Rough/Jagged Maya Sculpties

I'm pretty sure I've read every thread dealing with jagged sculpties but none has solved my issue..

I'm importing with lossless compression.. I've tried several different Section/Span combinations.. the clear history > freeze reset transformation > clear history thing.. but it seems that as soon as I begin to modify my sphere or cylinder away from it's original shape I always get a really ugly jagged surface. I've seen it around SL but it's usually only near the poles, not over the entire sculptie.

Here is a screenshot:

and in Maya:


Help please!

The coordinates of points in the sculpt mesh in SL only have 8 bits of precision. In addition if you're not importing the texture as "lossless" it is subject to JPEG compression artifacts.

You may want to try and reduce the number of unique sculpts in the hair, by using the same sculpts at different sizes and aspect ratios, to avoid your customers looking like they're wearing a bubble halo while the sculpties are downloading.

I am using lossless compression as I stated.. and thank you for your opinion about reducing the amount of sculpties in the hair but that wasn't my question.

If anyone has any other ideas on how I can get my sculpties to have a smooth surface please let me know!

The coordinates in SL have only 8 bits of precision. This means the points of the mesh are not as precisely defined in SL as they are in your graphics program. You can minimize, but not eliminate, this effect by making sure that each sculpt is exported in the tightest possible bounding box for that particular sculpt. If you are exporting the whole wig as a set, they will probably share the bounding box and thus have less effective precision than they would have otherwise.

You may be able to disguise this to some degree by baking shading into the texture you apply to the sculpt.

I understand that sculptie geometry won't be the same quality as the NURBS model in Maya.

I'm not exactly sure what the bounding box is.. but I've seen hair sculpties done with Maya that are much more oblong or rather have more intense curves (which I assume would mean a bigger 'bounding box') yet are completely smooth except for the tips (or poles).

A bounding box is a set of coordinates that completely contain an object or group of objects.



If these three shapes were separately bounded, each would have a smaller box around it.

If you take each piece of the wig, and orient it as vertically as possible, and then export it with the smallest bounding box, it will appear smoother once you get it into Second Life. How you select the bounding box for export depends on the program you use.

Avant, what size sculpt maps are you exporting? Lossless upload only works for fairly small images. For best results, don't go bigger than 128x128. For non-oblongs, I always use 64x64, myself.

Also, what program are you using to do the uploading? ImportPrimscript tends to yield more stable results than the viewer. Even though LL has "fixed" the bugs with lossless upload in the viewer several times now, it does still seem to malfunction from time to time. It's gotten a lot better, but it's still not perfect.

As for the bounding box question, it's not true that exporting the sculpts as a set will make them all share the same bounding box. Even though the Maya exporter can export a whole scene at once, each object still gets its own individual bounding box. Even if somehow it didn't (which would be impossible, but just for argument's sake), SL wouldn't know anything about it. Every prim in SL, whether it's a sculpty or not, and whether it's part of a linkset or not, has its own bounding box, and sculpt precision is always a function of the visual shape dimensions in relation to the bounding box dimensions.

For the highest possible precision, you want each sculpty's bounding box to be as close as possible in size to the sculpty's apparent visual shape. The Maya exporter makes this really easy to do. Simply make sure Maximize Scale is enabled in the exporter. That's what it's for. If you've got it turned off, the sculpty's bounding box will be 1x1x1, regardless of the visual shape. While this does have certain advantages for certain situations, it will often lead to precision issues. For maximum precision, keep Maximize Scale turned on at all times.


All that said, I actually like the wrinkled sculpties in your screenshot better than your smooth source model. Hair is never ever perfectly smooth. The wrinkled version looks about a hundred times more convincing than the smooth version.

I do realize, of course, that that's not the point; you want to know how to prevent this from happening since it won't always be a good thing. But sometimes accidents do make for the best results, and in this particular case, that's exactly what seems to have happened. I'd leave this one alone if I were you.

My advice, learn to fix the problem for whatever you're making next. This particular model is great just as it is.


Also, just a side note: unlock normals on that avatar model. That will allow light to reflect properly off the surface, eliminating the checkerboard look. The mannequin OBJ's were not properly exported from whatever source program they came out of (probably Poser). Those locked normals appear to be the result of user error by whoever did the exporting. Unlock them, and save new copies, so you'll never have to deal with it again.

edit: ok, Chosen was faster than me ...


