Which Software Can Reach?

I found some sculpted prims looks perfect with texture, but some others awful with texture. I think it's not only since the prim shape, but also the texture on the prim. Then my question is which 3d software is the best that can make perfect appearance with both prim and texture. Is anyone sure?

3 most commonly used for sculpty texturing

Blender for uv-mapping
3ds-max for uv-mapping and shading
Maya for baked shadow and uv-mapping and shading

There's no one single answer to your question, Jolly. There are lots and lots of options.

Myself, I use Maya to create the geometry, a combination of Maya, Photoshop, and a few other miscellaneous tools to create shaders and source imagery, and Turtle to bake the textures. Finally, I'll usually do some further post processing in Photoshop to clean things up and optimize the textures for the SL environment.

If you're looking for the simplest solution, and you already know the basics of Maya, you can use Qarl Linden's advanced sculpty exporter to spit out sculpt maps and baked textures at the same time. The results won't be quite as good as if you'd used all the tools I mentioned above, but compared with 99% of what you typically see in SL, your stuff will look just great (assuming your scene is well lit, and you've done a good job creating your shaders, of course).

You can also work very similarly in any other full-featured 3D application, such as 3D Studio Max or Blender, for example.

Another way to go is to bring your sculpt geometry into a 3D paint program like Photoshop CS4 Extended, Deep Paint 3D, Z-Brush, etc., and paint your textures directly onto the surfaces.

Be aware, though, that none of these programs will ever do the work for you. An incompetent will always get bad results from all of them. To use any of them effectively, you'll need to put in a lot of time and effort. The learning curve for any and all of them is fairly steep if you've never done this sort of work before. There's no such thing as a magical "make it look good" button. Whatever tools you decide to use, the onus is on you to do good work with them.




Almia, I'm a little confused by your post. All three of the programs you mentioned have very similar capabilities, with regard to this topic. Why do you feel a Blender user would stop at just UV-mapping, and not do a full texture bake straight from Blender, or that a Max user wouldn't do the full job in Max? There's no reason they couldn't.

Also, sculpties don't generally require custom UV mapping. All they need is a uniform grid, which they'll always have right from the start if they're made from properly created base primitives (planes, capless cylinders, toruses).

Almia, what's uv-mapping and what's shading you mean? UV-mapping means the sculpted prim shape and shading means texture mapping? Then what's 'baked shadow'?
But which software can make an object good-looking with both sculpted prim and texture? Some texture looks weird on the prim. Maybe I should show your some snapshots.

Chosen, thanks a lot for your comments. Do you have a complete tutorial or sample to tell how to make a sculpted prim and its texture in 3d-Max and how to restore its shape and texture in SL ?

EDIT: It looks like you posted new questions at the same time as I was writing this response to your last ones. To answer your specific question about 3DS Max, the answer is no, I don't have any tutorials for it. It's not a program that I use. There are some on the sculpty wiki, though, at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_3d_Software_Guide#3d_Studio_Max_.28Autodesk.29 . I have no idea if they're any good or not. I've never read them.

Anyway, below is the post I'd originally written, before I saw your Max question. Forgive me if I jumped the gun with any of it. By your earlier questions, I'd assumed you had no 3D experience at all. If you already know how to use Max, then a good portion of the post won't be relevant. I'm leaving it intact, though, in case my earlier interpretation was indeed correct. If you're brand new to 3D, take what's written below to heart. If you're already experienced, and just need to learn about sculpties in particular, the wiki is a great place to start.




Original text:

Jolly, I hate to say this, but it sounds like you don't yet have enough knowledge of 3D in general for us to have an intelligent conversation on the subject. I could try to answer the questions you just asked, but it's unlikely you'd understand much of what I'd say, and then you'd have even more questions, which is exactly what happened after we answered your first question. You just don't yet know enough to know what you don't know, if that makes sense.

