Sculpted Prim Tutorial - Geometric Modelling #1

No, I don't think you are missing anything. I certainly wouldn't suggest that Blender should have a direct mapping method _instead_ of baking via the UV map. And I don't even want to say that it should have one _in addition to_ the current method. I'm sure you have a better feel for the typical Blender user than I have.

My reason for even bringing it up was that you said that after scaling your model for the purpose of snapping to a grid, you would scale back to normal size before baking the scuplty. I was thinking that if you were going indirectly through the UV map, this would not be re-introducing rounding errors during baking, as it would with the Wings exporter's method of mapping vertex numbers directly to bitmap row and column. But having thought about it more, it seems like rescaling would reintroduce rounding error with the indirect method as well. The UV map just maps model points to sculpty bitmap points, right? The vertex coordinates still come from the model? Or have I completely missed how your method works?

I scale back just to eyeball it at proper scale. I don't think there are rounding errors as such. It's just on a freely modelled mesh, the verts aren't aligned with the 256 steps available. So the scale and snap to grid gives it that alignment. Rescaling doesn't affect it then as the step size changes with the mesh size and the verts are still the same relative distances apart.

Good point. My mistake.

Not a mistake as such. You are right that scaling back would mess up Wings at the moment. If you do change the default centre and scale in your script to be based on min / max dimensions only then Wings users can scale back too

Agreed, this is another reason to change my center computation.

Thanks for the fruitful discussion.

Omei, I have experienced the 'selection errors' which Daniel mentioned previously. Perhaps it is a system specific bug more than an issue which affects everyone. The only way I can select vertices with 100% certainty is to use his method of selection.

Based solely on the fact that I don't think I have ever seen it, I tend to agree. But I was hoping to be able to reproduce it if I could. Do you have a simple case that always fails for you? If so, I could try with that.

Trying to use Wings with Vista. Seemed to operate fine, but when I open the grid for the attatchement at the beginning of this post Wings freezes. Tried 98/Me, XP compatibility modes too.

Not sure what that's about. Do you have other Wings projects that open up OK?

I'm not sure how to reproduce it reliable, perhaps if i say 'this would be a really bad time to find out i missed a vertex' it would happen. When I run SL standalone, memory usage will range anywhere from 300-800 Megs depending on my draw distance. With wings running, SL (RC 1.18.3(4) ) slowly swells up to 1.5 to 1.6 Gigs of RAM (not swap) then crashes, in the timespan of about an hour.

I'll build some with SL off and see if i run into the same selection issues, though I'd like to know how Wings can cause SL to die in that way. Perhaps it's leaking memory somewhere or overwriting SLs data and corrupting it in memory. *shrugs*

I can't seem to make this work. I made some nice steps, made them phantom, added a nice (non-phantom) plywood ramp and as soon as I link them verybadthings happen. If I make the steps root, it turns the ramp phantom. If I make the ramp root, it turns the steps to non-phantom.

Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug, I mean feature of SL.

Dazed and Confused,

Doug

simply put, Doug - don't link them.

Well, what fun is that?

Seriously, this is a bug isn't it?

And thanks again for the great tutorials. I've watched them a bunch of times. I've been using the one on the rings to try and make some blood vessels. Kinda sorta works but I'm still trying to figure things out.

Doug

Not a bug as its by design - phantom applies to an entire linkset.
glad you enjoy the tutorials

Wow been a while since a post was here o.o

Anyways, I've now done and loved all of your tutorials, and there are so many things I'd love to see one on... one thing I've been curious about since I saw yours is things like benches, how you create them with perfect corners and various parts and such.. how you get a square edged box from a plane or sphere I suppose ^^ I've tried so far and ended with weird things lol

Anyways, here is my creation from the staircase.. used 4 to make a hedge design lol.. I love the effect personally (Not lossless so not perfect)

Thanks Danielfox, for a wonderfully lucid tutorial. You make it sound almost easy to do complex sculptie stuff.

