Builders, get ready for sculpted prims

Ever since I first discovered this impending feature a few days ago, I've set the hamster wheel betwixt my ears cranking on how to write one for MilkShape, though I'd first have to see how they're handled in the upcoming preview version to validate my assumptions.

Yes.. I went and looked at that video...and all I can say is...

HOT DAMN!!!!

making stuff just got sexy for me.. I wanted to work on some stuff, but other duties get in the way.. I'm making time to learn now...

I'll find a way.. if using free tools makes it take longer so what.. I want forests of fruit trees, reefs of corals, and my personal favorite goal, a fat avie that looks like a normal person.

I think sculpted prims take away the final limitation on making things here in SL. Really.

wow.

You must forgive me that at some point I stopped reading the thread - but it seems to me people are giving Simil a harder time than he deserved. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but I think there is at least something to his concern, and he didn't even raise if for his own benefit.

Actually, we wouldn't necessarily need to wait for LL to impliment an in-world sculpt editor. One could be put together with prims and scripts. Bear with me, now.

You have 962 prims, say spheres, representing the verts of the mesh. Then you have another 2112 [Edit: Make this 1920] tapered boxes representing the polygon faces. Then, you have a HUD attachment, consisting of 204 five-face prims and 2 two-face prims, arranged to make a 32x32 grid of faces.

You edit the mesh by moving the sphere "vert" prims, which cause the associated "face" prims to scale and orient appropriately. The correctly scaled RGB values are then communicated to the HUD attachment, causing the appropriate colors to appear on the relevant "pixels". Take a screen shot of the HUD attachment, crop it, scale it, upload it, and BAM! Instant sculpt map.

Sure, it requires a parcel with 3074 [Edit: 2882] available prims and would be laggy as all getout, but it should work.

Thanks Xylo.
If as the 3D people said here it is not so easy to turn high quality model from a 3D software into a high quality model in SL, then I'll be wrong, and I better be wrong anyway.
Still if I was LL I would do as I said and choose the progressive way.

Um, seriously who needs sculpted prims??

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h118/lordzahms/sculptedprims.jpg

Where are the 1-prim bananas?

Been playing with splines with Art of Illusion (a java program). See:
http://www.artofillusion.org/

Once we know the spline file import format should not be too hard to write a converter for it.

Don't worry, you are on an almost perfect streak of saying things that are wrong. Yes, it is somewhere between extremely difficult and nearly impossible to take an off the shelf model and turn it in to a sculpted prim. Reasons:

1) Sculpted prims can only represent closed, contiguous shapes
2) Every pixel in the texture modifies a vertex position, your UV map cannot have a single hole in it
3) The vertex grid is contiguous and maps to the texture in a straightforward fashion. You can't have a part of the model in one area of the UV map and an adjacent part in a completely different area of the UV, it won't come out right at all

Taking even very simple shapes and satisfying these requirements is not easy, unless someone comes up with an amazing script to cleanly fill up UV space from arbitrary polygons it would be faster to remodel an approximation of the original with a NURBS surface.

We do, but it's not a spline file format, it is a texture that could best be described as a 3D (RGB) displacement map that displaces from the origin, where gray (127) values are centered, less is a negative displacement and more is a positive displacement. Kind of like a normal map but with positions instead of normals.

This is one thing that has got me kind of worried. As near as I can tell, the mapping is polar and dealing with the poles could prove problematic. Nothing like saw-toothing across the top and bottom to try to fill in correctly. Or going with the 'quads and holes at the poles' approach.

And I would like to know if we'll be able to scale xyz of the prim indepentantly once the texture is applied. Just might have to deal with more ratios and/or bounding box hacks.

(And I'm kind of confused as to why the recommend an aspect ratio of 1:1 instead of 2:1.)

Other than those little things, I'm good to go. My shader is 100% self-illumnated and my patches are smooth.

Let's not exaggerate, at all.
The only thing that I said that appears to be wrong is that transposing a model from 3D software to SL would be easy.

Simil, you have said a lot of right things, and I believe you have certainly voiced a lot of concerns that the hobbyist industry of SL (the majority of people) is probably feeling right now.

This is likely going to be pretty disruptive if it happens in the way qarl describes it. That being said, I don't think it will necessarily be because of higher quality renderings but rather because your prim count might drastically decrease.

Something that took 40 prims before could take only 4 or 5 now with Sculpted prims.

