Advanced Sculpty Exporter... leaves open seams.

I tried using the Advanced Sculpty Exporter for Maya: (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Advanced_Sculptie_Exporter_From_Maya) to create smoother sculptys without wrinkles in them, and they have yielded the best results so far, but there is still a problem.

They come out all distorted, but changing the stitching type to Torus eliminated the walls and spikes. The problem is that I am left with a gap in the shape on all of the pieces I generated. Here are some common suggestions that I have eliminated:

None of the geometry exceeds 10 units in maya. I scaled everything to below 8 units just to be safe.

I deleted the history, froze transformations, reset transformations, and deleted the history again, on all parts.

The part with the most sections and spans is the piece that makes the top of the head, and they are 14 and 12, so I know that it doesn't go over the limit.

Is there anything that I have forgotten to check for? Has anyone else had this same problem? I have used the script from the Advanced Exporter, and the LlSculpt_mel, and each of them seem to have their own issues. The Advanced Exporter script makes a much better, smoother sculpt, I just wish it didn't have a gap in it.



Here are links to screencaps of the problem:
http://www.peledragon.com/sl/Sternbergi_seam1.jpg
http://www.peledragon.com/sl/Sternbergi_seam2.jpg

Disclaimer: I don't use Maya so this might be wrong

This problem looks like the one I ended up writing my own triangle fill routines to get around with the Blender scripts. With a shader based baker, the UV positions at 1.0 are outside the image area so the last column and row are off by 1/2 a face. Without specific coding to pull these back into the image area, you get issues like those shown on unwrapped edges. Wrapped edges don't use these incorrect baked positions as they are read from 0.0 and not 1.0

You know what I think is that there should be a sticky or wiki article that compiles all of the known issues of working with Maya, Blender, and other programs concerning what to avoid in making a sculpt, and if there are any processes that are consistently proven. The short list of problems that I knew to check for and eliminate I didn't gather from any one location, but over two days of exploring the forums and reading a Second Life book I checked out from the library. And spending hundreds of Lindens eliminating each possible cause.

I heard good things about SLImageUpload. I was just trying to upload a sculpt map that I know works (but comes out extremely wrinkly) that I generated using LlSculpt_mel, but it keeps hanging for a little while and then showing me an error:
Asset upload failed: The underlying connection was closed: A connection that was expected to be kept alive was closed by the server.

Open seams are often the result of the sculpt map needing to be rotated 90 degrees. Make sure Correct Orientation is checked in the sculpty exporter dialog, and make sure your global orientation in Maya is set to Y-up.

Common sense would seem to dictate you should set it to Z-up, since that's what SL's orientation is. But the exporter script was written with Maya's default in mind, which is Y-up. If yours is set to Z-up, switch it to Y-up, and see if it helps.

I'm just throwing out guesses at this point, as to what the problem might be, just so you know. I'm not experiencing the issues you are.


ETA: I just thought of another possible cause of your problem. Are you using groups or partentings in Maya? If so, open your hypergraph, pull all objects out of their groupings/parentings, and delete all group nodes from the scene. The exporter requires that all objects be on the first, and only the first, hierarchy tier. Groupings and parentings will screw things up in all kinds of ways. Wavy and/or improperly seamed surfaces are among the possible results.

If you need a convenient way to manage collections of objects, use layers instead of groups. The exporter doesn't care about layers at all.

Hi Chosen Few, rotating the texture worked. Initially, it still had the gap, until I changed the stitching type to sphere, and all of the gaps disappeared.

Also, I checked and fortunately all my parts are not grouped. I don't remember ungrouping them (perhaps I ungrouped them to make it easier to keep editing them), but I did group them so all the pieces would stay together when I scaled them down. In the future I will make sure that everything is ungrouped so that future problems don't start showing up for me.

Thanks a lot for your help!

I'm glad you got it worked out, Bowr.

You may or may not know this already, but you can keep the parts together when scaling or rotating, without using groups. You just need to do a couple of things:

1. Make sure all the objects have their pivot points in the same place. There are several ways to do that. The easiest options are either to freeze and reset transformations for all objects, which will move all the pivots to the origin of the grid, or to move the pivots by hand to an place you want, by first pressing Insert to expose them, and then moving them as you would any other object.

2. Make sure your transformation tools are set to the same orientation. To do that, double-click on either the Translate (Move) tool, or the Rotate tool, to show the tool settings. Right at the top, of the settings pane, you'll see a bunch of radio buttons, labeled Object, Local, World, etc. The simplest option to go with is World. That will keep the manipulators oriented withe global XYZ, just like using the World ruler mode in SL. (Note: For more information on this, including a good explanation of all the modes, and how to use them, click the Tool Help button at the top right of the settings pane. Maya's Help is very, very good.)

As long as you do both those things, plus use layers to keep your scene organized, you won't need groups at all.