Limits of Cinema 4d regarding sl? ...

Hey all!
Just wondering what the limits are ( for those that use cinema4d) regarding SL sculpties.
I use maya but I'm thinking of setting up my brain to learn cinema4d also as I have had it on my desktop for ages.
I just come across some excellent tutorials for Cinema , but I'm wondering what the limits are as to what you can do.

ALSO in Maya , what are the limits that you basically CAN'T touch when it comes to SL sculpties.

Hope someone can open my eyes !

Thanks
Kookie

The problem is Kookie, has C4D got sculptie powers?
Can it create and export sculpt maps?

I know Maya has those options as extra scripts and so does Blender.
Someone will be along to explain, I'm sure.

And it seems you can..
heres a link
http://kraphik3d.com/wordpress/?page_id=46
http://derek-lerner.com/blog/?p=923

I use C4d all the time, but it's not without it's caveats. Firstly there are no scripts developed for sculpt maps, although there is a shader and some loosely translated instructions as Kornscope pointed out with the links he posted. There are other tools such as Blender with Domino Marama's Primstar scripts that helped fill that void. For myself being familiar with C4d, it was easier to just use some functions of Blender such as auto UV creation and map baking than to give up on C4d and learn a new package from scratch. Besides, C4d's texture baking capabilities have long been production worthy and easy to configure and I had all my lighting rigs set up

Just remember that a sculpt map UV must be unfolded to a perfect square or oblong and not exceed 1024 faces or 1056 vertices/points. Check the sticky on sculpties for details. Most times this excludes subdivisions resulting in over 4096 polys, or any type of extruding. Before you say "wait! you just said nothing over 1024 polys for the map, what's this 4096 business?" I suppose I should backup and explain that I use Blender to bake my sculpt maps and Domino's Primstar scripts can handle a 4096 poly model and uses adaptive sampling to produce an SL compatible sculpt map image which is 1024 polys. I'm sure he'll jump in an explain and correct me

If you have Maya, I would suggest staying with it as it's toolset is far richer than C4d and already has the sculpt map capabilities. Most of Gaia Clary's videos on the Machinematrix will give you all the sculpty specific do's and dont's that you'd need to know when it comes to modelling sculpties in polygon mode. The platform may be Blender but the specifics on what you can and can't do with a sculpty are universal. Depending on your modelling experience you'll find that it's a nice option to be able to either poly model or nurbs model in Maya dependant on what you're creating. Another reason to stick with learning Maya in depth at this point is the eventual mesh import functions that will be coming to SL. Learn and hone what you can do now and it WILL pay off later.

/me sits back and waits for Domino, Gaia and the Chosen one to jump in

Hey! Don't drag me into it



If you use Primstar to do the baking, as long as you keep the mesh in C4D to a quad grid, save it as an obj and Import using the sculptie import (which will take sculpt map images or an obj file), Primstar will do the unwrap for you.

YAY I hoped to wake up and see some replys hehe.
Ok that's helped alot! I will probably stick with Maya , I just have used Cinema for a few rl illustration projects so wondered how it works with sl.

I never knew you could model in polygon mode for sl?! Would you have to convert it at the end to nurbs ?
*scratches head*
I've been using nurbs all the time but I've always been curious if polygon modelling was possible.
I see various tutorials on lets say furniture where they use edge loops etc , I'm not sure if this is possible for sl as its adding vertices?
Hope I dont sound to confusing

Maya's baker only works with nurbs as far as I know. Anyone using polygons in Maya tends to export as obj and use Blender + Primstar to bake their work. As long as the final mesh is a quads grid (like a subdivided plane) then Primstar will take care of the rest. If you use triangles or box modelling etc then you need to do a UV unwrap to a solid rectangle before exporting.

Right I see :/ lol
So basically using nurbs in maya is the best way to go headache free?
Like this tutorial I've seen is great I'm just not sure if I can use ALL the tools it mentions.,
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autodesk-maya/model-and-texture-a-posh-living-room-scene-in-maya/

The seat cushion is an example of box modelling, so it's not straight forward to convert that. If however you deleted the end faces of the cube (to make it into a 4 sided cylinder) you then have a quad grid mesh which would convert easily. Just extrude the open ends and scale them down to 0 to close the cylinder while keeping the quad grid layout.

http://dominodesigns.info/manuals/primstar/understanding_sculpt_maps might help you to see the target you are aiming at

But yeah, nurbs is the easiest workflow in Maya - not sure it's headache free through

Hm i see , are you online? easier to prod with a few questions before I log off again IF your not busy.

I'm planning on holding regular inworld meetings soon, but I don't tend to spend much time in SL at the moment so it's difficult to catch me logged in. I've hardly ever used Maya and the last version of C4D I spent any serious time with was v5.0 so there's definitely other people who'd be able to help more than me with those.

Where I can help is in understanding the limits of the sculpt map format and in using Blender and Primstar as part of your workflow. I prefer to handle support for that on my site forums, it's a lot easier for me to add images and blend files there to help explain things