Sculptie Exporter for AC3D, Ready to Go!

Thanks! That's wonderful! I'll watch for the plug-in. The Wings thought was just as a work around. If the Mac exporter for AC3D is ready, and I never feel the need to try to open Wings again, I will be a happy gal.

Yes. That's what makes the AC3D plugin so great to use. One little trick I use is to work in AC3D till I'm pretty satisfied with my 3D model, then save it as a sculpty from AC3D (.tga format). I then open the sculpty in a paint program and save it in a .bmp format. You can import this into Wings3D using Omei's plugin (I am using an older version not the most upto date). If your sculpty is perfect you will see the geometry again in Wings3D. If its not perfect ... get some minor "sculpty vomit"

I will have some examples by the weekend.

Will there be any improvements to the "sculpty extrude" function? I find it a bit of a pain to do one face at a time I tried multiple faces but only one face ends up being capped. And doing it one face at a time, if the faces are adjacent, you get lots of hidden surfaces.

gryff

gryff... I read this to Zora and you should have seen the gears turning... She says if you use the regular extrude and remap the area, you can do it that way. Or combine the surfaces and "make hole" then create a new surface from the edges and pull the vertices forward. It's something she would like to tackle in the future but doesn't know when she'll have the time to deal with it because it's a little bit tricky.

I haven't seen a Mac exporter go up yet.... I assumed it would be on the AC3D forum plugins page? Am I missing something? Thanks.

Betty: Sure when it is ready it will go up there. As my guess the Windows one too. I gather the AC3D people are testing them.

Zee: Thanks for passing on the two suggestions from Zora. Trying to imagine those gears grinding

I am playing around with the plugin - to see what is easily feasible and what is not. Kind of fun


gryff

As I said, I'm experimenting. Imaged attached is latest effort - a torus.

Its not possible to create torii directly in AC3D but i will post a file with some different starting torri shapes

The sculpty has to be set to torus using a script. I used the one by hypatia Callisto:

default {

state_entry() {

llSetTimerEvent(30);

}

timer() {

llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_TYPE, PRIM_TYPE_SCULPT, "uuid", PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_TORUS]);

}
}

where the uuid value is obtained by clicking on the texture in your inventory and choosing "Copy uuid"

Create a sphere add the script, wait a few seconds and voila

gryff




gryff

Thanks. Yes... I found it. I think I misunderstood and thought it was going up Monday morning.

The scultpy prim exporter is now official and available directly from Inivis. Get it now at:
http://www.inivis.com/secondlife.html

*Many* thanks to Andy and the fine folks at Inivis for their help!

Notable changes in this release:

- Support for Mac and Linux platforms as well as Windows
- No longer need to commit surfaces before exporting
- Minor fix to path naming convention on multi-part objects
- Improved undo support for sculpty functions

Nice! Thanks for the script, too. This gives me some ideas.

Is that gears I hear grinding ????

gryff

I found some 10-n-1 oil before any real damage was done ;p

As AC3D does not have a torus basic object, I have created a number of tori for people to play with.

ABOUT THE FILES
They are in the AC3D .ac format.
Each file has a diameter of 1 unit across.
Each torus has 16 vertical divisions and 16 horizontal ones.
They are centered at the 0, 0, 0 position.
Each file ends in a number eg _50.
This means that the hole size is 50% of the outside diameter.
The hole is viewed looking down on the torus (Y axis in AC3D).
No subdivisions have been set.

The texture map fits zora's criterion of of a perfect uv space (I believe!)

The zip file contains 7 tori with different size holes

Let me know if you have problems ... but you should one need to unzip to directory of your choice and then play away.


gryff

Thank you for this post! I've experimented alot with 3DS Max, but this made things easier when it comes to sculpties.

A question; does anyone know if it's possible to change the included baseprim, "subdcubes" parameters?

What kind of parameters do you want to change? If you're looking for more surfaces to work with, try the "Surface > Divide" tool.