I know this isn't what you're going to want to hear, but really, you shouldn't even be thinking about making sculpties yet at the level you seem to be at right now. Learn to do more typical 3D projects first, and then this will all make a lot more sense to you.

Here's what I'd suggest. Download the free Personal Learning Edition of Maya from http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639525. Go through all (and I do mean ALL) the Getting Started tutorials in the Help file. Maya's got the absolute best included help of any program I've ever seen, be it 3D or otherwise. Stepping through the tutorials will teach you a great deal, not just about Maya itself, but about principles of 3D.

Once you've finished with that, you'll have some solid experience under your belt, and you'll know about 95% of what you need to know to make and texture sculpties very well. The remaining 5% will come from practice working with sculpties themselves. But that can only come after you already know what you're doing with 3D in general.

Sculpties have specific peculiarities that separate them from "normal" 3D models. If you try to learn them before you've mastered the basics, you're destined for problems and frustration. Trust me; a little patience now will go a long way later. I guarantee that by the time you're done with the tutorials, you'll find that most, if not all, of your current questions will have been answered.



Note: Maya PLE won't be usable directly for sculpties. It watermarks all renderings, including sculpt maps and textures. It's for educational purposes only. For production, if you decide to stick with Maya, you'll need to purchase a licensed copy.

Even if you ultimately decide to use another program besides Maya (Blender's popular because it's free), I still recommend starting with Maya PLE simply because the included Help is so good. No other program's Help will get you started in 3D as well as Maya's will. Many of the skills and concepts you'll learn from it will be applicable to lots of other programs.

Chosen, your comment is really appreciated. You're correct that I'm absolutely a novice to 3d software. Therefore I want to know I should begin with which software lest wasting time and which software is the best for the sculpted prim and texture no matter the price or help content.

If price is no object, then Maya's probably your man. There are certainly good alternatives out there as well, so don't be afraid to explore them, but Maya is the most full-featured and most extendable 3D platform there is. It can literally perform just about any task a computer is capable of, if you know how. (I even used it to do my taxes one year, no joke. Old class project, long story.) It's more than capable of creating sculpties and texturing them.

Plus, sculpties were invented with Maya in mind, so you get the added advantage that the sculpty exporter for Maya was actually written by a Linden, if that makes any difference to you.

But again, don't be shy about exploring other options as well. As I said, there's no one single answer to your question.

Part of Blender's popularity for sculpties is due to having the most powerful set of scripts for handling sculpties. There are things you can do with Blender which just aren't possible with any other 3D sculptie solution. Things like offset centers, multi-frame animated sculpties with a common center and scale, and advanced LOD management are all made simple.

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/ has some beginner tutorials and you can get the scripts from http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts_git.html

I'd recommend using my release candidate scripts as they have a lot of new features the current scripts don't.

If you already know and have 3D max, then I'd speak to Shack Dougall as he's planning to update his 3D max scripts with the LOD management features from my Blender scripts.

/8/9c/185426/1.html

But if you are going to be learning a new package from scratch then you may as well give Blender a spin.

Domino, you rock. I had no idea you'd built so many features into your Blender scripts. Good stuff!

Ok, who are you and what have you done with Chosen?

It's my users who really rock, most of the features come from their questions and suggestions. Without their feedback, the scripts wouldn't be half as good.



Thanks. I'm intending on making the release candidate the 1.0 release. I'll be spending more time on the documentation then, so hopefully it'll become a little more obvious what's possible with them.

a uv-map means more then the geometry of a model in a 3d program.
a uv-map allows the program to texture the object as it was meant to look.

baked shadow is aka a false shadow because even tho sl does apply shadows to sculpts they are not very realistic so a false shadow always apply a bit of glamor.
but i really suggest you follow chosen few's suggestion after my comment.

Now, that IS, a compliment!
And I agree!

Hey, just because I've made my share of criticisms about Blender's interface doesn't mean I can't recognize talent when I see it. You've done some fantastic work. I just wish we had someone of your caliber actively working on the Maya scripts.