First let me say, that your sculpts are already very good in shape. As a matter of fact long sculpties typically are more problematic and occasionally need more work to to get them perfect (due to the limited spatial precision as argent already mentioned). But your sculpties are already close to perfect. Especially as you are modelling hair, which is never smooth but more or less curly... well at least with me

So if you really wanted to get it super smooth, your best option would be to make a perfect texture for your model, put some shades on it and thus make the eye "think", that it sees a smooth surface. This trick works all so often and if light and shadows are applied in a clever way, this can make the sculpty look almost completely smooth. By "clever" i mean: apply shadows and light with care, so that it won't contradict the current light situation in your current place in world.

Thank you! checking Maximize Scale did the trick and they look much cleaner. I forgot where I read to uncheck it but for now on I will be using it, at least for my hair sculpts.


The new sculpts with Maximize Scale turned on obviously being on the bottom. It makes a huge difference with the hair texture applied.



I've been unable to get ImportPrimscript to work. I'd really like to see if I could get an even better result by using this though.. When I run it from the command line it says that no primitives could be found from input file. Also, it looks like the download link for the GUI doesn't work anymore :/



While it would seem that way.. as soon as I applied my hair textures the 'wrinkledness' was not so convincing.. since it caused the hair to look like it had like zig-zags in it and very unrealistic.



Thanks! while were on that topic I was also wondering if there was a way that I could make the avatar model unselectable. It's an annoyance to constantly deselect it when I'm working.

Again, thanks for your help.

I'm glad that did the trick. It's usually something simple when things don't seem to want to cooperate.




I'm guessing you're probably using the wrong file type. ImportPrimscript only works with BMP files. If you're exporting to TGA or any other image format, it will tell you there's nothing there.

As for the GUI, I haven't tried to use it in a long time, so I don't know whether it still should be working or not.




Ah, that makes sense.





There are about a hundred different ways to do that. Here are a few, no particular order:


1. TEMPLATE THE MANNEQUIN MESH

Right-click on the model, and hold for a second. In the menu that pops up, move the mouse to hover over Actions, and then release on Template. Templated objects appear as a faded gray wireframe, and are unselectable. To return it to normal, do the same thing, but release on Untemplate.

You can also template and untemplate objects via the Attribute Editor, or by hitting Display -> Object Display -> Template or Untemplate.

Note, templated objects can still be selected in the hypergraph and in the outliner. Selection is only disabled in the viewer panes.


-OR-


2. PUT THE MANNEQUIN IN A LAYER, AND THEN TEMPLATE OR REFERENCE THE LAYER

First, expose the Layer Editor, either by clicking on the button at the top right of the screen, or by hitting Display -> UI Elements -> Channel Box / Layer Editor.

In the Layer Editor, make sure Display is toggled, not Render. Then hit Layers -> Create Empty Layer. Select the mannequin mesh (if it's got more than one part, select them all), and then right-click and hold on the name of the layer you just created. When the menu pops up, hit Add Selected Objects. The mannaquin will now be part of the layer.

Now, take a look at the two boxes to the left of the layer's name. The first one has a V in it. That's the visibility toggle. If you click in that box, the V will clear, and all objects in the layer will become invisible. Click again to restore visibility. You'll find this to be really handy for things like modeling the underside of the hair. You can quickly get the avatar body out of the way whenever you need to get in there.

The second box will be clear by default. Click once on it, a T will appear, and everything in the layer will template. Click again, an R will appear, and everything in the layer will reference. Referenced objects are unselectable, but unlike templated objects, retain their normal rendering status. They don't fade to wireframe. Click the box a third time to clear it, and return the layer to normal.


-OR-


3. TURN OFF THE ABILITY TO SELECT POLYGONS

All your sculpties are NURBS, right? The only thing polygonal in the scene is the mannequin. So if you disable polygon selection, you'll be able to select everything but the mannequin.

In the status line at the top of the screen, toward the center, are the selection mask buttons. The fourth one in looks sort of like a Windows logo, except it's blue instead of multi-colored. This is the selection mask for surfaces. Right-click on it, and you'll see all the various surface types you can select. Simply uncheck Poly Surfaces.



Now that I've given you that answer, I should probably point out that you would have gotten most of the exact same information, simply by searching Help for "unselectable". When you're new to Maya, it's easy to overlook the help file, since you're probably used to the inadequate help that comes with so many other programs. But Maya is very different. Its help is actually helpful. A huge part of the reason the program costs what it does is because its documentation is so good. You paid several hundred dollars for that help file. Don't be afraid to use it.


Oh, and one other thing you might want to do with the mannequin is give it a translucent shader. When I'm sculpting objects to fit the avatar, I usually work with a 50% transparent Blinn on the mannequin. The transparency allows for easy visibility through the body, to see all the sculpties clearly, and the shininess of the Blinn material helps keep the body looking as 3-dimensional as possible. Translucent Lamberts tend to look flat.




You're welcome.