Sculpty build optimiser

One of the things I heard being thrown around a lot in regards to sculpties is how it creates a rift in builders; as only those with experience using mainstream 3d programs can really create them. I myself am finding it a struggle to learn due to the over-complexity and down-right backwardness of every single 3d app I've tried yet. They're just so incredibly hard to use and pointlessly complex, considering how much most of them cost it gets really ridiculous. Hell, it's why I liked SL so much in the first place! I could just open it up and BUILD, being able to show people and interact was a bonus

But it occurs to me, most of the things I'd like to turn into sculpties are things I've ALREADY made! Things like prim-avatar parts such as feet, head-shapes etc that could be done in a single sculpty opposed to 6 or 7 or more.

So where am I going with this? Well; LL have already released a sculpty exporter for Maya, why not make one that lets us turn PRIMS into sculpty textures? The idea is simple, you select an object you want to create a sculpt map from, it pops up a dialogue-box which will give you a few options (sample-size, smoothing and such) and gives you a preview of the end-result so you can tell if your sculpty will look the same or not.

And bam! You've got yourself a universally accessible sculpty tool that lets you work with what we already have; Second Life! What's more, it allows every-day users to take an insanely complex prim-build and turn it into a light-weight sculpty build that looks just as good. I recently developed an all-prim avatar that I think looks pretty good, but it's heavy on the primitives. While not THAT big a performance hog, if several people were wearing variations in the same scene it would start to take a toll. But it's made up of so many different prims that could be done easily with sculpties that I could trim it down to 3 or 4 on most attachments, not to mention significantly improve the script performance by just changing a sculpt texture instead of moving or re-colouring however many pieces.

I'll post this to the JIRA as soon as I have my own internet connection where I am, currently stuck on near dial-up speeds =(

I've seen that a resident was working on something along these lines. They use scripted prims as the nodes of the sculpt mesh and these nodes shrink-wrap the object/linkset. With the data you export it to an external sever and generate a sculpt texture which is ready to be downloaded then uploaded to SL.

I'll post here when I find the corresponding thread.
Edit: found it: /8/27/189277/1.html

i have had similar thoughts. Certainly, a built in would be great.

I have imagined a sort of random-jiggling-hillclimb-genetic-evolutionary approach.


First, you need to define a function, FIT, that measures how good your mesh is. It needs more vertices where the object has variation, and only a few where it is flat. This function shoulk evaluate the current mesh, and return a value between Perfect and Horrible (0,infinity)

Start with a grid of the proper topology that completely surrounds a multi-object build and compute FIT. Then, according to some heuristic, move some vertices a little and see if FIT improves.

You cold also start with a mesh inside the object (like a black hole) and have FIT combine the two meshes into one evaluation function.

i know there is a huge literature on this kind of search.

To be most generic, this could be made to work on any .obj file, I think.

As someone else has mentioned, there's already several in-world solutions of some kind, and there's been talk, I believe, about putting what I call a "laser-scanner" into the client. This allows you to create a 3D shell of an object as shown in the viewer, and use math similar to what is used to create 3D models in real life from those sci-fi-like laser scanning modelers, then convert the result into a sculpty-map to reimport into Second Life.

Actually I found a JIRA issue already posted by Qarl Linden that sounds like just what I want:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1452

I would like it if I could just "think hard" and a finished product appeared before me.
I know it can be done, I saw it on TV. Bewitched or something like that.
sorry!