Sculptie planar edge problem

Hopefully the Maya & SL screenshots I'm providing are self-explanatory.



Can anybody tell me why the first column is not extending as far in-world, as it does in Maya?

As you can see, column 1 should be touching column 11.

UV Layouts are designed for faces not for edges, so when the UV points go from 0.0 to 1.0, usually the ones at 1.0 need pulling back by 1 pixel so the edge is inside the image, not outside it. Otherwise the baked edge comes from halfway across the face rather the real edge.

OK, I'm confused. That's a default plywood texture on a plane-type sculptie. I've done no texture baking. My problem is with column 1 not rendering in the same position in SL as in Maya.

I would like to take a look at your sculptmap. You can send it to me at: [email]gaia.clary@machinimatrix.org[/email] I guess it is the Maya-baker that makes trouble in your case and i want to learn in more detail what it does. I am way too curious to let that pass along
So if you like, do not hesitate ...

Hmm, after further experimentation, it seems that the first and last columns of vertices must be bunched together with their nearest two columns of vertices for the edges of a plane sculptie to be precisely positioned.

Sorry if this is basic knowledge and I'm asking dumb questions. I did search and research beforehand, but clearly my search-fu is faulty.

Oh, I only noticed your response after posting, Gaia. Do you still want the sculptmap after that explanation?

Yes, please. I would appreciate to see both sculptmaps, the faulty one and the one where you resolved your problem.

OK! I just sent them both.

Here you see what i found out about your sculptmaps:



The upper row shows the sculpties at LOD3 and the lower row shows them in LOD1.
The right most sculpty is a reference sculpty i created using blender and subsurf.

Some thoughts ...

1.) What you see in world is not a weird behaviour of sculpties but it looks like a weird(?) behaviour of the Maya baker. As far as i know, the Maya baker is optimizes for baking from NURBS and thus it seems it is not very good for precise (geometrical) objects. It looks like you MUST collapse several adjacent rows/columns of vertices in order to get sharp edges and that is entirely due to the baker not to the behaviour of sculptmaps in world. And at the end edges of the mesh (first/last row/column) the baker seems to fail. Please correct me if i am wrong.

2.) Even in your fixed sculptmap i can see a tiny gap from row-1 to the upper plane. You can not see it in the image above though.

3.) For some reason the LOD bvehaviour of your sculptmaps is not optimal. Again i must admit that i have no idea how you can trick the Maya exporter to create good geometrical results. And i have no idea how you can control LOD behaviour with the Maya baker. Maybe collapsing 3 adjacent rows/columns of vertices was the wrong decision? I would guess it should be 4 if you want to keep with good LOD ...

4.) The sculptmap on the right of the image is LOD invariant and it has sharp edges without the need to collapse several rows/columns of vertices. Hence it will be better for texturing and it will avoid texture jumping when LOD levels change. BTW this object has been modelled on LOD1 level (modelling in different LOD-levels is greatly supported in blender thanks to Domino) and it gets its LOD-invariance automatically

I would like to learn how the Maya-users actually do create precise edges on sculpties. What is your trick ?

I don't use Maya, so can't help with the specifics, but everything so far sounds like the problem I described. Somewhere the model is being baked to the RGB sculpt map and that's the step where the models surface is treated like a UV Layout.

I just lasso (select) a column/row of vertices, and either move that entire column to a specific co-ordinate or enable 'snap to point' so that I can move & snap those vertices to their counterparts in a neighbouring column.

Does that answer your question? I'm not sure if I understood it correctly, straightforward though it seems.

Thanks for analysing my sculpt maps and offering so much information.

1) You're absolutely right that the Maya exporter works with NURBS surfaces, and that it requires (according to what I've read in many places) three columns of vertices to be snapped on top of each other to achieve a hard 90 degree corner in a surface.

2) While experimenting with the *fixed* version earlier, I alternated between leaving a tiny gap between columns 1 & 11, and then no gap at all - just to ensure that level of detail was being visually echoed in SL. I'm afraid I may have given you the sculpt map with the tiny gap by mistake. I'm sorry.

3) I will see what results I can achieve with four collapsed columns of vertices, although that's going to severely limit my modelling options.

4) Maybe I should just try my luck with Blender? lol. I've actually just started a foundation course in Maya (for reasons other than SL) and it's going really well so far, but every time I dip my toes into sculpties, I feel like I need a degree in sculptie implementation and technical specification just to understand how to do the most basic things. I'm beginning to wonder (once again) if I should give up and wait until meshes are supported. :/