Anyone know how to convert a mesh to the right sculpty vertices?

Hey guys,
I'd really like to take any kind of mesh i have and just convert that to a sculpty shape. Preferable .obj 1st. I just want it to become the right vertices ect so i can skip trying to make the shape from scratch all the time. I've seen several sculpties in SL that were unlikely made from scratch. If i could just have a way of doing this, it would really make my day, well ok not just my day like my year at least lol.

I don't think, that you can find an easy solution, at least not for arbitrary meshes. There are some tools, which might help you to get along your way a little faster, but in general i think, that sculpted prims have very special characteristics, which typically do not apply to any "standard objects".

For blender there is a "shrinkwrap modifier" available, which wraps an existing mesh (e.g. a sculpty sphere) around another object. The results are sometimes a good starting point, but in all cases where i used it, i had to add significant manual work afterwards in order to get what i want...

Objects can be converted, but not without a LOT of work. Usually it involves taking an SL friendly mesh that must contain exactly 1024 vertices at it's lowest subdivision level and shrinkwrapping it to the mesh you wish to duplicate. Most complicated sculpties in SL are a combination of several sculpted prims to compensate for the vertice count and keep some semblence of detail. In short, learn the program you're using and how you can project/shrink one object onto another and be prepared to do this several times if it's a detailed model as you'll have to do it in sections.

How good are your UV mapping skills?

Any mesh can be converted to sculpties by creating a UV map that assigns parts of the mesh to continuous rectangles. Recent development versions of Primstar (0.9.2 or later) support meshes with faces assigned to multiple sculpt maps and perform a bake that will allow the mesh to align correctly as multiple sculpties.

As each sculptie is essentially a rectangular grid of faces, you need to create a UV map that covers one or more of these rectangles. This process often takes longer than recreating the model with this UV map in mind, which is why most people just remodel.

Primstar 0.9.3 introduced an easier .obj import for sculpties, the meshes in the .obj file still require a correct UV map though.

to be totally correct, it is 1024 faces in the highest subdivision level. But even that is not entirely true any more. Nowadays, meshes can have less, than 1024 faces. The smallest sculpty whichever i could successfully import into SL had only 16 faces... (but beware: There is a precision issue with small sculpt maps pending since a few months...)

Gaia, thanks for pointing that out. I'll try experimenting with different sizes. My workflow has been baking the sculpt map at 1024 faces then sub-d'ing much higher to get the detail in the texture map.

thanks for your help guys I can try playing with the shrink wrap, thats a good idea.

Blender's "retopo" tool can be used as well in some situations.

I'm been playing around with the shrink wrap tool. It helps quite a bit but i still beleive there is a tool out there that could make a more acurate replica. How was the "noob" sculpted object built? I am curious. I know that could not be purely from scratch nor could it be from shrinkwrap.

ok shrink wrap is crap, it comes out a mess when converted to a sculpty, i can make better on my own than that. Isn't there a better way? How was the noob sculpty formed? I can't beleive someone could make that just from spheres, its too good. What is the secret? I don't care what program i would have to get.

This could easily do the noob....but it would still take some effort and texturing.

http://blip.tv/file/887983

Vlad Bjornson's website contains a lot of useful info for Zbrush use in Secondlife

http://www.shiny-life.com/

Thank you very much I appreciate the info.