Sculpties with 3DMax - I'm totally stuck

Greetings everyone!

== Personal opinion about sculpts ==
First i wanna say, that implementing sculpties was a very cool idea, but creating them is such a pain in the ass!
I thought it should be no problem for me, as i worked with maya and 3d studio a lot before. But everytime i think "yeah you got it!", it doesn't work for me the next time.

LL should have provided good export tools _before_ they unleash such a feature on the masses! That's my opinion.
It's more frustrating than anything; there's no official tutorial and the user tuts are widely spread over the forums, which doesn't make it easier to get a clue how it _really_ works.
Most times they say "click here, press button X then click there" without explaining what's really going on. In my case, if i want to create something different than explained in the tuts, i'm stuck.
And finally, starting with a sphere or a cylinder isn't an option to me at all. I don't want to recreate objects from scratch, i want to use my already created objects. That's my main problem, as almost every user tutorial requires you to start with a sphere or cylinder.
I'm really frustrated.


== Problem below ==
See, i picked up the idea of Chip Midnight, who projected an object onto a sphere to create the sculptie map and this awesome head you can see on one of the sculptie pages floating around.
The funny thing is, i was able to create such a head too, looks really cool. (see attachment "Snapshot_013.jpg"
But when i try to create something "easier", it doesn't work at all and i have no idea why.

Besides other things, i wanted to create a simple gas bottle with a simple valve. It consists of 6 objects that are attached together. (see attachment gasbottle.jpg)
No matter what i try, i can't get a sculpt map out of it.
I have no clue, if it's because the bottle consist of multiple objects, although they are attached together.
I use exactly the same procedure as i used when creating the head, but i don't get a useable result.

Maybe anyone has an idea, what is going wrong, if it's possible at all to create that bottle with a valve or if my approach is simply wrong. I just don't see, why i can create such a complex thing like a skull, but fail to create a simple bottle.
Although it's possible in this case to start with a cylinder, i'd like to "just export" what i've got instead of remodeling a cylinder, as this won't work for further, more complex, projects at all.

Thanks for any suggestion!!

Regards,
Speon

What does the result look like in SL? Looking at what you want I don't think a projection method will dedicate enough vertices to the top. To my understanding there's also a limit on how a projection method can project things and the top of your creation might be pushing the limit.

Note that your creation is not to complex to convert to vertices. Although given the 8-bit precision you also have an issue on the relative size. It's hard to make the top nice if you've maybe only a few bits left in to map the heightdetail of the top (other axis are fine because you could make a "fat" version and rescale).

I never quite mastered Chip's projection method. Like you, I couldn't get consistent results--and so I abandoned it temporarily to work on another method.

For example, I made a flat plane, applied noise to it, and shelled it. This gave me something approximating a piece of flat terrain. The shape of it was roughly rectangular: larger in x,y than in z. When I applied the projection method to it, I couldn't even get a full sculptmap. It looked kind of like it was drawing a cross section rather than the whole thing.

I had better luck with objects that were roughly similar in all three dimensions, i.e., more cube-like or spherical in nature.

Another thought I had was that probably the projection method doesn't work well where a complex shape has been extruded out of the mesh. I think it works best with relatively smooth convex surfaces.

But I never got to the point of having any real knowledge about it.

Just to make this more clear.

Two images here.

1) Shows the cage around my terrain piece. I've turned on point-to-point so that you can see the rays that the projection would create. Most of the rays miss the detail of the piece. I could rearrange the cage, but I don't think that would help much. I might be able to deform the sphere so that it more closely matches the shape of the terrain. But seems like I tried that and it didn't really work.

2) Shows the resulting sculptmap.

I have not tried the projection method, but I'm pretty sure I understand it.

If you do a spherical prection, the valve will have lots of UV over-lap and that's not good. I'm pretty sure this will happen no matter how you orient the projection.

If you do a cylindrical projection, the horizontal planes will have over-lap. Again, not good.

The only thing I can think of is to perturb the model, get the projection, then un-perturb the model to get the map.

I tried the projection method on a plane like you mentioned. I get the same results. The best i could get was a half sculp map with the terrain, which doesn't work. I tried some mirroring of the terrain but this produced weird results.
I guess you're right, that the projection method only works on shapes that are almost similar in all dimensions. It works for my head, it works for a simple cube but it doesn't work for a plane or my gas bottle. At least it doesn't work for me.

Remodeling the projection sphere won't work, as it has to stay spherical (i think) - tried that already too.

Guess i have to find another method instead of projecting. Damn, this worked so cool for the head.

if only I knew how to program these kind of thing....:/

I have this idea in my head that it wold be more or less like this, the vertexes reppel each other but at the same time they try to keep their position in relation to the other vertexes,, whenever a lop on the topography was forcing some faces to overlap after a little bit the part "above" would tear and allow all the vertexes to settle in place, at least in my head, this would distribute the vertexes of your model reasonably homogenouslly over the area the texture would be, and having that done, have also somthing that would distort the original texture image to match the new position of the vertexes on the uv plane (or whateber that is called)