Using a render to make a sculpt map

Can someone show how this texture is made?

I ran across an article about using a render to make a sculpt map for a build. The article mentioned making a texture which, that gives a model, color based on its position along each of the three axes: red from 0 where X was -0.5, through 255 where X was +0.5; Green from 0 to 255 along the Z axis, bounded from -0.5 to +0.5; and blue from 0-255 along the Y axis.

I found this at http://johannahyacinth.blogspot.com/2007/05/sculpted-prims-with-pov-ray.html

Sculpt creation has moved on a lot since then. As the author notes: "POV-Ray is nowhere near the best choice for this sort of thing. It's just a renderer - you have to do all your modeling in another application," of which they will make the maps too.
You might want to see this page for a list of other applications to use in making sculpts.

/8/8d/196863/1.html

You're right, but there's no converter or exporter for SketchUp to make sculpt maps

Can Sketchup even create sculpty-compatible geometry in the first place? It's been a long time since I've looked at the program, but last time I did, it was pretty much a one-trick-pony, based entirely upon extrusion modeling. Unless they've radically changed things, the origami style modeling required for sculpties would be well outside Sketchup's capabilities.

This is what happens when someone jumps in the middle of a thread and makes a response without reading the first post. If someone can tell how to to make the texture like I asked for in the first post we can find out. Someone found out 2 years ago how to make the a sculpt map by rendering an object. Saying the origami style modeling required for sculpties would be well outside Sketchup's capabilities is as relevant as the cost of beans in Florida.

If you can use a renderer to make the sculpt map, it makes the modeling software used irrelevant. The only relevant questions are: 1. can the renderer read the model file to render it into a sculpty map?; 2. can you set up lighiting and a reflective surface in the renderer, as described in the article?; 3. can you set the model to show up in reflections but be invisible to camera, in the renderer; and the MOST important 4, does this work?

But first I'd like to know how to make the texture that I first asked for.

Let's see, should I respond in kind, and say your response is what happens when someone doesn't consider all the facts, and doesn't very carefully read the article that he himself linked? No, I don't think that would be useful. I'd much rather discuss the actual facts of the topic at hand.

Believe me, I understand what it is you're trying to do. That's why I asked the question I asked.

The fact is the kind of rendering you're talking about is unlikely to work if the UV'ing of the geometry you're trying to sample is not sculpty-compatible in the first place. This stuff doesn't run on magic. Just because you might be able to get a renderer to convert sampled surface point distances from center into RGB data does not in itself mean you'll end up with a sculpt map that works.

Surrounding the object with a reflective sphere to "fake it", as the author of that article put it, was clever, but it didn't necessarily negate the need for the geometry of the model to be sculpty-compatible in the first place.


In any case, no, I don't know how to make the kind of texture you asked about, or do anything at all, with POV-Ray. I've never used that renderer. But whether I do or I don't has no bearing on whether or not I can still raise questions about other aspects of the process you're trying to use. Remember, when you come to a public forum, the discussion doesn't belong to just you, even if you're the one who started the thread.

I understand you're maybe a little frustrated because neither of the two responses you've gotten thus far have directly answered the question you asked. But that doesn't make it right for you to jump down anyone's throat for asking questions that might be important to others reading the thread, whether you personally see the importance or not.

Be prepared to play nice with the other children, or don't come to the sandbox. It's that simple.

The purpose of the thread was to find out how the texture was done. To draw a conclusion from just a simple request about the texture; and to even suggest such as not considering every fact and a failure to very carefully read the article goes way beyond a presumption of facts.

Until I have the the texture, I'm not trying to do anything. That's why I asked about how the texture was made. The author infers that there are problems with non-convex shapes. And the article only mentions that only two shapes were rendered.

The first step would be to recreate the renderer's light, reflective, and model settings as described in the article. The next steps, referred in some circles as scientific method, would be to have enough controls (not just 2 different renders) and vary the aforementioned renderer settings to have enough information to draw an informed conclusion from.

I was taught to read an abstract (translate that in this case as an blog article) as having enough information to know what they did, but details of what they did are skimmed over.

