Blender Sculpties: Prim.Blender vs Domino

Hi, I'm starting to migrate from using proprietary software like zbrush, maya, and modo to open source ones like Blender - (Blender has advanced a LOT in the past 3 years!). I'm looking at sculptie creation tools in Blender.

So far, I've used Dominos a lot - but I'm wondering what the pros and cons of Dominos vs Prim.Blender are, especially in the sculpty creation arena?

Also, I'm wondering if Dominos supports multi-prim sculpties.

Also, Are there any other streamlined sculptie-creation kits for Blender?


Dominos: http://www.dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts.html

Prim.Blender http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=149111

I thought that prim.blender used Domino's scripts for sculpties? The main thing is that prim.blender can handle non-sculpted prims and placement.

Also, those are the only two plugins/scripts I can think of for Blender, but they're awesome. Domino's scripts are extremely accurate, one of the most accurate available for any program.

Untrue. Both Zsculpt and Maya's converter are comparable.

Yes, for all that i know, prim.blender uses Domino's scripts or at least a derivative of them. I can not tell about other programs and converters, but i think, on the free software domain, Domino's work is the ultima ratio.

Besides the official release (from july 200 there is another version available, named "the release-candidate scripts" from december 2008 (better known as the RC-scripts).

http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts_git.html

I have been using the RC-scripts now for almost 6 months. There are some caveats in the handling, but overall it is so much more powerfull compared to the official release, that i rarely feel the need to switch back to the released-scripts.

For my taste there are still some areas to improve, like better support for multi-sculptie objects (there is some support for that right now, but i am allready looking at how to improve that, since Domino has stated, that everything has been prepared, so it should be possible to finish soon.

Now since i am very curious and can not keep hands off anything, that interests me (and since domino was absent for some time), i meanwhile have created a maintainance release of the RC scripts, which allready contain some little improvements.:

http://www.machinimatrix.org/svn/sl/distrib (blender_scripts_rc_4.zip is the newest version)

And currently i nearly finished a more enhanced version of the scripts (mainly on the usability) with embedded NURBS support and selectable alpha channel masking. I am working on the tutorial right now and will post a release note soon

Please note, that my work is only an attempt to improve the existing software to work better for just me. I decided to release this fork to the public and Domino has meanwhile approved, that this is OK for him. I hope, that he can and will eventually reuse some of my work in his own scripts once he gets back to work on them.

Have fun,
Gaia

"One of" implies that others may be equally accurate. Therefore the comparable accuracy of other exporters does not make Keira's statement untrue. (Apologies for being pedantic).

True

I just never could understand the love for blender aside from it being free.

Free = universally accessible = good <> loved.

I would argue that is not the only reason, there are other software out there for free and not many use them or use their open code and/or plug ins system to make plugins. Blender has the most features and is fast enough to work with once you learn it. It is not a software that has to be sold to people, they work from features and comparability and decent workflow after the steeper learning curve.

I can use it on almost any OS, even on obscure ones. I can use it for animation, prim building and also sculpts. I can use it to bake textures with shine (via "nodes" and careful lighting and making the texture fit after SL messes the mesh up. ) and I can light textures with it and use those for baked shaded textures for regular prims. I do agree you can do more and get good results with some commercial programs.

So blender is the choice because blender works better overall for workflow and has more compatability, in general, and that leads to a larger and more savvy user base. Art Of Illusion sort of sits unknown, yet is cross platform via Java, has neat easy tools and a more commercial software like click interface. It is a "normal" type of interface, yet no one even adds support to it!!! Sad right?Blender has odd comparabilities and features tha work for poorer people to. I was looking at old PC's and Sunblades and thinking of how they may cluster to make rendering faster for my ageing PC. You can sort of make your own render farm with 50USD or free "junk" boxes with dead hardrives using linux liveCD's. It uses all those PC's to run a small OS and Blender, all in RAM, and they work all at the same time to do a bit of the work of rendering. It is like a serial, small and weak old school supercomputer!

So I think it is features and compatibility that make it so popular. Windows needs a Hard drive, and that is a common failing thing and people throw those out for crying out loud. If you lose all your stuff via theft, storm damage, virus or stupidity(this is the one to watch for when sharing a PC lol) you can get a "broke" PC from eBay, thrift store or neighbours garage and fire it up and do a bit of work wth a Linux LiveCD OS! No installing, all in RAM. If you manage to install the linux OS on a thumb drive, you can then use the scripts and work like you never had a problem! You can't do that with anything but Java based 3D programs, and they are many times buggy and have reduced file support and not as many tools.

A little story about love and hate

When i looked at 3D tools the first time in my life (~18 month ago) i did not know if that would be something, which will keep my attention at all. So... How to check this out without dumping money to the waste basket ?
So i looked out for tutorials to learn at least what was possible by then, before spending my money. But all i could find was a realy cool video tutorial about z-brush. So ok, i thought give it a try, i downloaded the trial version of the tool and tried to reproduce what i have seen in the video about "how to create a mushroom sculptie". Damn, it looked so easy, but it wasn't at all that simple. And i did not get any mushroom out of the tool. I started wondering...

