Stuck in a sculptie rut :(

I have been working on learning sculpties for a while now. For a while I have been improving but lately I feel like I've been hitting a wall. I just can't seem to get my skills up to the next level. I see things out there that amaze me and I have no clue how people even manage to create them. I feel like I've gone as far as I seem to be able to manage without some outside help so I'm turning to you all for a little direction.

Recently I had a pretty humbling experience. I was trying to work on a project that involved making a few geometric shapes with rounded edges.

To be specific: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/DnD_Dice_Set.jpg

I figured it wouldn't be too hard, since I've made more complicated things in the past. Wow was I mistaken! It took me about 2 days to make just the tetrahedron and it still didn't come out quite right. I have no clue how I'd even start to tackle the really complicated shapes.

One thought is that I might be outgrowing my main sculptie program of choice, wings 3d. I also use Maya when I'm making more rounded and shapely items, wings is more for the stuff with sharp edges.

Since I am asking for help getting out of my rut and moving forward it probably would make sense to give a sense of where I am currently so I have attached some pictures of my current work at the bottom. The shoes were done in Maya since they're curvy and so was the book sculpture. The rest were done in Wings 3d.

I think the biggest next thing I'd like to be able to get good at is making sharp complex geometric shapes, and following from that, some useful building component sculpts like the sharp single prim bookcases, tables, and chairs I often see. Part of me is starting to think that to get the results I'm hoping for there I'm going to have to learn how to make sculpts by directly editing the map in Photoshop, but texturing is not my strength and I wouldn't even know where to begin to learn how to do that.

Any help or advice would be most gratefully appreciated.

The secret is experimentation and tinkering. The sculpt techniques I pioneered (sharp edges, multiple disconnected objects per sculpt, and LOD enhancement) were happy accidents from just messing around with sculpts. Other techniques I learned, such as how sculpts alpha sort and retention of sharp edges/texturing on different LOD levels, were the result of trying to figure out stuff in general.

As far as a modeler goes, you need one that will give you WYSIWYG, per-vertex accuracy. I use Blender and Domino's export scripts (downloadable from the SL Wiki) because they provide this for all sculpt types. I'm not sure what other modeling programs allow for this, but NURBS are almost certainly out for precise work.

With all due respect, Aminom, that's absolutely not true. I realize an awful lot of Blender users are under that impression, since Blender's implementation of NURBS is atrocious. I can assure you, though, that Maya's isn't, and as far as I know, neither is that of Max or of dedicated NURBS programs like Rhino.

I do almost all my sculpties from NURBS, and I can promise you they're very, very precise.

I think, though, that your definition of "precision" might be slightly different from mine. If you mean the per-vertex exactness required for things like your one-prim trees and gears and such, then sure, you're not gonna do that with NURBS. But that's not what NURBS are for. In my opinion, it's not even what sculpties are for (although you deserve every possible credit for having learned to force sculpties to do things they were never intended to do). But that's another discussion.

But if you mean simply creating a physically plausible shape, and then perfectly replicating the appearance of the same shape in SL, NURBS work beautifully for that. Here's an excerpt from my part in a previous discussion on the subject, if you're interested:




Anyway, Stacy, if you want a critique on your existing stuff, I'd say you're off to a great start with the modeling. Where you seem to be lacking so far is in your texturing. Your existing stuff would pop a thousand times more effectively with really nice texture bakes on them. I hate to say it, but as they're textured now, they're, for lack of better words, bland and forgettable.

I think you probably realize that, since you yourself admitted texturing is not your forte. If you're really looking for advice on where to go next, that's the direction I'd encourage you to turn. Make your weakest skill your strongest. You're a good modeler. Become a great texture artist, and you'll transition to becoming a great modeler at the same time.

In my opinion, modeling and texturing are not separate things. You can't really excel at either unless you master both.

I'm going to try hard to overlook Aminom claiming to pioneer sharp edges and LOD enhancement when they were designed into my scripts long before anyone starting using them. There's a reason my name shows up in the credits for Blender 2.46 for addMultiresLevel

I'm going to try hard not to get involved in another discussion about the comparative strengths of Blender and Maya too, though anyone who has seen my flask video will know that using subsurf provides the same interpolation and minimal vertex editing benefits that nurbs does without the confusion of editing a cage rather than the actual mesh.

What I will do is point out how difficult the rounded geometric shapes you are attempting are and also give you a tip on how to cut out a lot of the work for some of them.

One advantage to my Blender scripts is the wide range of starting points it can generate. They will do a lot of the hard work for you. As you can set the number of faces in X & Y and generate a base mesh in any of the 4 types, you can save a lot of time in getting to the basic shape.

For the D4, you would use Sphere, X = 3, Y = 2, Multires = 0. The only mesh edit is then to move the bottom pole to be level with the middle to form the bottom face. Basic tetrahedon done. As we used an odd number on X, I'd also edit the UV map and align things with the 8 x 8 LOD level.