I'm not in the least frusterated, I was brought up to get right to the point. It's funny by how you made your post then continuously editing it, fine tuning it to barb me. When you edited your post to suggest that I, in your own words, jump down anyone's throat, I am wondering with this last edit of yours if this has has become a personal issue or obsession with you. From my perspective, your last edit looks like a tactic used by Patriotic Nigras, called trolling just to get someone upset. By the way saying I jump down anyone's throat isn't playing nice with the other children, if you understand what I mean.

I have considered every fact needed to get to the point to start, as i originally posted: How the texture was made?

Duplicate post. Unable to delete. Read the next one.

Understood. That was never in question. But again, that doesn't mean we can't discuss other aspects of what will be involved to make the proposed idea work.

Your insistence upon trying to stifle all discussion but the one specific question you're interested in is absolutely NOT within the spirit of what public forums are for. Hopefully someone will come along who can answer the question you asked. But you can't expect that that's the ONLY thing that will be discussed in the thread. There are lots of related questions that people may bring up, including the one that I asked. If you want the discussion to be about you and only you, then have it in private. Perhaps E-mail the author of that article. Otherwise, expect that people will talk about other things of relevance, IN ADDITION to just what you asked.



Exactly. The same applies your own wild imagining that I had not read your original post. That was my point. Don't dish it out if you don't want it to come back to you.




So in other words, you'd rather spend time discovering on your own what doesn't work, rather than even entertain the cautions of those who have been doing this for years? That's your prerogative, of course. But it seems a little silly to me.




The problem with narrowly focusing on getting right to the point is you can often miss seeing other related points that are just as important. In this case, you appeared to have missed a rather large one, so I thought it only pertinent to ask about it. I'm sorry you felt the need to make such an issue out of that.




First of all, I often edit a post shortly after submitting it. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. But where are you getting the part about "continuously editing it, fine tuning it to barb"? That's just ridiculous. How would you even know how many times I edited in the first place, let alone what was going through my mind when I did? All the forum lists is the last edit, not the full log, and I'd really like to believe you're not pretentious enough to claim you know what I was thinking better than I do.

If you really must know, as I recall, I edited it once to rearrage a few things that I thought could have been said more clearly, in order to make the composition read better, and then maybe a second time to fix some typos. It's possible it was more than that, but I can't say for certain. I write an awful lot of posts.

Now, you can call that "barbing" if it really makes you feel better, but I can assure you that's not what was on my mind.

Since you're so on the ball, you may notice I've also edited this post a couple of times now. It was the same process, for the same reasons. Clarity of writing first, typos second. "Barbing", "trolling", or whatever else you may wish to call it is not part of the equation. That's simply not how my mind works.

It's interesting to note that it might be how yours does though, as typically the motivations people assumptively attribute to others are the ones they themselves tend to have. A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that everyone else thinks the way they do. But clearly you and I think in very different ways.


As for the comment about your having jumped down my throat, well, that's exactly what you did. Here are the facts, which are plain to see. I asked a simple question about the capabilities of a piece of software, and then rather than respond to the question, or simply ignore it if you felt it irrelevant, you decided to accuse me of not having read your first post. That was rude, childish, ignorant, and completely uncalled for. Of course I read the thing. I would never have responded if I hadn't.




I would submit that how the texture is made is NOT the point to start. Where to start is by making geometry that can be compatible with sculpties. If you're not doing that, then the texture won't do anything for you.

The answer is on the original page you linked to. The code used to generate the texture is on that page.

http://library.thinkquest.org/3285/tutorial/simple.html has a simple introduction to the povray language that the code was written in.

Domino, thank you for pointing it out, I wouldn't have recognize it and I definitely do appreciate it.

Kornscope, I do appreciate your not perceiving "but there's no converter or exporter for SketchUp to make sculpt maps" as a personal challenge and not flooding this thread as a vendetta. I've seen this occur too many times in mmorpg forums. by teens and adults in their mid-thirties that are still in their teen phase.

All this started over a simple request for how a texture was made. When I checked the thread had 78 views, my guess most belong to third parties and the thread is non-verbal. After reading a particular portion of you-know-who's last post, I double checked to make sure that I didn't make a substantive statement about their character. Certain keywords give some insight about people, because you never know what profession a person had in real life.