In any case, my opinion on Blender's oddities has softened quite a bit in the last few months, thanks almost entirely to the excellent videos Gaia Clary has been producing. As I said in my response to the first one she posted about on this forum, I've become pretty well convinced that it's not that Blender's interface actually is badly designed as I'd always thought, just that it's been badly explained for a long time. It's great that that's starting to change.




That's kind of a strange definition, Almia. I'm not quite sure how to make sense of your wording. Here's how I'd answer the question:

UV mapping is the coordinate system by which textures (and other things) are applied to 3D surfaces. Think of it kind of like how a world map relates to a globe. Both have lines of latitude and longitude on them, and both show all the same features (land masses, oceans, etc.). Each point on the map corresponds to a specific point on the globe. The globe can be thought of has a sphere that has a map wrapped around it, and a map can be thought of as a glove that has been unwrapped and flattened.

UV maps are to 3D models exactly what world maps are to globes. Each pixel in a texture corresponds with a specific spot on the model, in the exact same way that each part of a map points to a specific part of a globe. Which part of the texture goes to which part of the model is determined by UV coordinates. Put all the coordinates together, and you end up with a whole image, which we call a UV map.

A good example nearly every SL content creator is familar with is the avatar clothing templates. Those are UV maps for the avatar. "Templates" is actually a bit of a misnomer.

Incidentally, the reason they're called "UV" maps is because the letters X,Y, and Z are already in use for the 3D coordinate system for modeling. So coordinate systems for texturing utilize next three closest letters U,V, and W. For SL purposes, U and V are all we usually talk about, since all textures in SL are 2D images. But just for completeness, there are such things as 3D textures, which use UVW maps.

Chosen, your comment sounds so professional and easy to understand. So UVW is the coordinates and UV-map could be served as the SL prim shape as well as the texture on the shape? Then how to understand the shadow?

It looks like I can't create sculpted prims by myself in short term. Then may I ask:
1. What about the price to buy other's sculpted prim if he or she create it for me per my requirements?
2. Which files should I request if he or she makes it in Maya? Which in 3D-max? And which in Blender?
Thanks!!

I'll throw my support in here, too. Domino's Blender sculptie scripts are best in class. They set the bar for everyone else. And the Machinimatrix tutorials are outstanding.

Blender is a free 3d Modeling application with serious strength. When you combine this with the powerful features in Domino's scripts and high quality tutorials from Machinimatrix, it becomes a compelling platform.

The main selling point of Prim Composer for 3ds Max in its current form is its breadth of features. You can create sculpties and basic prim types such as box/cylinder/sphere/torus together in a scene, texture them, bake textures, and export the whole thing including textures to either Second Life or OpenSim.

Version 1.1 (releasing Friday) will enable the workflow in reverse, so that you can export things that you created (you must be both the creator and the owner of the items in question) from Second Life/OpenSim and then import them into 3ds Max. This also allows you to move your creations from Second Life to OpenSim and back.

Essentially, this enables a kind of 3-tier workflow in which one creates and textures small assemblies of prims in 3ds Max, then uploads them to a local instance of OpenSim for larger-scale integration and composition, and then finally packages and deploys them to a public OpenSim grid or Second Life.

A lot of my focus is going into the tools that are necessary to do this on a large scale. I want to be able to deploy whole sims to a public grid without having to go there and manually build it piece by piece. I want to be able to upload a box, give it to someone, and have it automatically rez a whole sim.

Anyway, that's the vision behind Prim Composer.

Wow, Shack. That sounds incredible. Again, I'll say I only wish we had someone throwing similar effort into Maya. SLTK Pro is pretty close to your description, give or take a handful of features, but I continue to be hesitant to fork over $800-1000 to an overseas company without knowing what kind of customer service I'll be able to get.

