Slice Editor, An onGrid Sculpty Editor

I was looking over the model train set in Concinna last night and chatting with friends. Amazing btw the use of sculpted prims, really worth a gander although, keep in mind its a work in progres... Its the dream and build of James Gill, I just gave him an automated terrain mapping pod and he did the rest.

Regardless... Before I drift too far away...

We discussed making other tools for sculpted prim creation and editing. After we all broke apart due to a nice sim crash.. I got to pondering that. And as such, the Slice Editor was born. Keep in mind I have only been coding on it for a few hours. But its a good skeleton and has an api that lets it be controlled from other tools. If you can write a for loop, you can use it to spit out sculpties.

Slice editing creates a set of slices from a mesh. Each slice is one horizontal scan across the mesh. This is visualized in world as a simple stack of slices. Once rezzed up, you can manipulate the stack thru various means. Currently I have only coded for circle slices, but they could also be squares or triangles. I have seen sample code that deciphers a lot of additional prim params into usable geometries, which means they could be used as well.

The slices each are id'ed by name, as well a color gradiant. You can just grab it and move it around. Or you can group a set and move them just like any other prim editing. You can resize them on the X/Y plane... And they could be elliptical. If elliptical, you could rotate them to get even more coolio effects. This is a 3D space we are editing in, its quite easy and simple to just move the slice where you want it.

The api() gives real fun. You can talk to each slice individually, or as a group. The command syntax is simple, and kinda logoish.. I might take the time to work into Bradford Russell's LSL-Logos project into the tool.. Or just teach the turtles how... Heh... Yeah, I think I will leave that for a weekend so I can give it more love... Commands to move, resize, color, change alpha, center on X/Y orig position, reset to original pos, scale, color, die, and of course... Save.

The save process is rather rapid, as each slice reports in.

All the calculations are done in world. The only export is in an industry standard format that you could load into any editor, or convert to tga and import back into second life. So integrating with any backend would be easy enough.

There really is something to be said about editing such things in 3D with the size perspectives...

I would love to get some user experience opinions so I can polish down some of the aspects. Personally, I just write short scripts that interact with the api(), but my wife says im a nut if I think anyone else will do that... An example though is this short script which reorders each ring into cone shape...

//lsl
integer i ;
for( i=1; 1<=32; i++ ) {
llSay,( gCommandChannel, (string)i + " size down " + (string)i ) ;
}

I just toss that into a new default script in any object and run it... and the editor does the rest.

Of course you can just chat at the rings using dialog commands. All comm is handled thru the editting grid, so you simply chat to it, on its command channel. It then passes the commands along to the slices and makes sure they commit the transactions.

So, you could just say things like:

/80 45 move up 10 # moves slice 4 up 10 spaces (a space is .1 meters)
/80 64 move down 24 # moves slice 64 down 24 spaces
/80 all alpha .5 # change the alpha of all slices to .5 so you can see the nesting
/80 1 move to 16 # move slice 1 up 16 spaces
/80 6 size down 20 # size slice 6 down 20 spaces (scales the X/Y)
/80 6 id red # shows slice 6 in red, so you can find it easy.

I have played with moving the rings around by hand, easy and basic building... And a center command allows you to get anything back onto the pole axis. All the normal editor tools would work just fine.

I was pondering that once the rings are placed by a user, for a general form in lathe like manner... The next step would be to change a single ring into a series of mesh points and allow those points to be manipulated individually. This way you could bring more of the mesh to an area you needed more detail in... Ideas, lots of differing ways to interact with such tools.

If you are easily entertained, and would like to give it a spin, send me an IM. If you would like to help, or work on interaction interfaces of your own... Do get in touch. I dont mind sharing the code and helping get some functional tools into the hands of the user community.

Cheers
Anjin Meili

That is pretty cool.
I just started to mess with Rokuro and making some sculpties.
Though when it comes to scripts I am majorly intimidated especially if there is lot to remember.
Yet I am curious about what you're doing.
One thing I always wish there was was a way to remove parts of sculpties ingame so like a hack saw for hanging, dangling parts of my sculpties I don't want.
Can it delete or edit portions of the sculpted? If so what restrictions does it have?
Can I indivually texture line with something other then colors?
How do you know what command is needed per line?

Hey Anjin, do you ever sleep?

Another really intereresting tool! Sort of a digital potter's wheel. I'd love to give it a try. I will IM you in-world.

Here's an idea while reading oyur post. What if the slices had sensors in them and could change shapes based on the proximity of a 'cursor' object? You might be able to simulate some of the 3d magnet or sculpting type tools.

I don't know how many sensors are too many, tho. I am sure that there would be a point where the sensors would affect the Sim. I have laid played around with some art installations that had up to 100 short range sensors and they seemed to be ok.

Anyway, cool idea. can't wait to try it.

Hack saw for sculptys... Heh.

