit the vertices of that. But are there any tools that allow creating multiple basic shapes (I need a box, 3 cylinders, 3 spheres and 3 torii) and creating a single sculpt mesh out of the combination?

Thanks for any info,

Dylan

There was an inworld tool -- name I can't remember. You would put your object inside a sphere and then vertix balls would rez around it. You could adjust their position and then create a sculpty map through a server.

I'm not a modeler but two tori would mean two holes, and while you can get that by twisting, that's already a lot to ask of a sculpty.

I'm sure I already replied to this but it sounds like Sculpto'Matic that you're talking about, unfortunately the reviews on it seem largely negative, and from my own playing around with trying to create a mesh for my shape, anything that samples at fixed intervals along any given axis just isn't going to work.

The torii don't produce holes in the shape - they just add a raised rim to the top of the cylinder (and the spheroids add a raised hub just inside that). It's highly annoying that the SL prims actually produce a perfectly good model, but I can't animate them so that they stay together (the ones that are s'posed to stay attached while moving are part of a larger object that moves in entirety, so they can't be linked to form their own object, or they won't move in sync with the whole model) - I figured the only solution was to generate a sculpt texture mesh for them so I could treat them as one prim, but I've yet to find a modelling tool that makes this easy to do.

I am not sure, if this would do it, but maybe "offline builder" can help,

/8/64/110607/1.html

Since offline builder is working on top of blender, it should be possible somehow to do it the following way (but it is just a rough guess ...):

- build your thing with offline builder (maybe there is even a way to export from SL into offline builder ?)

- then use the blender facilities and create sculptie meshes and do some shrink wrapping until the meshes tightly cover your build.

- use the sculptie meshes as replacement for the original...

i am not sure, if this works good or not. But maybe it helps you finding your path.

Can blender create a single mesh from multiple joined primitive shapes?
I did download it but the tutorial I saw suggested you could only use a single primitive shape in order to generate a sculpt texture, so I haven't tried it out yet (also I still have to download & install Python).

I was able to make a fairly credible duck from sculptomatic, it that was a program. The issue I had with it was having to tell group members to reduce the number of prims out so that I could have access to the number needed. You can manipulate the points by hand.

Do you mind sending me your object for me to see?

I made a jack sculpt (like the game jacks) but LOD kills it.

Although python was preinstalled on my computer, i believe, that you get an embeded basic python implementation with each blender-download. So no need to install python separately (on windows-xp, for other operating systems i am very unsure).

Since sculpted prims do have limitations on the underlaying mesh size, my best bet is

- create multiple sculptie planes (arbitrary numbers of planes should be possible)
- join them temporarily
- (shrink-)wrap them around your base object,
- unlink them again
- export them individualy
- rejoin them in SL

done.

ok, the proces is somewhat more complicated, because in general you will get trouble with the seems between the different sculpted prims. You have to take care like hell to get that done exac. But in general it should work.

I have got a tutorial for this technique in my todo list, but unfortunately lately my time was taken from me by other projects, so i have become very slow at the moment

I'm trying to upload a picture of what I'm trying to model but it's not letting me currently. Will try again in a bit.
Just to reiterate, it has to be one single prim in SL.

About complex one-prim sculpties: If you can manage to make your sculptie look nice with 16*16 faces, it would work ... If you need 1024 faces, you will suffer from LOD problems. In other words, your object will look nice when you are close to it (or it is realy big), but as soon as your viewer decides to use the next level of detail, your object might get realy ugly.

About uploading images to the forum: I just heard a rumour, that the SL-databases are full and they do not accept image uploads (any more?). So you better upload your image to an external service (flickr, or your own webserver), then add a link to the image into your post by using the IMG tag (similar to how you use the URL tag).

I hope that helps a bit.

Well I'd probably consider having it render as multiple prims when not moving, and only switch to a single sculpted prim once it needs to start moving.

Here's a flickr link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34537033@N05/3211924421/sizes/l/

Because you can't specify surface normals in a sculpt texture, I'm gonna lose all the nice shading aren't I...

If you can switch as you proposed above, it is doable

it should be no big problem to create a single-prim sculptie and texturize it so that it looks like what you show on your image. You can bake shadows into the texture if you like, so you could fake many details, which otherwise would not be possible with one sculptie. From a very quick estimation i even would say, you can get a reasonable sculptie with quite correct LOD.

From what i can see, it is no big problem to make this as a sculptie from scratch, so
i think, you do not need to rebuild this as a prims set in blender and shrinkwrap anything...

If you can switch between a prim-linkset and a single sculptie as you proposed above, it is doable I even think, it is doable with a single sculptie, if you place some details into the texture. And if you rely on the new sculpted prim techniques (oblong sculpties) you probably can create a quite good approximation of what you show on the pics (but that would not work with the current standard viewer).

It should be no big problem to create a single-prim sculptie and texturize it so that it looks like what you show on your image. You can bake shadows into the texture if you like, and you could fake many details by placing them into the texture instead of building them into the object.

From a very quick estimation i even would say, you can get a reasonable sculptie with quite correct LOD. And from what i can see, it is no big problem to make this as a sculptie from scratch, so i think, you do not need to rebuild this as a prims set in blender and shrinkwrap anything...