And then i asked the question "Isn't there anything else available, which makes sculptie creators life easier but still allows for full flexibility?" It must have been one of my first posts here in this forum and it was answered by "Vlad Bjornson" (or maybe it was Chosen Few, i don't remember? ) who told me, that any 3D program would need a significant amount of initial learning before i could expect to create something significant...

And then someone mentioned, if the learning-process is complicated and time consuming for any 3d program, then i also could just try out blender. At least it would give me the full feature set without spending money, just time ...

well, i had more time than money at that time, so ... i tried and failed, tried again and failed again, just so similar as with z-brush before... And that was when i got really angry about the whole story. Hey, folks, why is this soooo damn frustrating ??? Hate over all programmers, especially over all 3d programming neards ! And NO, i will never give up! And yes, i will try even harder... I got angry, very angry.. and i was trying and failing for quite some time.

And just when i thought, i had to give up (which did not occur frequently in the past), i suddenly had created my first sculptie in my life. Ok, i had significant help from a good friend, who could tell me where i probably fail, but both of us where quite astonished to see our first working result...

But we did not know, why it suddenly worked and w could not reproduce it, arghhhh. "I never give up, ommmm" that was my mantra... So i put more of my time into it and slowly, very slowly things got better and replicable and just when i started to get comfortable with the weirdest and most complex process of UV-unwrapping and color transforming and what not else, then i found Domino's scripts and suddenly the winter storms vanished and where replaced by "bright shining meadows in the spring sun"-like feelings and "ohs" and "ahs" and ups" ... i was soo happy by then, that all i could do was spreading the news...

And this was not only my story about "how i learned to love blender" but also the story about "why the machinimatrix videos have been brought to life".

I hope i could entertain you a bit
have fun
Gaia

Same here!! Except, I stumbled on it again just a few days ago -- impressed with its cloth and fur/hair features! IT also has inline sculpting, now. Huge improvements from a few years ago when it was just free.

I used to refuse to learn Blender, because of the bad rumours about how hard it was to learn. At this point, however, I prefer it over anything else I've used, after having used Maya, 3ds, Rhino, Wings3d, and a few others.

When I did finally decide to cave in, due to lack of money for something like Maya, I found it wasn't so bad. The 'Blender 3d: Noob to Pro' wikibook is AMAZING, and there are tons of resources for newbies. The Blender Artists forums saved my ass many times, as well as hel;ping me get better via speed modeling contests.

After I took the time to learn it, I found it has a great flow for how I work, things all make sense after learning the basics, and the UI, while complex, is extremely well laid out. You don't need to change windows that often, and almost everything you need to do can be done without changing any window or opening any new ones.

Along with this, I've found Blender's quality to be on par with anything else I've used. The Render engine is the best one I've used, in my opinion, of the in-app renderers, Blender has a relatively powerful, and extremely easy-to-learn (IMHO) particle system, can do compositing with Nodes within Blender, and so on and so forth. It even handles texture painting on-model very well! The support for the existing (easy) language Python is another added bonus.

When I found all of this within a single application, no plugins, and absolutely free, I was amazed. And it's constantly getting better! When I started Blender, the particle system was a bit clunky, but now it's fully capable of doing combable, physical particles for extreme quality videos. It's awesome!

As for sculpties, it has all the tools I need. It has easy-to-use modifiers for some of the most common sculptie tasks, has a true sculpt mode, can bake textures quite well, and Domino's scripts really are extremely accurate.

Even if I had the money, I don't think I'd switch to any full-featured nonfree equivalent product. I absolutely love Blender these days.

That being said, I could never tell anyone it's the best, because everyone has their own likes and dislikes about X or Y program. Blender happens to be my tool of choice, and I adore it. If it's not your cup of tea, that's fine.
^-^

True for the most part -- although I prefer Lightwave/Luxology modo's render engine to blender. But, I'm really impressed that blender has quite decent cloth / fur support!


As for techniques for making multiprim sculpties using blender - anyone care to share?

Ideally, I would really like to create an entire complicated multiprim sculpty -- say sculptprimmy hair -- in blender... where it's much easier to rotate, size, and place things precisely -- than having to fumble using SL's limited edit tools.

Well, Domino's scripts support it to a point.. they don't currently include position, just rotation and size, I believe. However, if I understand correctly, and Prim.Blender uses Domino's scripts, then it can also handle placement and whatnot, as it's an offline builder. So, using Prim.Blender should be capable of multi-prim builds including sculpts, I think.

I haven't used it, though, so I'm not 100% sure. (I'll be trying it out in a few days, honestly. On vacation atm)

Hmm, how do you get domino's sculpt tool to portray the right size? I find that I have to restretch it once I import a sculpt to SL -- and, the normalize feature distorts the details.