You-know-who I cant' advise you what you have done with just one paragraph in your last post alone because there's no client relationship. I have a boilerplate letter always sent out each time I decided not to accept a client, paraphrased it says "you need to seek the advice of counsel." Cyberslapp, and the the phrases "world of warcraft precedent" and "second life precedent" are entertaining thoughts considering thats what suits are made of. I'm being nice; you-know-who please don't reply to give me ammunition; but I do love pro-ser's, ignorance of the law, and defaults (synonyms for money).

And yes, I'm tenacious like a pit bull, thats why I wanted to know how the texture was made.

I'm glad you got the answer you were looking for, Josef.

Now, as for everything else you said:




Nice of you to thank someone for not doing the wrong thing. If only you could have applied that same behavior yourself, we could have avoided this argument altogether.




Yes, and then it took another turn when you decided to be snotty about the additional question that I asked, by accusing me of "not reading", when what you could have and should have done was either answered the question politely, or ignored it.

Surely you didn't expect that opening that particular box wouldn't result in an argument. Seriously, did you honestly expect my reply would be, "Oh wow, you're right. I totally didn't see that this thread had an original post at its beginning. It's so weird, because I was just thinking to myself, 'Every other post has a start. Why doesn't this one?' Thanks so much for pointing out the bleeding obvious."? Come on.




I'm not sure what "the thread is non-verbal" might mean, or how you're defining "third parties" in this context. Those 78 views (now 108, as of this writing) represent unique individual forum users who have clicked on this thread. Out of that, 5 people have replied. That's a fairly typical ratio. This forum, like all others, has far more readers than writers.




You can say my name, Josef. It's OK. You won't melt. Go on. C-H-O-S-E-N. You can do it. You also can write directly to me instead of about me, just like any normal polite person would.




If you want to know what I do for a living, all you have to do is ask. You don't have to put on your X-ray specs and your magic decoder ring to try to conjure it from between the lines of my writing.

The answer is I make models, textures, and other assets for virtual worlds, video games, film & TV, etc. I also do graphic design for print ads and commercial packaging. Plus, I do some audio production as well, from time. Oh, and I'm currently exploring opening a small manufacturing business on the side, but I haven't fully committed to that yet. My current career is actually my second. I ran a sales & marketing business for 12 years before I gave it all up to be come a "starving artist", only I'm not starving, so I guess I didn't do it right. None of this is secret in any way. Is there anything else you'd like to know?

Or were you referring to what YOU do for a living, not me? Your next paragraph would seem to support that theory.




So, in other words, you're pretending to be a lawyer today, and you're making a veiled threat at suing me for whatever I might have said to bother your sensibilities in whatever was the "one paragraph" to which you refer. Thank you. That's the best laugh I've had all day.

If you truly believe you have a case for a law suit because you and I disagreed over what was and wasn't relevant to the subject of a forum thread, or even because one or both of us may have used language the other didn't like, then I can only think of two things to say in response. First, I'd like to ask precisely which crackerjack box you got your degree out of. Second, you if really are what you claim to be, then I think you know full well that such an endeavor would be nothing more than an amusing waste of time at best. If that's where you see fit to invest your time and money, the by all means, don't let me stop you. Go for it, man.

In any case, for whatever it's worth, I didn't make any substantive claims about your character either. I had some words to say about your behavior, and still do, but that's not the same thing, as I'm sure you well know.




I can't imagine what tenacity might have to do with wanting to know how to make something. I would have thought words like curiosity, creativity, artistic desire, etc., would be better motivators than simply wanting to express your own stubbornness or dominance over a situation. But if that's who you are, that's who you are. Who am I to judge? More power to you. Do what makes you happy.

So...... Is it Friday afternoon, or a full moon, or Halloween ..... ? Geez, guys, relax and enjoy the weekend.

It's not often Chosen decides to chastise someone, but given the OP's opening remark in response to Chosen....he gets a free pass. Besides, how often is Chosen off the mark, and if he is, he usually says he is in a follow up post or edit.

