Rhinoceros?

I don't know if anyone here has used the program Rhinoceros, but I was wondering if there was a way to export from Rhino to sculpties.. any sort of plugin or anything that would work for this..


website for the program itself is
rhino3d.com

I honestly wouldn't bother. Rhino is a NURBS based program--I'm not even sure if that's feasible or possible to export Rhino to a format suitable to your needs.

Use Blender if you want a free program. Or Wings3D.

If you have Maya or Max...you're even better off.

Okies thanks.. wasn't sure. I'm just more used to Rhino than anything ^^

I'm getting used to blender now, if slowly lol.. thankies ^^

I believe you can export to .obj from Rhino (if not, there is a plugin), so it should be possible to export to obj, import to Wings and then export to sculpty. I know Wings also imports other filetypes and there surely is a combination that should work.

Having said that, and I'm very interested in this as well, the problem is the number of polys or faces or whatever. Sculptys are 32x32 (I think... brain not working... Got Season 6 of Scrubs yesterday and was up way too late watching it) and I know wings only works off of multiples of that.

I'd be interested to find out if there's a program that'll take an obj and get it sculpty-ready...

Anyone?

You are so totally my hero.. thanks ^^

Is it completely shallow to tell you that I love you, 2k?

Thank you for that.

Michael, I'm wondering why you think NURBS are bad for sculpties. NURBS are the surface type that sculpties were originally designed for. I've never used Rhino specifically, but I do make ALL my sculpties out of NURBS (in Maya). I see no reason in principle why Rhino wouldn't work.

I'm fairly certian the only reason Blender users tend to make sculpties out of polys is just because Blender's implementation of NURBS is pretty awful. And as for Wings, it can't do NURBS at all. That establishes the two big freebies as poly-only for sculpties, but it doesn't mean sculpties themselves are poly-only. NURBS work great, as long as you're using a program that implements them properly.

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I have worked with Rhino for several years and was pleased to discover that it can create quiet useful organic shapes that convert nicely using 3dm2sculpt.
It is however very important to work only with nurbs spheres, this may at first hand seem very limiting but once you get used to the techniques you can get some very controlled shapes.
The secret is to use the tools on the Transform menu, in particular the Cage Edit function , Bend & taper.
Working with a nurbs skin allows you to influence areas of an object using a cage frame and by deforming and then creating a new frame to further refine the surface you can usually get a nice mix of flats and curves.
Don't cut or break up your shape otherwise the 3dm converter just creates loads of useless surfaces that are very expensive to upload and have all sorts of stray artifacts.
There does come a time when you want to crease, stitch or indent your object and here I've been experimenting with a very cheap little program called Digital Clay that works much the same way as Zbrush but with a far easier user interface. It's a bit of a fuss getting from one to the other and the best way is to convert to sculptie and then load into Wings and export again, ( keeps the polygon count right). I haven't done much this way but it has a 15 day free trial so is worth googling and playing with.

Interesting. I've never used Rhino, but what you're describing sounds very much like using deformers in Maya. Your "Cage Edit" sounds like a lattice deformer. "Taper" sounds like maybe the equivalent of a flare deformer. "Bend" of course sounds like a bend deformer.


In Maya, if you want to crease a NURBS surface, you simply overlap nearby veritces. Three vertices snapped to the same location will form a hard edge. Two or Three in close proximity, but not exactly in the same spot, will form a tightly rounded edge (a soft crease). Can you not do the same in Rhino? These techniques are standard practice for NURBS modeling, at least as far as I've ever known. I'd be surprised if Rhino doesn't work the same way.

Actually I use polys in Blender as it's WYSIWYG as far as sculpties are concerned. By using multires I can check each LOD during the modeling process. You can use nurbs to create them, but the sculpties themselves are polygons.

Well, technically speaking, everything displayed on-screen is polys, even NURBS models. The concerns are how accurately does the program in question do the NURBS math when deciding how to draw the object out of tris on-screen, and how well will the results of that math translate to other applications. Where Blender is concerned, unfortunately the answer two both questions is not very well. Maya has three different ways to display NURBS on-screen, one of which matches perfectly with the way sculpties tesselate (not counting the implementation errors within SL itself, of course, which occur equally whether the sculpty was sourced from NURBS or polys, and which obviously none of us can do anything about but Qarl). I would imagine that Rhino, as a dedicated NURBS program, would probably be able to do the same thing, but since I've never used it, I don't know.

I have been using Rhino for a few years now. I am very good at it if I may say so myself. I have been making products for Poser software. I model in nurbs, but for my finished product, I convert the nurbs object to mesh. Poser uses .obj so I export the mesh to that format. I have a lot of other formats to save the mesh to as well as 3DMax.

For those who don't know the nurbs model is very exact model. I like nurbs because it appeals to how my mind works. Nurbs models are most useful for prototyping and designing real world products - Meshes are less exact and don't need to be because they are used for entertainment industry.

I am here today and for the first time in the SL forum to find out what I need to know to convert meshes I make in Rhino for usage in this game.

I believe rhino can save/export to a .3dm file. If so then its super easy. There is a free app called 3dm2sculpt (Its in the sticky at the top of the forum about sculpty tools) that can make any 3dm file into one or more sculpties. All sculpties are a single face, and if 3dm2sculpt notices more than one face, it will export each as a seperate sculpty.

Also, all sculpties will be read at a 32x32 level. So, when you're making it you have to get used to which vertices and such will be used, as not all will. Best way to learn is to try in my opinion

In addition to a sphere, you can also create a tube, provided that said tube starts and ends with a taper to a point. In effect this is the same as a sphere stretched out into a tube as the UV knots are similarly arranged.

I have tried to create a loft but get a split artifact in the model which coincides exactly with those pixels of the sculpty which are the topmost row. Now I had arranged the UV knots of my lofted model to similarly equate with a deformed sphere. But still I get that split artifact.

If I feed a lofted *.3dm into 3dm2sculpt, so as to generate a sculpty having said artifact, import said sculpty into SculptyPaint and export as *.obj then re-view the *.obj in Rhino, then I can see the same split-artifact evident in the model.

If from within SculptyPaint I change the model from sphere to torus and re-export to *obj again, then Rhino shows the split as being repaired. But if then from SculptyPaint having still the same as before and output a PNG for the sculpty, then the sculpty retains the artifact.

It is all very annoying. What I'm trying to make is a pagoda roof that has exactly the right kind of curves. And working with CageEdit on a sphere is only quasi-approximate to what I want from this sculpty business.

I think it is a slight bug in 3dm2sculpt itself. It think this because viewing the results in SculptyPaint I can trace the edge of the artifact and always it is the topmost row of pixels.

I have twice tried to contact the author, Cindy Crabgrass, to see if she might enlighten either myself or McNeel Assoc so that Rhino might fully support sculpties. I've only been waiting a little while for her to respond. I am hoping she will. I will gladly pay her $100 USD for her efforts in this direction. Anybody else care to chip in?

Meanwhile, I did succeed in an exchange of emails with Bob McNeel, CEO of the company that produces Rhino and they very kindly sent me a SculptedPrim plugin for Rhino that will open and display sculpties. But it will not yet export them.

Think, people, wouldn't that be great? Whoever is a sculpty guru and is willing to consult with McNeel to get this going, we might just be able to enjoy a pure Rhino sculpty generator.