Texturing a Sculptie in SL

Ok.. I'm not a pro at sculpting or building but I have tried my hand at it a couple of times. Anyways, I have an extremely simple question to ask and I can't find the answer anywhere.

How do you 'align' the texture (once both sculptie and texture is imported into SL) on a sculptie?

Every time I've tried texturing my sculpts, the texture is always 'rotated' in some way. I've tried to fix the texture manually, but of course it ends in an epic fail.

+++Programs used: Gimp
Blender

Any advice will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks- Laita

Textures on sculpts have the same UV Map as the sculpt itself. Which means that they follow the flow of the sculpt itself.

You can rotate the texture, flip it, change the repeats and so on. But it will still be applied according to that underlying UV Map. So if the sculpt gets its shape by going in strange and wonderful directions, the texture will also be a bit.. ummm.. odd.

The best thing to do is to make the texture for that specific map, in one of the many 3D painting programs out there. Of course, for that to work, you have to be able to get the sculpt out of SL, and into one of the programs, probably as an .obj file.

To do that, you'll need to either have made the sculpt in a 3D program to start with, or you'll need to have full perms on the sculpt (so you can export it) and then you'll need something that will read the sculpt.

I know that Wings3D will read them, and it's free. You can find it at http://www.wings3d.com/

You'll need to translate the sculpt from .tga (which you'll get when you save from SL) to .bmp; but any graphics program should be able to do that for you.

Then just import the .bmp (Import > Second Life Sculpts (.bmp)) and export the .obj (Export Wavefront (.obj)) Or whatever format you prefer.

There's more information about Wings3D, including some stuff about making textures for Sculpts, at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Wings_3D

There's also stuff about texturing sculpts at http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2007/06/day-279-sculpted-prims-tutorial-part-4.html She's using the kind of methods we all had to use before there were paint on 3D programs. They're not as easy, but they do work, and you can use your normal 2D paint program for the texturing.

Hope this helps!

So.. maybe I'm just texturing the UV Map wrong?

Ummm.. no, more like the placement of the polygons on the mesh that makes the sculpt sounds like it's non-intuitive. You need to find out what it's actually doing, so you know how to approach it.

The UV map for a sculpt will always be a square, with the vertices laid out in a perfectly even 64x64 point pattern. That's the way sculpts are made, and that's what all the maps look like.

However, where those polys land on the actual object, in SL, depends on how the sculpt was made. Without knowing that, it's difficult to know what the texture needs to look like.

For example, most of the textures for the sculpties I make are upside down, because I tend to build them from the ground up.

Some people make the sculpts sideways, to hide the pinching at the ends in a place that's mostly hidden.

If you are using a single sculpt to make a whole table with four legs, or a set of ten floating stars, or something like that, a good deal of the texture will be hidden in the collapsed polys.

There are lots of different ways to make the things.

You can get a better idea by putting a test texture on the sculpt, to see what the flow looks like. Does that make sense?

The technique is described in the last link on the post I made this morning.

So it's not a question of you doing it wrong; it's a question of every sculpt being unique, and textures needing to fit the sculpt in question.

Hope this helps!

a good way to make a texture designed for your sculpty is to use baked lighting like in blender or use the baked lighting generator in sculptypaint i recommend sculptypaint its much easier and does have some nice results. it can make a shadow map that you can use to actually further texture your sculpty.

ok just didnt want to make another thread, but I think this fits here.
I have sculpty texture map. Now is this what I would possibly use in PS to do my texture for the specific Sculpt in mind.
Also, say I get the sculpty map (not the sculpty texture map)downloaded to my computer, will I be able to use it in CS4 to create the texture for that? Similar to what was mentioned above?

hmm anyone anyone bumpdidy bump

You'll need to convert it to an .obj file to use in CS4. Either export it from your modeling program in that format (in addition to creating the sculptmap), or import it into a modeling program like Wings 3D (Omei Turnbill's plugin for SL supports .bmp format iirc)

ah ha
well ty
I only use for now PS. I have bought Sculpt maps from XStreet so I would have save the ones that give me a full perm Sculpt Texture to my desktop and find a program that is easy enough for me to convert then. I am starting to read Robin's Tutorial on this too. How lucky we are to have her

Not sure if this is what you were meaning, but Abu Nasu has made some nifty little plug-ins for PS which fake the baking process, and is particularly handy for sculpt texturing! It could help with where the shadows and highlights go. I'm not sure if it will work in PS4, but it does work a treat in PS3

Basically, save the sculpt map to your hard drive, open it up in photoshop, enlarge the image (256* or 512*) and play with the settings for the plug-in. You'll see how they work when you get going.

RGB Ellipsoid- probably the simpler one to understand.
http://tech-slop.serveit.org/wiki/index.php?title=RGB_Ellipsoid

RGB Theta: My fave
http://tech-slop.serveit.org/wiki/index.php?title=RGB_Theta