Help me fix this? Random Sculpty Spikes?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MKU9HlfWSFE

I made a video to explain whats happening because trying to explain it with voice is hard.
In MAYA i build a random shape, and when I upload it into SL or preview it it will have these random spikes that fly out to a random point.

The spikes appear to be coming from the poles. Those chisel things that you mentioned and said that you would leave for later.

A sphere has poles, north and south if you will. The poles come together at points. This means that you can't have quads, but you get triangles at the poles. Those triangles are the chisel things along the top and bottom of the exported sculpty map.

If you look at the UV of your object, you should be able to see the chisel things. The missing UV space, the triangle chisels, should be clearly visible. Those missing triangles need to be filled in. Since those triangle chisels pieces are missing, they are being filled in with either pure black or pure white - looks like pure black in the vid. So, those points of the sculptie mesh are begin chucked to RGB(0,0,0), which is one of the corners of the bounding box. Hence, spike from the the pole to the corner.

Actually, once you get it into SL, looks like being filled with pure white. Either way, you need to fill in those missing triangles.

Jeez. Does that make sense?

You've got several problems, actually:

1. As Abu pointed out, your UV setup is incorrect. That's the cause of those spike-like protrusions. The black areas of the canvas are causing half the vertices at each pole to be in the wrong places.

Sculpties require a perfect UV space, all quads. But since you're starting with a polygonal sphere, a perfect UV space is not what you're creating. By default, Maya builds poly spheres with tris for the top and bottom rows of faces, not quads (because quads would be geometrically redundant). The presence of the tris is why your textures are displaying that sawtooth pattern on the top and bottom. Each colored tooth represents one tri. Each black tooth represents the missing half of what would otherwise be a quad.

With polygons, the easiest way to solve the problem is simply to avoid it. Start with a cylinder (sans endcaps) instead of a sphere. Since capless cylinders are made entirely of quads by default, you automatically get that perfect UV space that you need. Then, to form your poles, simply snap the top and bottom rows of vertices to the center.


2. You'd be much better off using NURBS than polygons. The sculpty exporter is optimized for NURBS, and is far less accurate with polygons. Start with a NUBS sphere, and you'll always have better results.

If you're not experienced with NURBS modeling, it will just take a little getting used to. It's a slightly different mindset from poly modeling.

NURBS spheres will solve your UV problem too, by the way. NURBS, by definition, always have a perfect UV space.


3. NEVER make your sculpt map 1024x1024. You gain absolutely nothing by doing that, and you lose quite a bit. Make your maps 64x64, always, and then upload them losslessly.


4. You must remove history and transformation information from your objects before you export your sculpt maps. Otherwise, you're destined for problems. Before you export, hit Edit -> Delete by type -> History, then Modify -> Freeze Transformations, then Modify -> Reset Transformations, and then once more Edit -> Delete by type -> History.


5. It's a good idea to put the exporter script on your shelf as a button, so you don't have to drag it in every time. See this thread for detailed instructions on how to do that, and for some tips on NURBS modeling: /8/06/257778/1.html

Hope that helps.

hey to all who sent in their help thanks a bunch, looking at some of the other links on this topic that gave other ideas helped me out . Thanks again!

Greatest lessons learned.

-Save as bmp or tgf (or wahtever it is LOL)

-do these steps
Edit -> Delete by type -> History
Modify -> Freeze Transformations
Modify -> Reset transformations
Edit -> Delete by type -> History

-and save in a good clean 64x64 size



THANKS GUYZ