Absolutely precise texturing of sculpts (tutorial and templates)

This tutorial will show you have to precisely texture a sculpt in any way, including the poles (top and bottom points) of a sculpt, and how to create straight lines across flat-topped sculpted cylinders.

I blogged web: http://integralsl.blogspot.com/2009/01/ocd-texturing-of-sculpts-and-templates.html

I also included a set of templates that show the exact position and orientation of every face of a sculpt. It's a rar because there's all kinds of different ones for oblongs, UV repeats, etc. Right now I have it as a rar file on a crappy free uploading service; if anyone knows of a better one, please tell.

You can also pick up a set of these in-world at http://slurl.com/secondlife/sculptomancy/128/128/0 . This is recommended because there's some templates that are 2048 pixels on a dimension, and had to be uploaded using a modified client by a friend.

Very nice! Thank you for sharing that.

Just curious... How does this hold up with LOD changes? As you back away, and the sculpt changes LOD, does the texturing detail hold well?

I looked at that and only 2 things come to mind..

1. You are insane

and

2. Better you than me


haha

I will stick to square and rectangle pictures for a while longer, that is confuzzling enough at times.


afterthought..

if you can devise some code that will take a regular texture and re-map it to a sculpty map.. then you will be a hero.

For doing circulars and similiar things, polar coordinates are your friend.



Good show. Always appreciated.

Is there a way to extract the polar coordinates from a sculpty Map?

I think I know what you mean, but I'm not sure.

In PS, Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates come with two options: Polar to Rect, and Rect to Polar. If you take the template and use Rect to Polar, it should turn the template into a bunch of concentric circle. Draw on that, then use Polar to Rect.

The down-side to using Polar Coords is that it can be tricky and might mangle the pixels a bit muchly.

You would not want to use a filter on a sculptie map as it would destroy the sculpt because
the rgb values on the sculpt map represent the coordinates of how the sculpt will be displayed in
SL.

For the most part the sculpt "map" is a finished product unless you are like Aminom and are able
to do pixel level color adjustments that make sense in the structure your are trying to create.
In my experiments with sculpts I have done some painting on sculpt maps on a larger level and
occasionally got lucky with certain attempts. However in my opinion it is very hard to know what your doing unless you have a very deep comprehension of color values and some super visualization skills.
Oh I and I do need to make an exception on the filter assertion I made above. The "Gaussian Blur" filter can be very useful. Or at least it was in when I was baking my sculpts in blender.

I did some quick tests with his templates. The process is very well thought out and very precise.

I would differ that on the description of it being "absolutely precise" as no man made objects are absolutely precise not even within the digital realm (as compared to a quantum level of comparison). As long as we are being extremely detailed here.

For those that are not quite as detail oriented as Aminoms literal tutorial process would require
the templates are still useful as you can apply the correct sized ones to your sculpt and see
with a visual observation the areas where stretching is occurring. Then you can either correct
the initial sculpt itself or adjust the texture you plan to use to cover those areas or both.
As there will Always be some stretching in a sculpt due to the limited number of vertices they
must be contained within.

Ceera, if I understand it completely (I think I do The templates just show you where you
need to make corrections to optimize the texture you want to end up using on the sculpt.
So the LOD issues will be determined by the sculpt creation method as usual. If you have a nice
tight clean sculpt outputted with a good exporter then your textures should look good as well
as long as they are of good quality also.

yes.. what I meant is a way to de-discombobulate the raw Sculpty map into some kind of a template that a regular texture then can be re-combobulated upon, so that it will work on the finished rezzed sculptmess - via automated process.



thanks for sharing a new button to push.. I always wondered what that did.. now I can try to confuse myself more than I am already .. maybe I will make a fancy roof using your method

Why "rar" and not a de-facto standard format like "zip"?

If people stuck with 'de-facto standards', entire software fields would have never advanced and Mac users would still be using "Pack-It".

There are times when it's important to break standards, and there's times when it's just being annoying. I don't know whether this is the case or not, because I don't know why he picked RAR. For example,:

* RAR may compress to half the size of ZIP
* RAR may be required by the site he uploaded it to.

I do not know whether this is the case or not, which is why I asked the question.

As for Stuffit... Stuffit is a perfect example of a community switching from standard formats to a proprietary one that was only ever properly supported on one platform. There was a perfectly good Apple standard for converting Mac's resource forks and finder info so the file could be transferred and copied and stored in standard archives, and if Aladdin had chosen to use that format in their product and chose a published container format it would have saved Mac users years of incompatibility.

Thanks for picking such a good example of why following standards actually matters.

And, back to Aminom Marvin, I am genuinely interested in why you picked RAR format. Pardon for the digression. Feel free to tell me to get stuffited if you think I'm being rude.