Which tool do you use?

Pardon if I've missed a thread similiar to this one =p

I'm looking for a fairly basic one, that doesn't cost much.. Maybe even something with a 'demo' version that I can try out and still do stuff with. I've read around but I mostly see Bender mentioned and I believe that costs alot.. Least from what I remember, lol. I've figured out how to make alot of things without a 'tool' but having a tool would be awesome, too =)

Which tool do you use to make 'sculpties'?

Bender would agree:




I think you meant *Blender*, though:
http://www.blender.org/



Which is free (open source!) and not terrible for simple things like sculpties.

Have you seen the thread currently under this one yet?
/8/60/203571/1.html

Or the video tutorial thread for this?
/8/75/257428/1.html

Oops! Lol. Yes.. Blender =p And thank you - Will check out those pages too.

Blender is a great program, but since you said you were looking for simple, it doesn't quite fit the bill. Many find its interface to be quite challenging. You might want to check out Wings3D, which is also free. It's nowhere near as powerful as Blender, but it is a lot simpler to learn, and it works quite well for sculpties. There are numerous threads about it on this forum, as well as articles on the sculpty wiki.

For a fairly comprehensive list of sculpty-friendly programs (arranged in order of price), see http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_3d_Software_Guide

I'd second Wings3D as a starting point. There are easier to use programs (Rokuro can be learnt in about 15 minutes), but Wings really will allow one to make pretty much any basic shape you wish. Texturing is not really supported (although you can import a texture and do some basic UV mapping), but it's free and relatively easy to understand. Give yourself a week of playing about with it in the evening to get the basics of creation and importation down.

As Chosen said, there are a lot of tutorials for Wings out there. Personally, I liked Natalia Zelmanov's tutorial series for Wings (which also includes Rokuro). I'm fairly non-techy, but I found it easy to follow:
http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2006/11/build.html
(page down for the sculpted prim tutorials)

Happy Sculpting!

Perhaps I'm the only person that finds Wings3D a little less than intuitive. The interface is clean, but it tends to drive me nuts with its choice of selection keys, and tends to crash a bit on my system.

I do hope the Windows build is a bit better.


As a true "intro" to 3D, I'd also recommend this little Windows tool:
http://www.anim8or.com/main/index.html

It's what I learned on before I moved on to the real stuff.

Yes.. I tried Blender a bit ago, fiddled around with it a bit and quickly concluded it's uselessnes.. It starts off with three shapes on the screen that don't change. They move, if you can call it that, but there's really nothing much else to do. That, and it takes roughly 10-15 seconds to select/do anything. Not a terribly 'long' time but it adds up quickly..

I'll have to check out Wings3D too =)

Currently breaking from all that fiddle faddle and am messing with floors! lol.

** Side question, and hopefully someone will see this as I've made so many threads already.. lol.

How do you get rid of the horrid 'line' between two prims? Say when placing four flattened cubes together to create a floor peice, it leaves this nasty line no matter how close the peices are. Hopefully I'll figure it out, it really can't be that difficult, but so far no luck! lol. Maybe I should schedule in a class sometime =x

This is the kind of thing that perpetuates the myth about Blender's interface. Yes it's unintuitive and has to be learned, but it's neither useless or slow. The three objects are a camera, a light and a cube. You can select the cube by right clicking on it. Then go to edit mode and you can change it to your hearts content.

As far as sculpties are concerned http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/flask.avi shows one workflow in Blender. I was deliberately going slow and also suffering a little from lag due to recording the video on my portable, and I don't think any action took more than a few seconds.

For normal modelling this video shows about an hour's work (by someone more skilled with Blender than me) compressed into 10 mins:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J53EenY6mkE

Blender is the one application I've found that can work faster than I can. That's something you can only discover once you've learned the interface. "The interface put me off" is a valid critique, but for those willing to get over the initial shock and go through a few tutorials, it's very rewarding.

I bought Hexagon from DAZ3d when it was on sale. It has a specific tab for SL sculpties and an exporter for those sculpties. But you have to use a special prim and you can't delete any faces, not without making it back up somewhere. It is a very nice interface and there are some good video tutorials to get started, especially by this guy named E-Z. Unfortunately if you want to sculpt in a more organic method, you will need to save as .obj and try one of the obj to sculpt exporters and pray that it works.