Chosen thank you for brief statement that you recognized I got the information I was looking for regarding the texture. But you opened the door in the remainder of your last post.

you said

"You can say my name, Josef. It's OK. You won't melt. Go on. C-H-O-S-E-N. You can do it. You also can write directly to me instead of about me, just like any normal polite person would."

Chosen HEHEHEH. Chosen my derriere it is. I know you didn't lookup cyberslapp because if you did, you know that I'd be addressing you by your real name. I was giving you a trail of bread crumbs that you totally ignored. Theres a saying send the kid to school and he chews the covers off the books. (If you aren't certain, check with LL they can tell you all about cyberslapp, more than you wished you never heard)

you said

"So, in other words, you're pretending to be a lawyer today, and you're making a veiled threat at suing me for whatever I might have said to bother your sensibilities in whatever was the "one paragraph" to which you refer. Thank you. That's the best laugh I've had all day."

You're trying to put words in my mouth, I never said anything about suing you. But lets look at what you said next

"If you truly believe you have a case for a law suit because you and I disagreed over what was and wasn't relevant to the subject of a forum thread, or even because one or both of us may have used language the other didn't like, then I can only think of two things to say in response. First, I'd like to ask precisely which crackerjack box you got your degree out of. Second, you if really are what you claim to be, then I think you know full well that such an endeavor would be nothing more than an amusing waste of time at best. If that's where you see fit to invest your time and money, the by all means, don't let me stop you. Go for it, man."

Like cyberslapp, you didn't even look up the two phrases "second life precedent" and "world of warcraft precedent" You being the professional in the graphics field, I'm certain that you kept up on intellectual rights. You remember that where someone was being sued over selling copies in second life a few years ago, they used copybot. the case was filed in New York, they lost. very important case because between that and the warcraft case it set the stage for the next one. well get back to that in a few minutes.

Two-thirds of what goes on are rescheduled hearings, and travel outweighs attorney fees, especially if you have to travel clear across the country, sort of ties back to the suit filed in New York when you're thinking you have to do it in California. I have a friend of mine that had several cases involving a real obnoxious dummy for an opposing party who lived out of state. To take the pound of flesh he served a subpoena on the poor sapp through his attorney for the first hearing. They guy didn't show up, just his attorney. My friend had a motion for enforcement prepared in advance of the hearing for dummy failing to appear under order. Theres a few states that have a rule of procedure to put it briefly you serve the client when you serve their attorney with subpoena. Anyway my friend was regularly filing motions, serving subpoenas and scheduling scheduling hearings every few weeks. After the enforcement episode the guy would religiously show up and there was a motion and order granting continuance at every scheduled hearing over the next few months. You don't want to guess how much he spent. He lost his job and filed bankruptcy because he was spending so much time out of state in court. A few months later he was evicted and ending up in a night shelter. Attorneys aren't really nice because its all about manipulating the system and how far they want to push the envelope.

The next thing you said, I can see it coming before you even said it

"In any case, for whatever it's worth, I didn't make any substantive claims about your character either. I had some words to say about your behavior, and still do, but that's not the same thing, as I'm sure you well know."

To attorneys it don't matter its the same thing, you might call it nitpicking, but words and their definitions are everything.

Let's get back to what I was talking earlier about the second life and world of warcraft precedents. Anyway the second life case established what ever happens in a computer environment is as if it occurred in real life. These two cases were used to stairstep into a suit involving statements made in a yahoo forum. The first thing that happened was that yahoo got hit with a subpoena pursuant to cyberslap. They notified the person being sued that they were under an order to appear with every computer record involving him reduced to human readable form, which they surrendered. The guy's life became a goldfish bowl, you might say he got yanked by his cyber collar into real life.

Lets look at part of what you said earlier

"I think you know full well that such an endeavor would be nothing more than an amusing waste of time at best."

I was paid very well for making mountains out of molehills. I always made sure that there was enough truth just in case to eliminate the risk for sanctions for a frivolous filing, especially when the case was organized in a way where they had to spend money. I was also known for telegraphing them a lot of information, so they thought they knew everything except for the one little important thing (what you might call a sucker punch). I'm sure that you know people that are newly retired, for them time is no longer a precious commodity and there is no such thing as a waste of time.