That's pretty huge.

I've not used Blender, but isn't there a Blender script that gives you a SL like interface for modelling? Presumably it has basic boolean operators too? And the ability to export a baked texture?

That would mean people who can't get the hang of modelling properly in a short time (or at all) could model in the SL way and still take advantage of sculpted prims straight away wouldn't it?

Yes, if there's no big issues with transforming the prims created with those plugins* into something that can be exported as a sculpt texture.
This rejoins my idea (earlier in this thread) of converting a linkset of non-sculpted prims into a single sculpted prim.
*Prim.Blender for Blender, SLPrims for 3D S Max and SLmodel for Maya.

And your problem is what? You want to limit competition because you don't have the skills?

Nefertiti.. hmm.. which Nefertiti is that, anyway, :
How about you start by reading the whole thread especially the first post before trolling/flamming and accusing me of anything stupid hey moron.

I'm not "flamming" ... your response to the possibility of the Maya expoeter was just the same as the response of any entranched industry to a disruptive technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism

Forgive the double quotation, but I wanted to preserve the chain of ideas here.

Okay, after learning a little more about how "scuplties" work, I'll say that it's highly unlikely that your idea would work, AJ. All Sculpities are morphed spheres, meaning each has just one contiguous surface. You can't turn a six-sided cube into a sculptie, or any other multi-surface prim; it has to be a sphere, one surface. Further, the resolution (tessellation) of that one surface is pretty low, just 32x32 vertices. Those two things combined mean that almost no pre-existing 3D model will be SL compatible, not even ones made with the prim.blender plugin.

Simil, it won't be the case that a linkset of regular prims will be readily convertible into a single sculpted prim. There are too many vertices involved, and too many non-contiguous surfaces.

As I said earlier, it's going to be a long time before anyone gets really good at using sculpted prims. Sure, those with pre-existing skills will learn it faster, but no one's going to be an expert right out of the gate. There's going to be a serious learning curve here. It will take time for people to discover what works and what doesn't, just as it took years for people to get really good at using regular prims (you should have seen what passed for a "quality build" three years ago, yuck!).

So relax. SL's not going to transform over night because of this. You don't have to worry about anyone having an "unfair advantage" (not that anyone really could anyway, for the reasons I talked about in my first post here). Feel better now?

Well if that's protectionism, even if temporary, I say yes to it.
Better than a crisis and whole families ending in the street.

And your problem is what?
Want more money than you already have ?

What is hardest , to do never having any immersion

1) operating and making stuff in maya
2)scripting in sl
3) animating with poser

Please head back to the wiki : Talk:Sculpted_Prims#non-sculpted_linkset_to_single_sculpted_prim



And ROTF at you there.

I doubt that whole families will be in the streets if someone does cool things with sculpies.

As for me wanting more money, if you check out my for-sale items, at http://slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&MerchantID=49350 you will notice that they are cheap and flat.

Yikes! Thanks for the link. It's amazing how much information can change in a day or two. It looks like Qarl's got a lot of awesomeness in mind for sculpties, and the current info probably isn't even scratching the surface.

I think I'll hold off on offering any more comments on this until it's actually up and running on a grid (preview or main), and I've had a chance to run it through the mill. At this point, nothing we can say is any more than speculation, and to continue in this manner would be irresponsible. I'm sure I'll post some guides and tutorials at a more appropriate time, as I normally try to do for new stuff (and old stuff), but for now, I'm bowing out of this discussion.

You're laughing because I was right? At the time that you posted the idea, there WAS no documentation on this. It was just something you made up. Add to that, it looks to me like this was answering the question as to whether or not this is going to happen... posed by you. So... what are you rolling on the floor at? You were, yet again, proved wrong and I proved right. I'm glad that's funny to you.

And yes, I WOULD like more money than I already have. I would like that very much.

Wouldn't you?

It's nice to see that you're continuing the trend of rudely attacking anyone who questions you. Nice.

Tell you what. I'm done with this. I'll be holding off on posting again (save a direct poke at me like the one above), happy in the knowledge that your silly proposal won't go through and that we WILL be able to import these maps from Maya and Blender.
Me, I've spent two days taking a Blender tutorial so that I can be "unfairly" ready to import models into SL. Isn't that horrible of me, to actually try to figure out how to do this before it happens and not just bitching and moaning and being rude?
I'm sure I'm going to hell for the unfairness off it all.