I'll second what Domino said. Malina, I'm a fairly outspoken critic of Blender's interface, but even I won't call it "useless". It's anything but. In fact, it's fully capable of generating cinema-quality 3D models and animations. It's just a question of learning how to make it work, which is a bit of a struggle for most people, largely because the interface is such an oddball.

I'll also agree with Jeffrey that Wings' has some strangeness to it. For example, it's been a while since I've used it, but last I looked, there was a long-standing bug which prevented reliable direct selection of multiple vertices. The work-around was to select all and then deselect what you don't want. Moderately annoying, but not really a showstopper, in my opinion. You just need to be aware of it is all. DanielFox Abernathy explaines it quite well in his first Wings tutorial: /8/3b/210515/1.html

Let me clarify why I suggested Wings in my previous post. It's not that I think Wings is a truly great program; I don't. It's limited in a lot of ways, and it has its share of weirdo quirks. But since the OP's criteria were simplicity and inexpensiveness, I figured it was a good choice. It's a lot simpler than Blender, anyway, the only other good free 3D program I know of.

Cristalle, I've never used Hexagon, but I love DAZ as a company. I've been meaning to check it out, just haven't had the time. I've heard nothing but good things about it so far. My assumption is it's probably a great choice, but I can't make recommendations based on assumptions. I was hoping someone with some experience with it would mention it. I'm glad you did.




I also realize I failed to answer the question, "what do you use". My tool of choice is Maya, which would always be my first recommendation for nearly all things 3D, as long as upfront price is not a concern. It's very user-friendly, extremely well documented (best help file of any program I've ever seen), and it's arguably the most powerful 3D application available. But it's far from inexpensive, so it's not a realistic option for most people, unfortunately.

As they say 'to each their own'. As Blender DOES take awhile for me, then it's useless for me to fiddle around for an hour just to figure out how to make a pie slice. So, this said, I'll still refrain from using Blender until my computer is more 'up to code'.

ZBrush can make you a nice slice of pie in just a few clicks of your mouse.

But it'll cost ya!

Sadly, it has a thirty day trial, which is more than enough time to get addicted to it. Curse you, Pixologic!

BTW, working my way through "Introducing Zbrush" by Keller right now. Absolutely love it, and it really makes some things about the interface much clearer. Mind you, nothing one makes in the book tutorials will be importable to SL, but I'm a believer in learning everything about a tool (especially an expensive one like Zbrush!) that I can. And the techniques learnt at high resolution can be applied to low resolution SL sculpties.

Anyway, should you decide to play with Zbrush, I'd highly recommend getting a copy of the book, as well as sitting down with the video tutorials by Canned Mushrooms (Jason Welsh) and Vlad Bjornson (the latter are specific to SL).

I did the same thing, Cristalle. I'm new to 3-D modelling and I probably wouldn't have bought Hexagon except that I was impressed by the demo and -- duh! -- the 1/2 price sale. For the most part, I'm pleased with how easy it is to create simple sculpties with Hexagon. Once you get the hang of a few tools and know which handles to tweak, you can turn out decent sculpties in no time. On the other hand, I'm disappointed that 90% of Hexagon's features can't really be applied to anything I can take in world, and it is tough to make things that need a more "organic" approach, as you point out. I keep wanting to squish and mold objects the way I can do with clay in RL. Now that I have my feet wet, I'm going to go ahead and learn to fly Blender. I've never been one to get scared by an unfriendly UI ..... yet.

I would love the ability to start off with just lines or a prim with only a few vertices and start extruding until I had what I needed, without worrying about having too many vertices in one place, or not enough. I mean, I can do that, but it needs the .obj to sculpt exporter, something that doesn't really exist in quality form except maybe for 2k's application for Zbrush. But then, it may just be that my own understanding of what I need to do to make it convertible is lacking, since I haven't really gotten any obj->sculpt exporters to work.

I forgot that Hexagon also supports saving as .3dm, I will have to try 3dm2sculpt and see how it works. So there are options. Hexagon is a pretty powerful modeler, and I don't think we should be limited to SL primitives. You would spend days trying to achieve the prims as seen in the "limits of a single sculpty" thread otherwise.

Cristalle, what happens when you feed the latest version of Sculpty Maker with a Hexagon .obj file?.