You're right that it won't be in the short term, as in it won't be overnight, or even this week. But it also doesn't have to take a really long time. If you're serious, a few weeks is all you'll likely need in order to learn what you need to know.


Everyone's going to have different rates. Some people are content to work for micropayments (a few hundred to a few thousand L$), while others (like me) charge RL rates for the time involved.

If you want something specific, I'd suggest you post it in the Products Wanted forum, and see who answers.


In most cases, if you hire someone to create something for you for SL, they'll deliver you the finished product in-world, and that's that. Some might also give you the source files if you request them, but not all will. I almost never do. If a client wants that, they can negotiate for it, of course, as part of the contract, but as a general rule, my clients take ownership of the finished product only, not any of the source components.

To use the globe example, there's a number of different world maps (the unfolded origami version) that could be done for the globe.

The sculptie map is the equivalent of an elevation map, where each part of the world map defines an offset that alters the shape of the globe.

The texture (where the shadows would be) is the more conventional world map where each part affects the color on the globe.

So they both use the same UV layout and map to the same positions on the globe but have different purposes.

UVW is a different sort of mapping which isn't used on sculpties in SL (though you can use it on materials in the 3D program to bake a texture). Here the material is a solid block rather than flat, so the shape of the object is like a sculpture cut from that block.

These are most often done mathematically rather than as a texture. When we talk about baking textures, these 3D UVW materials are converted to 2D images that just cover the visible surfaces of the object. So the color at any point on the world map depends on the position inside the UVW material block of the corresponding point on the globe.



Stick at it. First impressions of any 3D software are going to be overwhelming purely because of how much they can do. Sculpties only need a very small subset of the tools and with sculptie specific guides, you should be able to learn those quickly.

Domino, Thanks for your comment. Especially agree with your this opinion. So I think it's not that difficult for me to learn SL sculpted in whatever maya, 3d-max or blender. The key questions should be clarified first are:
1. Which 3d software is the perfect to do it?
2. Where's the simple and complete tutorial of making SL sculpted in the software and restore the sculpted in SL ?

My understanding is 2 source files needed for SL sculpted prim. One is UV-mapping for prim shape. The other is UV-mapping for the color (texture) on the prim. Correct?
Or which files must be exported from maya and imported to SL ? Which from 3d-max and which from Blender?

As one who's been doing (and teaching) digital art for a long time, I have to disagree somewhat with your assessment of Domino's comment. While he's absolutely right that it's not exactly difficult to learn to make sculpted prims in whatever your program of choice happens to be, there is a certain amount of prerequisite knowledge on which you'll need to depend, knowledge which you don't have yet. And while it's certainly not impossible to do, I strongly caution against trying to learn 3D modeling by doing sculpties first. Sculpties are unique to SL, and have many peculiarities to them.

You'd be far better off taking a few weeks to learn the basic principles of 3D in general first, and then you'll be able to apply that experience directly to sculpties with relative ease. If you try to go the other way around, you'll be limiting yourself in ways that are all but guaranteed to come back to haunt you down the road. As I so often say when these types of discussions come up, don't put the cart before the horse.



As I said earlier, there is no one answer to that. Those who are experienced with Program A will usually recommend it over Programs B and C, and their reasoning is usually compelling, no matter what actual titles A, B, and C happen to be. And that pretty much supports what I've been saying all along, which is that it's not about "learning to make sculpties", but about learning the basic concepts of 3D, along with the fundamental operation of whatever your program of choice happens to be, and then applying that knowledge to whatever it is you want to make, be it sculpties or anything else.

You might as well be asking what's the perfect car to drive. Ask a hundred people and you'll get a hundred answers.

The "big 3" tend to be Maya, 3DS Max, and Blender, but there are many, many other choices. For a good listing, take a look at the 3D Software guide on the sculpty wiki.



There are lots of tutorials on the wiki, but again I'll stress, learn the basics first, and then apply your knowledge to sculpties. Don't try to just learn sculpties. It doesn't really work that way.



