Aculptie o Matic Texturing - Please Help!

Well, I was smug.. I managed to turn some linksets into sculpties with teh Sculptie o Matic system. Yay.

But I can find no way of texturing the damned things If I apply a texture it repeats across every surface of what was an individual prim, which is NOT what I want to have happen.

I've messed my brain cells up and lost a lot of sleep trying to understand all this Blender and Wings stuff, and have to say I've gotten nowhere. I did get the maps into Wings, where there's a load of strange distortion on what was the first prim in the linkset, something not visible in SL. I clumsily worked aorund that, but couldn't save the thing as an SL sculpt due to "unsupported mesh size". So I saved as an obj. And got hold of Blender. And lost more sleep.

Basically, I have a sculpt map that I am very happy with in SL. I understand to apply a custom made texture to it I need to load it into something that then lets me apply colours or textures. But I can't for the life of me get anything to work. Blender was clearly created for those with far too many braincells and hours in the day to click through a sea of grey, and as I seem unable to save the "fixed" sculpt map to upload it the texture I tried to make in Blacksmith3d works not one bit anyway. I thought I'd convert the obj to a SL sculp map, but can't find a working link for the app to do that, and have no idea if it would manage to do the whole mesh thing that Wings is wibbling over anyway.

So... erm... Help! Has anyone used Sculptie o Matic to make sculpts, and if so, have the results been texturable in any sense other than finding something that doesn't look too naff on repeat across the whole thing?

you best hope is to use the baked lighting plugin inside sculpypaint i nthe texture menu. from there you can assign faked lighting to your prim and that can be your layout for making a master texture for the prim.

Erm... How do I get a .obj into Sculptypaint?

The actual map as created by the automatic system in world is broken when viewed in 3d applications, so I can't load it into Sculptypaint - At least not with massive success

SoM actually uses text files to encode it's sculties, that might be why the file will not work in Sculptypaint. Try opening your file with note pad (even if it says .OBJ or something else.) If you get a set of numbers its a .TXT file with the incorrect file extension and you're going to have to ask Contagious Republic if he will give you a way to get a .PNG or other texture map that you can convert and put into Sculptypaint. I don't use the SoM but I have seen it in action, its pretty cool how it works.

HMMM.... the other problem might be that you're trying to open a texture file in a 3D app. try opening the original file with a paint program too.

What is the file extension on the original file you have?

SoM spews out a vast amount of text, that gets copied and pasted into a decoder on a website - That then throws me a bitmap. When I upload the bitmap the scultpie works perfectly (so long as I've not done something stupid), but when I try and load that bitmap into Wings 3d for example, it shows a lot of garbage sprouting from what would have been the first prim selectd in the rootset. The rest of the object is fine however.

So I tried a bit of a trick in SoM, and created a small prim not visible in teh finished item, and buried it from view and made it the first selected prim. This enabled me to ditch the garbage in Wings by tweaking things a bit, leaving what then got exported as an obj. Pulling that up in Blender it appears to be fine, also goes into Blacksmith3d and AC3D OK. But Blender is some form of trickery uncomprehended by mere mortals such as myself, and I can't seem to export the obj as an SL sculpt map successfully with any program I've tried

I tried painting onto teh object in Blacksmith3d, but the resulting texture worked not at all well (as in it gave apretty, but useless appearance) in world.

Maybe if there was a way of copying the huge text chunks into a 3d application for *it* to do the coding and map creation? I don't know, my tether end was reached and passed hours ago.

SoM is fantastic for idiots like me, I'm using it right now to throw together a portcullis - As I can live without the finer art of texturing on that But if all I can do is make sculpties that can't be textured with anything more than throwing a normal tga on and watching it repeat/ stretch/ distort all over the place, then I'm not sure how useful it's going to be

OK there it is

The bitmap is a texture, try opening with a paint program that suports .PNG files(Windows Paint does not.) If you don't have one maybe try PIXIA, its very fast, powerful, stable and best of all free. Get it here PIXIA Once the bitmap is in PIXIA choose File>Save As> By File Extension> .PNG

Load the .PNG into Sculptypaint and fallow the above instructions for baking shadows.

Good Luck.

Well, it went in as a png... And looked... Terrible!