Sculpty Maker is a little more flexible these days. Although it still doesn't like objects that have triangles at their poles. So if Sculpty Maker gives you a sculptmap with a black border then you know it's caused by the dreaded triangles.

It said it made multiple sculpt maps but no bmp is to be found. I'm using Windows Vista Home Premium, don't know if that makes a difference.

I feel very lost with the resident converters, I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

My bad, it is not .3dm but .3ds! maybe i will have more luck with that converter.

Nah, you're not doing anything wrong. I've just downloaded the trial version of Hexagon and noticed the UV map of a sphere had triangles at the poles. So that's probably where things are going wrong.

I have a suspicion that that can be fixed by remapping the UV, either custom or applying a spherical uv. I'll try one of those later. Hexagon has a nice unwrapping feature, by selecting the edges to make seams right on the model. It shouldn't impact the squareness of the UV map itself. You can see the UV in a separate pane.

From what I understand from 2k, his exporter is Dependant on the UVs of a Zbrush "sphere". I put it in quotes because it is functionally a cylinder without caps and the top and bottom ring of vertices snapped together. If you bring it into another 3d application the poles are not a single vertice, but many sharing the same space. This means that the UVs for the "sphere" cover the entire UV space range, Like a that of a cylinder (or NURBS patch).

In most other applications the spheres have their poles as one vert, so the last ring of faces is comprised of triangles. When you unwrap them you often get a "sawtooth" pattern for that ring of faces. This means that the face UVs leave gaps and won't cover the entire UV range. Even if it is otherwise nicely normalized in UV space with a typical square checkerboard arrangement edge rows. I could be wrong, but that's what I took from it when he said:



If I have this wrong 2k please clarify the issue. But I'm pretty sure this is the cause of your problem.

Edit: Regarding the OP's question - I use 3ds Max and SculptGenMax as my main tool to author my sculptie maps. I use Zbrush for texturing. Go go Zapplink gadget!

to pay or not to pay, thats the question... or better said the first.
the second depends on what you want to do. only building sculpties or learning more of 3D building?
last but not least its a question of the object you want to create.

one i paid for in SL is TAKARA from yuzuru jewel

/8/98/184264/1.html

its great for creating sculpties the fast way and easy to learn.
it creates also object files wich you can use in other 3d programs. if you dont have a software that creates sculpties you can import them back too. at has also some other features and is a look worth.

so i have blender and i think i dont need to say much about because its mentioned so often^^.
thats the one i started with some years ago because it was free. but after all this time i am still impressed every day from the features of this open source software. its professional.
for all who want to see what you can do with blender, these videos are created with blender

http://www.vimeo.com/1132937 (the 2nd one is my favorite)

but because its pro its GUI is looking strange for some people.
but lucky there are ebough teachers that get you on the way to be a sculptie artist with blender and scripts like the offline prim builder and the sculotie script are most helpfull.

i tested other 3d programms too but when i opened them their GUIs looked strange to me=))

the other opensource software i use for texturing sculpties is GIMP. strange GUI but really powerfull


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Yep, you're totally right, Py!. But I like Cristalle says, it might be possible to remap an object. I personally would just chop off the faces at the poles.

Sculpty Maker's dislike of triangles wouldn't be difficult to fix, but I've just not got the incentive right now. I'm gonna end up being a full time sculptmap converter creator if I'm not careful.

Here here!

Maybe i am biased or just used to the Blender now.. but I can't figure out why people have so many problems with interface.

A question to someone who has tried blender plus others..maya .. 3dsmax etc.. what is it about Blender's interface that is so difficult? can anyone help me understand with some specific critiques other than its 'non intuitive'.

The way I put it to my students is if you can learn Blender you will be able to jump into other 3d tools quite easily.. Blender is no more complicated than 3dsmax. Skills don't grow on trees and it takes time and dedication to learn any high end system.

Blender's biggest learning roadblock for me is not the interface, but its the fact that it is over-documented like many open source projects. You could spend a whole year reading and getting very confused about Blender.. as well alot of the documentation lacks the basic - basic - basics like hotkeys and menu navigation. I wouuld suggest just jumping right into Blender.. its not going to cost you anything.

Start with Dominos Add Sculpty Mesh script, drop into sculpt mode and you are off to the races! I would argue there is ****!!!!! no easier way from an starting out perspective to make a quality sculpties for SL then with Dom's scripts and sculpt mode:!!!!!****

-why

just because...