Well. I am working now on a method of taking a sculpted texture and visualizing it inworld as a virtual representation, made of lots o prims instead of a single sculpted prim. This would allow you to modify, change, chop of dangling bits..

But, this really is nothing more then the exercise for me. As these tools will be client embedded eventually.

Tomographic representations are the idea I was shooting for with the Slice Editor. Its the forth, err, sorry, fifth tool I have written to play with this format. I now have a set of libraries and modules that allow you to create sculpted prims from just about anything. Someone suggested I work out a method to get USGS data into SL. I think it took all of about 24 minutes and an additional 8 lines of code. Although, such rough analysis of images left me a lot of artifacts in the sculpted prim. And my choice of using Mt St Helen's as a starting image might have been a bit on the large side to get a clean representation into an itty bitty 32x32 grid. But my research is steadily moving forward with new ideas and methods constantly appearing.

IMHO, the slice editing is the fastest to use, and the easiest to master... Anyone can do it with very little knowledge. The concepts are rather easy, just manipulate each slice as you want it, and then save the final. The directions it can be taken are quite amazing as well. Consider that MRI, SEM, CAT, and many other imaging systems are based on tomographic slicing... I have already been challenged to produce replications of DICOM data using this method...

Obviously my goals are not to derive sculpted prims using the fine hand eye coordination and wonderful, rich, artistic environments like Maya.. But to arrive at finished imagery using dataset modeling alone. But along the way, I hope to develop some good tools that anyone can use to produce simple to complex results.

Terrain and Landscaping bits are outstanding. Want rocks? Need to convert that 1000 prim waterfall/cave/cliff into a group of sculptys? Want some nifty garden sculpture?

I do find myself on the defensive more and more though. Lots of IM's from folks who at first think my goal is to 'Steal' the work of others.. And then leading to challenges that I need to prove I can exact perfect details. Really folks.. Please... Its not about theft of creative property. Its just about making tools that anyone can use. And, comparing the results of a few long evenings work... To the output of an artists weeks of effort inside a tool that costs thousands and was developed by large teams over years... Well.. No worries, it will not stop my development. I am rather enjoying this path of learning...

Cheers
Anjin

Vlad...

Heh, yeah, that would be one of the reasons I put in an API. I have already written tool code for things like 'Sine Chisel' or 'V Cutter'. The idea is that very simple snips of code can be used to interact with the slices. So, pushing the Sine Chisel against the stack, pushes a sine wave thru the stack.. The tool code can be quite simple for each tool.. I figure with a few example tools, others could crank out all kinds of whacky things. Perhaps something that just changes the rotation of each slice just 5 degrees from the last, using triangle, elliptical or square slices... It would make a nice candy cane like twistie....

And um... Yeah.. I do sleep.. Even have a day job! Sadly, they consider SL a waste of time..

Cheers and see you on the Grid

Anjin

*chuckle* I have to re-iterate Vlad's sentiments about your insomnia. I also have to say I am impressed with this current project you are working with. I would not even think to take on such a thing, but I can see how you arrived at the concept. In those same terms, I have to wonder if FD's hacksaw notion is so very far from possible. You have put a really different kind of analog as to how the sculpties are being created, and would it be that difficult, in your analog, to perform a boolean-type in-plane subtraction from a 'slice' with another prim of the same thickness, at the same elevation?

Great work, no matter what.

I am building or tempting to sculpt a dressing table for my stagehouse green room
I really could use a hack saw. I am still not sure how I can texture the sculpted prims my friend gave me similar graph with letters on it.
I am using rokuro but still trying to understand how to design with cartesian cordinates,etc
I am artist how I have taught myself to draw often is study old masters. In order to learn we often need others who have master items. We all have copied someone at one point be it are parents and siblings as we are learning to do something be it talk,etc. I am not here to sell things just learning and creating. How I have learned things is by copy and studied then from there finding a unique or my own way to create something. Yet it when comes to script language what I tend to do is copy and paste because I don't understand it and I often run into problems. Yet when copying and pasting scripts I have run into problems because I don't understand how they work the script fails.
When I was looking at your rainbow grids I was wonder if there is way using the color grids to actually do select areas and not sure how like you would do with each grid being dot that would become actual painting. Perhaps it would be difficult if your not aware of where to put the dot of colors via the script. Tool bad we just can't rez a paint brush to paint our prims, and chisel or hacksaw for parts we want to get rid of. Not even sure how one would do that or if using device like that would cause so much lag it shut down entire sim. I would love to talk to you more about what you are doing. Sine chisel, hmm that sounds very fascinating too. What are you using to make your sculpted prims with?
Problem with Rokuro its very easy to use but I have been told it has its limitations and I discovered the tinier prims have issues, if I don't design right also I get this weird flashing that seems to animate the image and when rezzing its like easter eggs hatching. I would love more sculpted textures that I could play with that I am not able to make and study.