I guess this is a part of an ancient train, which connects the wheels ? If so, can't you make the object flat on the backside ? That would save a few vertices more, which could be used on the front side for finer design...

You mentioned in an earlier post, that you wanted multiple holes in your sculptie. But where in this object do you need holes ?

Yes, it does connect the wheels, it is flat on the backside, and no there are no holes as such (I said there were 3 torii, and another poster expressed concern that the holes would cause a problem).

Ok, so what tool can I use to create such a sculptie, given it's made out of joined primitive 3d shapes? I looked at the tutorials for creating sculpt textures in a bunch of applications and all of them implied you had to chisel it by hand out of a single starting shape.

I can't tell you. I simply don't know of any tool, but there may be some available...

Well, this is the nature of sculpties They are basically planes, bended to some shape, which can be created by using planes. like torus, cylinder, sphere... as far as i know, this are the most basic 3D-objects you can fold from a plane.
Anyways, since this is how sculpties work, you typically start off with one of the basic shapes, then sculpt this to your desired shape. so in your case, i would

- take a cylinder
- stretch it quite a bit
- distribute all vertices along the ends and into the center
- blow up the ends and the center to a spherelike object
- fine tune until you get more or less what you want.

ok, so "don't talk, but act"... i did a 30 minutes work on
your shape and at the moment it still looks pretty ugly,


but ...

- The I-beam doesn't need more tweeking. i think it is finished.
- i did not fine tune anything along the spheres. There will be most todo.
- i did not make a texture for the whole thing. that should not be complicated
- i did not yet bake shadows into it.

I think, you could get quite far with this single prim sculpty if you put another day of tweeking into it. Or even less depending on your skills and the level of perfection you want to achieve. And it is already LOD resistent, although i didn't expect that.

For the tool: i did it with blender and with Domino's scripts of course

Wow...you must be bored Don't s'pose you want to send me what you've done so far?
Though I notice your I-beam isn't really complete as such, because it's s'posed to have two raised semi-cylindrical ridges along it.

The thing I know it's mathematically possible to automatically generate a single mesh out of a shape defined by multiple polygons (I even know someone in RL who used to write code to do that sort of thing), and I'm not sure I want to deal with the learning curve of Blender (relatively steep from what I've heard) just in order to solve a problem that's actually just a silly limitation of the Linden scripting language (not being able to move/rotate multiple prims simultaneously).

first: I am not bored, but curious and i like to experiment
secnd: I never give away half finished stuff


I think, that would be no problem at all to model. It would take some more tweaking and shifting, but it would be doable.


If your skills are more in the mathematical domain, you might better end up creating a program to create your sculpty. You also could hire somebody to make such a sculptie for you.

Concerning the learning curve of 3D tools: In general my impression is, that 3D design is something very special and you won't master it in half an hour. All reasonable tools seem to have steep learning curves, and so does blender.

When i started with sculpties, it was all very strange for me, there was virtually nothing around, except 2 very complex tutorials. I took a look at some of the 3D tools, and i ended up with blender, which fascinated me right from the beginning, although i did understand almost nothing about that tool in the beginning
But with the help of a skillfull friend, we eventually got the grip on blender. And with Domino's scripts, it has become a very easy to use tool.

So i encourage you to take the tool and play with it. and do practice, and practice... And look here:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/

Or, as i said it... hire someone, who likes to do all that for you.

Fair enough about the unfinished work thing.

Ok so I've resorted to writing a little program in C# to generate the texture.

So far it just does a cylinder, but it doesn't seem to map properly, even though I've followed all the instructions re sampling etc.

It looks fine at the top (rows 0, 2, 4 etc. of the texture), but at the bottom (rows 60, 62, 63) it looks excessively flattened, for no reason I can discern.

This is using no stitching (or plane stitching).
There's also some odd artifacts at the sides, but I'm less concerned about those.
Note that this is generated with a monotonically increasing z value for simplicity's sake - I accept that to get a perfectly round top and bottom I'd need to curve out the z values, but I'd be happy if the bottom looked like the top for now.

Anyone seen anything like this before?

Fair enough about the unfinished work thing.

Ok so I've resorted to writing a little program in C# to generate the texture.

So far it just does a cylinder, but it doesn't seem to map properly, even though I've followed all the instructions re sampling etc.

It looks fine at the top (rows 0, 2, 4 etc. of the texture), but at the bottom (rows 60, 62, 63) it looks excessively flattened, for no reason I can discern. And yes I've rotated the prim so that rows 0, 2, 4 are shown at the top (I tested this with a version of the texture that put a little dimple at row 10, and it was correctly oriented).

This is using no stitching (or plane stitching).
There's also some odd artifacts at the sides, but I'm less concerned about those.
Note that this is generated with a monotonically increasing z value for simplicity's sake - I accept that to get a perfectly round top and bottom I'd need to curve out the z values, but I'd be happy if the bottom looked like the top for now.

Looking closely, it seems like it's simply missing row 62, and trying join vertices along row 60 to those on row 63. I understand this might happen at lower LOD, but I have mine at max (AFAICT) - I'm not super concerned about it happening at low LOD, seeing as typically it will be further away and the effect not noticeable.

Anyone seen anything like this before?



One other thing - I take it it's normal for sculpties using no or plane stiching to be completely invisible from the back?