Just to be clear, since I know some of the other exporters don't work this way: You can use *any* geometry you like as long as it's textured correctly. You can have as few or as many faces as you need. It's perfectly safe to slice, divide, combine, and do whatever else you like, even if it changes the surface count... all that matters is the texture. In fact, you can even start with a pre-existing model of your own and apply your own uvs if you desire.

The starting geometry is simply a convenience because creating a perfect uv map can be tricky... although, with the scripts Gryff posted, even that is suddenly much easier.

I'm having a problem I hope someone can help. I've worked with plugins for photoshop all my life so I know how to install them. I'm putting this exporter plugin for windows into the proper folder for AC3d but when I go to look for it in help>about plug-ing, or I try to export it, that plugin is NOT listed for some reason. I don't get. I've tried it a milion times. It's so frustrating because this step should not be an issue for me. In fact if I install any other plugin for ac3d it appears fine. I downloaded the one from the link in the first post about 20 times and keep installing it and starting up ac3d and it's not listed but the plugin is in the folder for sure.

Can anyone please please PLEASE help me out here?

Carl most plugins would show up under tools menu ...
this one does not
to know it is installed
look under File-->Export--> should see an export option as sculpty

gryff

Any chance I can get the exporter to work in AC3D 6.1? I don't really feel like paying for an upgrade at this point in time.

Tharkis, if you use the plugin that is downloadable from Zora's website it will work in 6.1. Though if you have 6.1 ... I think 6 upgrades are free ( I maybe wrong of course!)

gryff

My first piece made from more than one sculpty (3 in this case 2 spheres and a torus).

Florenze, the top catwalk model at "Salon de Gryff" is modeling a necklace

It took less time to make the sculpties than it did the chain.

gryff

That's gorgeous, Gryff. Here's my second ... the sleeve poofs on this 1940's dress. The first were the ends to a tied scarf. Still lovin' AC3D.

Nicely done Betty ... dress texturing is very nice.

Here is my latest effort .... testing the cylinder based sculpty. Inset pic is from a distance to check LOD effects.

Actually in this pic, I'm wearing sculpties made from a sphere, cylinder and torus ... just the cube one to test now!

Glad you enjoying AC3D ... I've used it for years. When it comes to simple low polygon modeling nothing is faster ... and the learning curve is pretty shallow. And over the years I've tried a lot of 3d software.

Gryff

Zora has put up on her site, ready to use in AC3D, templates for the
SL avatar form.

http://www.ccccybernetics.com/downloads/avatar-templates.zip

My latest effort .... Grandpa Jones !!!

Three sculpty prims with distance shot in corner.

gryff

lovely piece gryff!

As ppl may have noticed old grandpa had no ears ... so I set about making a set of ears as separate sculpties.

I modeled one ear (the left one from a sphere) ... no problem. Thinking I was clever, to get a right ear, I made a copy of it then "flipped" it along the X-axis. Results in image ac3d_2ears_001.jpg.

Immediately you will notice that the flipped one looks wrong ... in fact its almost like you are looking at it from the inside .... the normals are facing the wrong way. So, I flipped the normals ... image ac3d_2ears_002.jpg. It looked fine.

So I exported the two sculpty textures (original left ear and right ear made by flipping) as .tga files and uploaded them to SL.

The original left ear forms a sculpty object fine ... but the right ear did not ... it showed up inverted again. I thrashed around trying various things ... repeating the procedure, using the mirror function instead ... still the inside out right ear sculpty.

Finally I looked at the sculpy textures that were exported from ac3d in a 2d graphics program and just on the odd chance ... I flipped the sculpty texture of the right ear, horizontally in the graphics program and uploaded it. And it worked. (Image sculpty_2ears_001.jpg)

I don't know why this flipping in a graphics program is necessary ... I sent Zora my geometry files, as she requested them, so she could look at them .... but never heard back.

Anyway, to all users of AC3D be aware of this little problem .... and the fix.

gryff