I've got a suggestion for a tutorial: that lovely ladder in your pic. I'll bet that'd show off some really neat technique!

Yes, and definitely LOD-management and UV-space continuity. A sculpty is useless without a fitting texture.

Anyhow, keep up the good work! Thanks again!

First off, thank you for the thorough tutorial. I've only just started working with sculpties and Wings 3D, but I'm *slowly* getting the hang of it thanks mostly to posts from you and Omei.

It may be a newer feature in the latest release, but I've noticed that in Wings holding shift to make a selection only grabs those items (vertices, faces, etc) that are apparent- for lack of a better word. On the other hand, simply holding your mouse OFF the edge of your creation and drag it on, then it will grab even hidden items. I tried it on your grid: clicking grabs one, shift drag grabs two, but this method grabs all 12. It might save you a lot of deselecting.

I'll post back when I tackle these stairs.

Omg Daniel. I saw this thread months ago, watched the video and was already amazed by it back then. But I never got around to actually doing it myself. Well... I did it now and it worked marvellously lol. I have worked in Maya up to now, but I find Wings so much easier to work with for sculpties with hard edges such as the stairs. And the Wings vertices selection problem also seems to be gone now! Thanks a lot for this great help!

Hi! I'v been trying to make sculpties with Wings 3D for quite a while now but they never turn out looking anything like they did in Wings. Then I found this tutorial and I'v done exactly like described but it still doesn't turn out well. I use version 0.99.00b of wings and I'v attached my results to this post. What am I doing wrong, can anyone help me?

Edit: When i upload the sculptmap and look at the preview it looks kind of right, I don't have a screeshot of that but atleast it looks like some kind of stairs.

Great post. I just also installed Wings and started to play with sculpties and your video tutorial was very helpfull. I would love to see more similar tutorials from some basic prims what you can use in SL.

It would be great if you did the ladder tutorial - I realize this is old, but so far watching your video reinspired me to try fiddling with wings3d again. I have been trying for a few days to make an object with several holes in and not getting anywhere - granted I was using ac3d and probably modeling it all wrong for sculpts, but wireframing is pretty much the only method I am decent at. However it doesnt seem to work at all with sculpts - so seeing how you created a ladder (essentially holes) would be great.

Hi,

Just starting sculpties and I loved these tutorials but when I tried to download and unzip your file it was corrupted. I tried to down load from all your tuts and the same result.

Can you post it again? Or maybe just instructions on how to create the grid from scratch.

Thanks much!

I'm having trouble getting this file to unzip also. Is there another source available? Anybody have a copy they managed to unzip successfully they could send me?

Thanks.

Same here with the corrupt file . and HOW did he go from a SPHERE... to that .. flat.. thing... in the tutorial that he starts with?? I cannot duplicate that thing. If I understand correctly... the exporter for wings to SL only supports SPHERES.... and ya mold the sphere into the shape you want.. in Daniel's tutorial however.. he starts with a FLAT . thing.... whatever it is.. but no instruction on how he got to that point... he just starts there.... is that what that .zip file is?? his starting shape? if so is there any other place to get it? or can someone please tell us how he got to that shape. It looks as if Daniel himself might have been out of SL for a while since the last post in THIS thread was oct of 2007. But if someone could help me out I would appreciate it. and if anyone coupd maybe point out additional detailed wings tutorials for SL.. or maya.... I have both but dont know how to really use either yet LOL. the only other tutorials other than daniels that I can find for wings all have an end product that is still mostly spherical.. simple...but what about making a rounded cube? like a sofa cushiopn?? or how to make other geometric shapes out of that initial sphere... I think that if I I could get from a sphere to the other basic geometric shapes.. then from there could make more complex stuff.

I just found a copy of the file Danial used for this tutorial. I tried posting it here, but forum posts don't seem to be working. So I posted a copy at http://pkpounceworks.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=28&func=fileinfo&id=253