Blender Sculptie Importer - Attached

Not sure if this helps, but I find its very important to be aware of where the seams are in your UV map, especially with the sphere. Plan your model before hand considering how the seams will fall in areas of low detail in your model. Any kind of bumpiness I find is usually a result of either too much stretching or bad closings around the seam areas. Try using a cylinder instead there are ways to close the ends that can help in certain applications.

A real handy tool I use is http://sculptyspace.com/ this will allow you to quickly preview what it looks like in SL.(oh dont we all wish SL sculpties looked as good as they do in Blender)


-whyroc

Someone should have submitted "use Blender's game engine as a new SL client" to the Google Summer of Code. >3

This is one of two of the videos that are listed as .AVI videos and I can't see either of them. I don't know what is wrong, but I even downloaded a special viewer that says it will view .AVI videos, and it's blank. I get sound, but no picture. Well not on this one. This one I get NOTHING. It comes up as an error. The second one, the one about making videos, has sound, but no picture.

I don't know if anyone can help with this, but thought I'd ask if I was the only one with a problem? I even tried to rename to .SWF as the video about the monkey in .SWF shows a picture... though it has no sound.

Thanks ahead of time....

None of the videos have sound, they are just over the shoulder sessions. The latest ones should play fine in vlc

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

or to use other media players on Windows you can install the FMP4 codec

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm

thanx a lot. Now we have to deal with that bug, cause somedays I see a nice door and other day is a "thing" with no defined shape

From what i can see in various tutorials, it should be possible to create a sculptie out of an arbitrary mesh, well at least out of a mesh, that can be mapped to a sphere, torus, cylinder or plane. So i got curious what will happen, if i apply the sculptie baker to simple mesh objects. So i played a bit, but did not get very far. indeed, i immediately stumbled over a problem (i use blender 2.46, last recent version). I start with a clean canvas (all standard settings), then:

add -> mesh -> cube

i get the default cube. now i

render -> bake second life sculpties

and get this error:

"The UV map is outside the image area"

Ok, i find, that the object has no UV texture, so i create one (in object mode UV texture -> new) and now the sculptie baking works. But Happiness lasts only for a minute:

I store the map and reimport it to blender via the sculptie map importer.
Now i see an object almost totally flatened out.
as if one axis has not been generated correctly somehow ?
What is the missing link here ? What else do i need to do in order to get a sculpt map out
of a simple mesh ?

The UV map is the missing link. You need to unwrap to a square and make sure that the map is contained in the image area. UVs - Layout Clipped to Image Size and UVs - Snap to Pixels ( on a 32 x 32 image) are useful things when doing a manual unwrap.

You can see how I handle UV maps from scratch in these videos:

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/wheels_of_time.swf

I ran out of time on that one, but it shows most of making the UV map square after an unwrap. The next two take the UV map into consideration during the modelling process.

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/using_multires.swf
http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/steps.swf

These were made with much earlier versions of the scripts. It was after unwrapping enough sculpties I decided that the scripts doing it for me was a better idea. So I added the Add - Sculpt Mesh feature.

well, ok, this means, that creating sculpties is only easy, when the starting point is plane, sphere, torus or cylinder (what your scripts can create)... So then we might go on looking at your sripts and try to add at least some "basic objects" like a cube or a pyramid just for ease of usage.
Thanks for the clarification anyways!

You can get a lot of different base objects by playing with the settings.

Try 4 X 2 Y 0 multires cylinder then scale top and bottom loop to 0. Align bottom loop with middle one for a pyramid.

4 X 4 Y 0 multires cylinder and scale top and bottom loops to 0 and align on Z with next loops for a box. Square the box up for a cube.

Sticking to powers of two for the X & Y settings will give better results for LOD management. So 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 are the best values to use. If you use other values you can manually align the UV map for better results.

Once you've made your new base sculptie, bake and reimport to get the full number of faces. You can add simple subdivision before baking to get geometrically divided faces rather than texture aligned divisions.

I figured anyone using a particular shape a lot would just bake and save the plain sculptie map as a base. Importing that becomes the starting point. I wasn't planning on adding extra types to the scripts as they already support any it's possible to make. I think the add script supporting the base types and the import script for variations is the right approach, but feel free to convince me otherwise

Domino, Do you use 'snap to grid' in your sculpty blendering? If yes, do you use a particular setting? Could snap2grid(in Edit Mode) help avoid in world jaggies?

It depends. See posts 247 to 249 in this thread for info on grids. In effect each sculptie has it's own optimal grid which is different in X, Y and Z depending on the size of the sculptie in that direction. So there's no one grid setting that's going to work in all cases.