I'm not sure if this is progress or not - At least I was able to almost make out what it was this time... But it looked hideous. And yet again, it looks perfect in SL. I'm now very confused.

On the bright side, my portcullis came out OK on the 9th attempt (kept getting flocker/ bleed till I fiddled with it enough) and I don't mind it being a little lacking in texture detail as it's not meant to be pretty!

HMMM... Make sure that you're converting with 100% lossless when going from bitmap to .PNG.
I have some experience with Sculptypaint, a lot with Zbrush, and tons with texturing. What looks really bad to you in the viewer might be fine. If you really need the help you could send the bitmap to me and let me take a look.

The other suggestion is find a plugin for Wings that will bake the sculpy for you. But with that strange distortion you're talking about the finished texture will be messed up.

OOOO..... Try rotating the texture by 90 deg. intervals. It might line up right when its 180 out.

I dropped you a very basic thing I threw together for testing a few days ago - It comes out fine in SL, but as they all do, it has some odd stuff going on opened in a 3d program.

I'll try the slowly going through 180 degree idea later

Scultie o Matic exports an 8 by 512 bitmap.

1) Open bitmap in paint program and re-size to 512X512, trim the top gray area off. Possibly the bottom 2 rows of pixels as well. (I only had one texture to test with and it looked better after trimming off bottom 2 rows.)

2) Re-size the resulting 512x32 texture to 64X64 and export as .PNG.

3) Load to SculptyPaint. If the prim is hallowed and has a cut, it will look distorted. If the Prim is either hallowed or cut it should be very close to what you'd expect it to look like.

4) Bake on texture (even on the funky looking results, they will texture correctly in SL.)

5) Export .PNG texture and possibly touch up in a paint program.

6) Use the original exported bitmap for the sculpty shape in SL, apply the texture made in SculptyPaint.

I hope this helps, it can be a pain to do but seemed to work OK for me.

Thanks

I'm currently watching my PC taking a 50% CPU hit for the last couple of hours, trying to convert an obj to a sculpt. I first imported teh SoM version into Wings3d and tidied up the junk.. Saved that as an obj. Then into ZBrush, which wibbled about non standard something or other, I let it do its thing, and resaved as an obj. Then dropped it into Scuply Maker. And waited. And waited. And am still waiting! I know my creaky old P4 3G isn't going to keep up with modern stuff, but this seems like a very long wait! I did try converting with Blender, but on teh odd times it seemed to let me do anything, it either spat out unreadable images, or better yet, plain yellow squares.

Will have a crack at your method on the remaining 50% spare on my CPU and see how I get on

Wow!

It looks.. A mess!

/me leaves an imprint of his forehead in the desk

Days spent trying to get this to work, and even with the best minds (and mine, dragging the cumulative ability down a bit! ) it's just not wanting to play. I can make out the thing in SculptyPaint may well once have been what I tried to create, so I guess that's a good thing?

I've just zipped an obj file and original SoM bmp.. But either the forum now hates me, or it simply doesn't work, cause I can't upload said zip.

Thanks for the help

Watch Vlad's tutoral on Zbrush at http://www.shiny-life.com/2008/02/12/video-creating-sculpted-prims-with-zbrush-3/

The exporter for Zbrush needs an exact .obj configuration in order to work. Sculpties are a beast all on their own. What you're doing might seem like an easy way to go, but there are more effective ways to make textured sculties. Tried and true ways. Send me those files to the addy I gave you and I'll take one more shot.

Blender seems the weapon of choice from what I can tell, and I get the feeling anyone capable of using that has far too much to do in the real world perorming brain surgery or designing rockets! After far too many hours getting lost in tiny texted menus I simply couldn't face it anymore.

It's so immensely frustrating that SoM can do just about anything I might ever want in terms of shape, but is apparently so impossible to ever do much of use with that shape unless I want one block of a single colour over it I apprecaite more creative skilled people would need more than it can do, but if not for this texturing issue it's as much as I'd ever need!

I guess I'll have to either stick with multiprim slightly rough edged ideas, or disappear into a dark room full of 3d tutorials for a few months if I want to ever get anywhere.

Oh well, was worth a try, and thank you again for all your help