You're sort of getting the idea, but you don't yet know enough to be able to realize why what you just said doesn't quite make sense. It's getting harder and harder to try to explain properly, the more you keep trying to dive into deeper and deeper water without first learning to swim. You're picking up bits and pieces of terminology here and there from this conversation, but you're not yet able to grasp what it all really means. That's not your fault; most of what we've talked about here is simply over your head at this point.

I strongly urge you to change course here. Make the investment to learn the basics of 3D modeling, and then I promise you, this will all make total sense.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but this thread has been going on for over two days now. Had you spent that time running through a few of those Maya PLE tutorials I recommended in the beginning, we'd likely be having a very different conversation right now.

I can't stress this enough: Forget all about sculpties for the next couple of weeks, and use that time to practice the basics of 3D modeling. Once you've done that, revisit sculpties. You'll find that most of the questions you think you have right now will have been answered through the process, and you'll have a whole set of new ones.




The files you'll export from your modeling app, and import to SL, will be the same files, no matter what program(s) you're using. It will be two image files per sculpty. One will be the sculpt map, which contains the 3D geometry information, and the other will be the surface texture, which is the object's "paint job" or coloring.

Hi Jolly,

In the same way as you learnt the SL client step by step, you can learn 3D modeling the same way. There was no reason to spend weeks studying SL before logging into the world and taking your first steps, and learning 3D modeling can be a similar journey.

Step 1) Get Blender

http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

Step 2) Get my sculptie scripts

http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts_git.html (get the rc version from the download button and follow instructions in readme.txt in the zip to install)

Step 3) Follow Gaia's videos or the webpage tutorials, or both

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/
http://www.secondlifeartist.com/

Step 4) Make your own sculpties

If you get stuck, ask for help /8/60/203571/1.html

That's not necessarily a fair comparison, Domino. "Taking your first steps" in SL literally means taking your first steps, as in learning to walk around with your avatar before you do anything else. It doesn't mean trying to figure out how to create advanced content, with absolutely zero prior knowledge of the subject.

And whether you (or they) realize it or not, every single SL user who creates content DOES absolutely spend weeks studying. The amount of questions asked on this forum every day about how to do what you and I would consider some of the most basic things, by people who've been around a lot longer than just a few weeks, is proof positive of that. It's just that they're doing so many other things at the same time, nobody really thinks of it as "studying SL". (Not that doing those Maya PLE tutorials would really feel like studying either. They're fun, and very satisfying to complete. And when it's all done, you know all kinds of stuff you didn't even realize you'd learned.)

Don't forget, SL does all kinds of things besides just 3D modeling. Do any one of them, and you're an "SL user". But that doesn't mean you know ANYTHING about any of the other things. Learning modeling doesn't quite fit that mold.

I've used this analogy before: Learning 3D modeling is a lot like learning to play a musical instrument. If you're a music teacher, and someone walks into your office and says, "I love Mendelssohn, and I want to learn to play that famous concerto of his," you don't just hand him a violin, and say "Here, watch this video to learn where to put your fingers when, and you'll get it in no time." It simply doesn't work that way. You don't approach the instrument with any particular piece of music in mind. If you want to play something on the violin, you learn the violin itself. Once you've developed the necessary skills, you then apply them to whatever piece of music you want to play, be it Mendelssohn or anything else.

I'll grant you that given enough dedication and single-minded focus, it's technically possible that someone could follow along with such a video and hack his way through playing the concerto if it really came down to it. But I'm pretty sure you'd agree the guy would turn out to be a lousy violinist. I would never steer anyone down that path.

If one wants to play the violin, one learns it the same way everyone else has for the last 400 years, one step at a time, in an order that works for everyone, not just for the few naturals who are out there. And if you want to make stuff with a 3D modeling program, you learn 3D modeling, not just the particular stuff you think you want to make today.