What's even more amusing is in real life to see someone rush to their door, lock it, flip over the sign 'closed for business', then pull down the shades before the person ever gets to the door just to minimize exposure after their ordeal with them.

Chosen or whatever your name is, I'm sure that you're smart and can begin to piece together everything even though you're viewing the tip of the iceberg.

Let me see if I got this right...

First you ask about making a texture for a sculpty and link an ancient pov experiment somebody did.. which actually had the info you were asking about in the first place right in it, as was pointed out to you in a later message.

Then, it was pointed out to you that that is pretty obsolete and links you a list of things to choose from that are being used for sculpty generation. To which you reply with a statement implying you use SketchUp, and lamenting the fact there is no exporter for it.

Chosen then replies to your post asking if SketchUp had been changed to enable it to make sculpty compatible geometry to begin with, as it did not the last time he tried it.

*You* then cast the first stone, insinuating that Chosen blundered in blindly in the middle of a thread in which he had not fully read. This is your first fatal mistake. Anyone that has spent more than a couple of hours reading this forum is fully aware of his skills and fondness for instruction and learning new things. He has not, as you implied, taken this as any personal vendetta to flood your thread. This is just another day in the forum. He is a very verbose persona, in case you might have missed his post count.

FYI, if my memory serves correctly, it was Chosen who found a way to use Max to render sculpt maps in a similar way described in the article you linked (using spherical projection through an existing mesh), when sculpties were brand new. I'm pretty sure he knows as much about the limits and abilities of sculpty creation using more software packages available than anyone else in this forum. It also seems to me that he was hinting that maybe you were trying to run with it when indeed the prudent course of action would be to learn to walk first. That you didn't reconize that the very thing you were asking for was in something that you linked in the original post.. well I would think that should tell you that you just might be a bit out of your depth. Not to mention way out of line especially considering you went off in a huff about "a failure to very carefully read the article" which obviously you yourself failed on. That you started slinging mud at one who was trying to help is not helping your case in any way.

If you still want to argue about things you don't yet grasp, such as the constraints meshes must follow in order for that technique to produce a sculpty that doesn't look like the dogs breakfast, by all means feel free to do so. Just don't expect to produce anything worthwhile until you actually know at least a little bit about the basics you're currently choosing to ignore because you're looking for an "easy button".

ps.. the PN did not invent, nor make famous, trolling. Why you would invoke their name boggles me.

pps.. you're making veiled threats about suing someone because you didn't like what he said after *YOU* trolled *HIM* on the interwebz?!? Really? ROFL!!

Haldir

I asked about a texture that was used to make a texture for a sculpty in a blog post where they made a sculpty from POV-Ray. I don't know anything about POV-Ray much less its programming language. I see the words made a texture, had the author had wrote they coded a texture that would have been enough to tip me off.



Unfortunately I'm not able to read the forum online and wasn't aware of it, not by choice. It would be the equivalent of making a person with attention deficit disorder sit absolutely still for over an hour. When I access the forum, I run a search, and look for specific key words, for what I'm needing then I'm done. Forum threads get bloated making related posts in a thread hard to follow, combine that with that avoiding pdf and other electronic media as a substitute for a physical book. I grew up when there were no computers and never adapted to reading online. I have to print it out to read offline.







Sounds like a case of miscommunication. Had he been verbose and touched on the 3D Max work before asking the question I would have seen that question in a completely different context. Keep in mind age plays a role how you communicate. If my memory is correct there was a series of events in second life that dealt with that particular topic.



Who was arguing? I think all that was said was that if the renderer was able to map the coordinates, it would make the object making the texture irrelevant; but it was qualified by needing to test it first; then that was it up to your post.

The rest I wont bother addressing, for the reasons i mentioned above about thread bloating (makes it hard for someone my age to read) and this being in a texture forum. I looked through the forum index page, looks like there's no appropriate forum. Maybe they could set up an intergenerational/communication forum. On the other hand that's a bad idea, it would open the door to a who knows what. I found out about all the policies and griping that a thing called zandria created (and that was just over something not politically correct, could you imagine headaches we'd have if someone ever played the age card)