If preserving the size within the bounding box (So that you don't have to stretch it to get it proportioned right) you will lose detail. I'm unsure, but I don't think there's a way to do it without losing detail. I also don't know the technical reason of why it does it... so I'm not that loaded with information except to say that you always will lose detail XD

Typically I find little detail loss if I export a sculpt using Dominos, and not have *none* of the buttons selected: "fill holes","normalize","compressible"

But it does mean I have to manually stretch everything

The technical reason, why the "keep scale" looses detail is because the color space is reduced according to the scaling. as an example think of a brick with rounded edges and the overall size

x=1
y=1
z=8

Now lets keep scaling:

Since z is the largest axis, the full color range is used (0-255)
But in x and in y only 12 % of the color range is used (0-31)

So the number of possible coordinates in x and y is reduced by a factor of 8.
And you will see this at the rounded edges, which will be rendered dramatically worse compared to a brick with size <8,8,8> and later rescaled in SL according to the desired proportions.



The multi sculptie technique uses a Bounding box which uses a size so that each individual part of the set fits into it. Imagine you would smash all parts together to the same location, then create the bounding box for that set... (Thank you Domino! I was not aware of this, but it makes pretty much sense ) Hence the color space is reduced for each individual part.

The reason, why this is done so, is because of scaling effects: You typically get severe alignement problems when you try to align to individual sculpties in world. You generally can not achieve pixel alignement (vertex alignment). But when using the technique described above, the vertex alignment is as exact as it has been done in blender (modulo vertex resolution of course)

Does this answer the question ?

Use export LSL to get the sculpt map, texture and a LSL script for each sculptie. The LSL script is linkset aware, so if you link some prims before dropping the images and script in it, you'll get position as well as size and rotation.

Oh and Ina, switch to the RC scripts

If all you want to do is sculpties, then my scripts are much more flexible than the simplified version prim.blender uses. They do demand more from the user in their knowledge of Blender, but as Keira and others mention, once you learn the basics of Blender it gets a lot easier to understand and use.

http://www.blendernation.com/2008/12/11/animation-freddys-world/

That's a good example of why Blender is popular. Pre-high school students making their own 3D movies. It's common to see stuff like this with Blender, where other apps can be out of reach due to price, complexity due to being designed for use by teams rather than individuals, etc.

http://www.blendernation.com/2009/04/18/interview-with-nathan-letwory/

That's a developer view on Blender. With open source, developers tend to be users as well. They see something that could be better in their work flow and build on it. For me the itch was SL content development. So the sculptie scripts and avatar.blend were developed to make that easier in Blender.

Close.. The bounding box on a multi sculptie bake is the smallest that would cover each sculptie from it's center. So with -2.0 to -1.0 on sculptie 1 and 1.0 to 2.0 the box would be -0.5 to 0.5

Also the export LSL expects you to have already baked the sculpties, so you can use different bake settings on individual parts of a linkset and still export them all together.

Domino, I totally agree that Blender is great!! I'm migrating over from proprietary software Maya/Modo/zBrush. And, on my second day, I've already accumulated a small list of why Blender is great (especially for making SL Sculpties!) http://blog.inacentaur.com/2009/04/19/blender-is-awesome-for-sl-sculpties/

In other news, here's what I've created in Blender on my second day so far. It doesn't look like the kind of ruffles I'd intended (advice welcome!), but I'd really have to agree that blender's learning curve is quite comfortable!:

http://blog.inacentaur.com/2009/04/19/ic-seregel-elorisse-by-ina-centaur-for-fdc/

Is this only in the RC scripts, or the current release, as well? I looked at the LSL output of that option before, and didn't see position set in there, nor did they move in SL, but I'm using the non-RC scripts atm, because no idea why.

Also, do the objects need to be parented in Blender, or just left alone?

Hey, that is an amazing video, which you did here I am very impressed. After 2 days ... And i haven't even realised this sort of technique could be used for sculptie making after beeing with blender for a year or so Thank you for the insight, Ina!!!

hehe, np, Gaia! Blender's cloth simulation feature is one of the reasons why I tried it. It works easily well and it's kind of really fun to play with! (Neither Modo or zBrush have it... my ancient copy of 3ds doesn't have it, and I can't figure out how to do that in maya...)

Another awesome super-easy technique for Blender is one I've just discovered on my own, which is using particles to bake textures to give a furry look. You can accomplish a relatively convincing texture in just a few minutes ^-^

The trick is, that Blender enables you to comb particles, so you can make it look just right, then convert the particle system to curves. Extrude those curves a tiny bit in two directions, and you've got solid fur, and can use them as shadow sources for creating a furry look. Working with some material settings, you can change their opacity, to give a thicker, thinner, etc, fur look, and if you really work at it you can have a very realistic fur appearance much easier than having to paint the fur by hand, and its settings are easily transferred to other projects for future use ^-^

Just making sure, are these the RC scripts? http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts_git.html

And, how is the multi-prim support? If I were to place each sculpted prim of a highly primmy sculpted hair in Blender - would I have to re-do it all once I import, or can it be more or less 1:1?

The current version I'm using is here, but I haven't been able to get multi-prim export to work...:
http://www.dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts.html