Blender and sculpties

I've been trolling and playing a little in blender, and really have one big question.

Do you need to restrict yourself to a primitive in Blender with a specific # of segments/vertices ?

I'm assuming based on a decent explaination in a Wings tutorial that irregardless of which 3d modeller you use, it must have a specific # of vertices in both dimensions to create a square UV map, 16 slices/15 sections, 32/31 , 64/63 etc.

I read a blender tutorial that starts a 32 slice cylinder and then stated create "some" horizontal sections but didn't state how many.

(edit)
ok and one other question I just thought of....
Can you use a torus prim........I would have said. since its possible to unwarp a torus into a flat map.......its just like a cylinder that's been twisted 360 so the top/bottom meet together.


Thx

V

No you can use whatever you like. I tend to start with something with 8 x 8 faces and a couple of levels of multires as it makes LOD management easier. You can use a torus.

Most of the tutorials were written before I did some scripts to make things easier

/8/60/203571/1.html

When you model off a multires grid in blender does the final 32x32 face mesh represent the actual vertices?

Assuming the base mesh you added multires to had a correctly aligned UV map, yes.

As Linden Lab in their "wisdom" have now decided http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2291 won't be fixed, sculpties just lost a whole lot of their appeal to me. It's particularly the lowest level being 6 that causes a lot of problems for me.

As anyone who races seriously in SL knows, most racers run with graphics on lowest detail and we are limited in the number of prims per vehicle (as high prim attached vehicles are also too laggy for racing). Something like a bike exhaust pipe could be done and look reasonable in a 8 x 8 face mesh, but degrades considerably at 6 x 6 faces.

As this lowest level of detail doesn't degrade nicely to match subdivision levels it also makes LOD management incredibly more complex during the modelling stage. This is a serious problem for anyone trying to do sculpties and puts major limits on what shapes they are useful for. For things like car doors, where a torus sculptie would be ideal, the jump between 8 and 6 faces means keeping the window opening and corners of the door constant is close to impossible.

Sorry for the rant but at this point it's hard to see my time investment in sculpties as anything other than wasted. LL obviously decided that the lowest LOD would only be seen on tiny objects so it didn't matter if it distorted. That's not the case and my major use for sculpties is now a non-starter.

That is too bad Domino. I understand the reason for your upset and completely agree. You have been upfront about your interest in vehicle modeling right from the start, I get it now that you need to turn down the graphics settings, thus running into this problem.

From my point of view you have helped me cross over deeper into blender with some of your tutorials and posts, I would like to personally thank you for your truly groundbreaking work.

I think the planar unwrap script is brilliant, and now that I am alot more cofortable with UV unwrapping in blender I can really appreciate what you have done.

Indirectly through sculpties, and the SL blender sculptie community you have contributed to, I've had alot of learning and fun with blender for second life, as a tool in itself, as well as developing for the blender game engine.

So I hope you can work it out!

-whyroc

Domino sorry to hear about the impact of that bug not being fixed......but thankyou for what you've contributed so far......I was able to get up and running with Blender and get the very basic shape of what I want all the way into SL last night. So I appreciate your replies and the scripts.

Yeah, not a lot I can say on that. I'm sure I'll find some uses for sculpties, it's just really annoying when their potential is handicapped like that.



Thanks for the compliment, but all I did was move existing stuff into a new context. Others broke the ground, I just built a mud hut on it



I've updated the script (now called EAC unwrap) and have just posted about the latest version at http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=109833

It now calculates the poles based on the 3D view so it's a lot easier to experiment with finding a good angle for the unwrap.

Yes, thank you was playing around with the EAC unwrap last night. Nice work!

-w