What I sometimes do is import the sculptie, scale to 2.55 and snap to a 0.01 grid. It's only if there is a really obvious problem that I'd bother with this step though.

Generally speaking I try to minimise the effect during modelling just by roughly eyeballing the grid. If you roughly keep diagonal lines as between the corners of a number of squares, things tend to work out better. Short lines (across a single grid unit) need to be 90 or 45 degrees, the longer the line, the more flexibility you have with it's angle.

That was exactly, what i needed to know when i first saw these parametets, i asked myself, what is this about, but was taken away and completely forgot about them. Now it turns out, that this feature is the one i need. No need to make "basic sculptie objects" they are allready there. Domino, THANK YOU )) i consider making a tutorial for "howto use domino's blender scripts efficiently" tips and tricks....

HI!

First of all thanks for the great scripts for blender Domino I've seen with the inworld Sculpty tools like sloft,that they can make window frames and arches,is this also possible using blender and your sculpty scripts?I tried to separate the vertices and it says i cant in multires mode.I am also only a week into using blender so sorry if this is a silly question.

I think it's a great question, and I've been wondering that, myself. I created a torus or two, and they don't have holes when I preview them in the SL upload window [in the RC client]. So I've been wondering how to make holes that really are holes, too. I've heard some mention of this "collapsed vertices" trick, but haven't yet seen how to do it, or any details, really.

Meanwhile... I did my recent torus test with blender 2.46, which, I'm happy to report, works with my new Space Navigator, using 3D Connexion's plugin. After a few adjustments, I think the SN is wonderful and makes blender more fun to use.

I'm grateful to Domino for this blender work not only because it makes sculpty creation possible in a powerful, free program, but also because it's led me to finally buckle down and give blender a chance. I'm enjoying this!

/8/60/256244/1.html

That has info on using the torus shape for a sculptie with a hole. If you check the console window after baking sculpties, there is a LSL snippet with the appropriate settings for the sculptie you baked. I don't think you can change the sculptie preview type, though in the RC client you don't need the script, just change the type in the edit box.

Using zero width faces as connecting lines to turn one sculptie into multiple parts isn't really an option I like. You have to sacrifice a subdivision per level of detail (ignoring the oddball lowest one), so to get a line that stays hidden at the top 3 levels, you have to squash at least 4 x 4 faces.

To get two distinct halves, that becomes a 4 x 32 face strip. As it has to be grid aligned, that gives 16 x 32 and 12 x 32 meshes left. At the 3rd level of detail that's just 4 x 8 and 3 x 8 faces. As the row where the zero width faces begins is already scaled to a point, your creative options are seriously hampered. So if LOD is a concern (and it should be) I don't recommend this approach.

hi.

I am pulling my hair out of my head about high precision sculpting with blender. I seem to miss one crucial point since 3 days now. And i am sure, there is a super silly solution to this problem. But i can't see it. So here is what i do:

- I have created a perfect cube, whith LOD aligned in a way, that the cube remains a cube at any distance.

- I have taken this cube and sculpted a perfect arch, symetric along the x-axis.

- I have scaled the object to size <2.55,2.55,2.55>

- I also ensured, that the bounding box is <2.55,2.55,2.55> which is equivalent to: "the arch spans over the full 256 available gridpoints in all 3 dimensions"

- I have set my grid width to 0.01

- I have done a snap to grid after shifting vertices around a bit to obtain a better result.
(I ensured, that the bounding box remains the same size)

Now, after i have done all this, my object looks appealing to me in blender and i am quite sure, that this object matches all rules about LOD, scaling and precision. Hence i expect no distortions upon sculptie baking and no distortions upon reimporting the sculptie map to blender. I expect the reimported object to look exactly the same, i.e. all mesh points should be created at the same positions as the original...

But i get (arbitrary?) shifts of vertices by one grid step... (It looks like sometimes a grid point jumps away from its dedicated position towards an adjacent position) And this destroys the arch bow severely. although it is only one single step, it allready looks crapy.

Even rearranging the points within the imported sculpties, rebaking, and reimporting the tweeked map shows again arbitrary shifts of 1 gridpoint but now at other places. What the hell is going on here ? What do i not see ? Where does precision vanish here ?

Before you pull more of your hair out, there HAVE been intermitant issues with (alternately) the uploading process, and/ or the viewer's rendering of scupts. It seems like every other blog post claims to have fixed this same problem(or claims they are going to). It being almost the one year aniversary of sculpts one begins to wonder if maybe (just maybe) perhaps they don't WANT us to achieve precision sculpts as that would lead to too much prim reduction and lower land prices.

If you are using a 32 x 32 face model then add 1 level of subsurf before baking. This effectively disables the interpolation as every pixel on the 64 x 64 sculptie map now comes from a mesh vertex. I find it can help in some cases. Beyond that I'd need a problem blend file to explore.

No, i am not at all having problems with the SL viewer or upload.
I am only talking about effects, which happen, when i reimport the just created sculptmap into blender itself. So i think, the problem lies somewhere in the process of sculptie baking with Domino's scripts. Probably it is all correct and i just do not understand some detail of that process very well

So many thanks for your support, Domino!!!

I am afraid, i need more help .
I tried to apply an additional level of multires, i also did "apply multires" and then i tried with "subdivide", and finally i tried with subsurf. The results don't get better. But i must admit, that i do not exactly know, whether i did it all right. At least i saw some effects, but the problem got worse not less...

So i attached the .blend file here in the hope, that inspection helps to uncover what happens behind the scene.

In order to see my problem, open the .blend file, then

render -> bake SL sculpties

look at the reimported sculptie in front view. You immediately see heavy distortions on the right bow, less heavy distortions on the left bow. If you place the original and the sculptie above each other (in front view) then you can better compare and see the areas of displacement immediately.

It is always at most one step in x and/or one step in z. the y-dimension does not seem to be a problem.

Hey, Domino. Think we could get the abbility to create prims for spheremapping? Soft-edged cubes and soft-cylinders? I ask because I really find it difficult to fix a sphere into those shapes without taking a lot of time to do it.

It happens that i forget all the time, which combination of x,y,multires lead to which basic shape. So i ended up in creating base .blend files for whatever i need frequently as you proposed in a previous quote. That is a sufficient approach. But from the viewpoint of usability it would be still great to get "prims on click" right from the create menu, thus lowering the entry level to blender sculpty creation a bit more. And it would be awesome to have it visualised by little icons (well that's eye candy, but i love that If i only would know more about scripting blender...

The problem with this approach is what becomes a base sculptie? The fish makers needs are different to the avatar builders, which are different to the architects, which are different to the gardeners who are different from the bike and car makers. A line does have to be drawn somewhere. And given all the variations of base sculpties I can think up I still think leaving this to the individual to organize is a better option. With the import route, everything can be placed into categories with folders. With a built in approach, it gets a lot more limited.

I've had a look at the blend file for the arch, and I think you are just hitting the angle limit on sculpties. I've attached a picture to explain, the same lines of vertices (simplified to 2D) are shown at different LOD levels. The dots represent the vertices as read from the sculptie map. The grid shows the available vertex positions.

The green is lowest LOD and you can see each vertex falls on an exact grid point.

The red is the next LOD and each vertex is again on an exact grid point.

The blue is the highest LOD and here we now have vertices that fall between two grid points. These will snap to the grid and you get jaggies.

So a long sweeping curve is one of the toughest things to avoid jaggies on. At some point on the curve, getting the highest LOD to fit nicely on the grid is going to be tricky. Also if you do get it aligned, then you will probably have to skip keeping faces evenly sized, so you might get texture jumps as the LOD changes. I've a few ideas I want to explore, I'll update you when I find out what works the best. Though personally I'd be using normal prims for this shape, if I was doing a sculptie there'd be more decoration and I'd be adding it on the problem areas

Hey Domino, do you think we could get a logic option to bake the sculpt's size into the texture? I know in the past I've been able to select a sphere with no sculpt type and the sculptie I made, and the sculptie would be mapped appropriately so in SL no resizing would be required, it'd just be the shape I want. Lately though I haven't been able to do that, no matter what order I select the objects in.

Addendum:
I figured out how to do it again, but I still stand by my request. It's a pain to have to add a new mesh, rescale it, and bake one at a time for 7+ objects.

When you say "bake the sculpt's size" do you mean the proportions? Keeping the size isn't possible as all sculpties are 1x1x1 until resized in SL. Keeping the proportions is possible at a sacrifice of some of the sculptie's vertex grid range. This I could add as an option "Normalize" or something like that - current behaviour is normalized and the new option would be to unselect "Normalize" and it would maintain proportions.

Partly things are the way they are as the scripts are a work in progress. Eventually the console printout of LSL script snippets will become a saved text file that you upload with the textures and sculpt map, and a magic monkey will rebuild the objects in SL.

But I can see the "Normalize" option being handy for doing megaprim sculpties so I'll add it as I've described unless someone has a better suggestion on how it should work.