For the D8 it's even easier, just use Sphere, X = 4, Y = 2, Multires = 0 and the basic shape is done. As we are on power of 2 values for the face count, no UV editing is needed.

For the others, just use the same idea of identifying how many faces you need in X and Y and feeding them into the sculptie options when you use add - mesh - sculpt mesh. As long as the basic shape doesn't need more than 8 x 8 faces, you'll be able to generate LOD resistant base shapes easily.

At this point you could bake the sculptie and reimport to get the full 32 x 32 faces for doing the rounding of edges, or use loop cuts and subsurf or multires as you prefer.

Where the problem comes is in rounding things out. As the poles are different to the other points, there's no simple way to get identical rounding on all edges. This is where you'll end up spending more time in modeling and whatever method you use (including nurbs in Maya) it will be tricky to get perfect results.

Its sculpty chime in time!

@OP:

I think you obviously have a good grasp of modeling, let me go over what some of your texturing options are.. keep in mind I am a certified blenderaholic (and fully with Domino on his comments) so I am biased.. but I imagine Maya has similar features to what I suggest and by all means if you have it use it! Maybe someone else can give you specifics on how to accomplish some basic texturing with Maya.

1. make a numbered grid pattern and like you say photosource and hand - touch your textures in PS or the like.
2. Project a photo-sourced or tileable texture onto your model in the 3d app - UV techniques and texture bake
3. Bake a texture for your model using materials with lighting and shadows in your 3d app
4. Hand paint directly on your 3d model - texture painting in blender - using brushes or images as brushes
5. Bake an ambient occlusion of your model in 3d app then multiply and layer your texture(s) in 2d app.. PS. (IMO this may be the easiest way to get a good end result for SL sculpties)
6. A combination of all 5 of these.



-whyroc

First let me say thank you so much for your thoughtful answers! This is definitely above and beyond the response I expected and I'm very grateful for it. You guys are like my sculptie idols and the stuff you make is what's kept inspiring me to push further so hearing from you is very awesome.

Let me take a moment to address your replies in turn in perhaps ask an additional question or two.


Aminom: Having the per vertex accuracy for things that have many completely square edges is what first motivated me to try to learn wings 3d in the first place since it does that.

I have been able to create certain one prim furniture objects like picnic tables by starting with flat grid of verticies then pulling one layer up to make the table top and then pulling faces out of the bottom of the table top to make the legs. Things like the ladders and the chairs that have simultaneously vertical and horizontal spans of wood in the backs still elude me as of yet, and your gears just add a whole new level of over my head.

You mentioned that you use blender, though don't you also still edit the map in Photoshop? As of literally last night, I have decided to switch from Wings 3d to Blender for working with sharp edges (more on that later). I also plan to continue using Maya so I would use one program or the other depending on what I'm trying to make.


Chosen: First off, the project you shared pictures of is totally amazing! In the past I have used Maya for the more shapely stuff I've made and I understand what you're saying about the flexibility of NURBS, though your pictures show that NURBS are capable of even more than I had thought. In Maya I found that I was able to push, pull, and smooth the model in ways that would make a person nuts trying in Wings.

As far as your comments about texturing, you couldn't be more right on the mark. I have always really struggled with textures, though. Honestly, I'm a really bad artist (think stick figures). I understand the mechanics of many of the basic features in Photoshop but actually using those tools to create something good is another story. Any more insight as to ways I can increase my texturing skills would be more than welcome. I'm very intimidated by it, but I know if I want to improve I have to get over it. I have a pretty good understanding of how to render lighting effects on a texture in Maya (none of the pictures I shared really shows that well but I do). So, my problem isn't with that it's with making the actual texture itself.


Domino: Your scripts for Blender are great, as I mentioned I moved to using Blender over Wings just the other night and I've already made use of them. I watched a beginning tutorial, then I used Blender to create a sculpt in about 5 minutes that would have taken me at least an hour in Wings. After that I was pretty much sold on it for good.

Right now I need to track down more Blender tutorials, I think. You seem to have a lot of useful ones but without sound to explain what's going on they are a bit fast for me at my current level of Blender experience.

Thank you for your suggestion on how to make the geometric shapes, I will give those things a try. I am still not too clear on how the who UV map bit works. In the past I've basically just avoided the problem by making all of my sculpts starting from a 32x32 sphere and just deforming it. Staring at a 32x32 sphere and trying to figure out how the heck I was going deform it into a tetrahedron was really discouraging. One thing I don't understand yet is what Multires is and how it works so I think I will have to research that. It does make me feel better that what I'm attempting is actually challenging.

I am still unsure how I'm going to manage a 20 sided figure even if I do start out with exactly the right amount of faces. It might be my geometry skills that are lacking there, I don't know. I guess I will figure that out when the time comes.


Whyroc: I do have a template to use as a grid pattern to see what goes where and do the whole paint by numbers bit (thanks to Aminom and one of his older tutorials on that subject). So now, instead of just drawing a stick figure, I do know how to make a perfectly aligned to the shape stick figure. Again, it's my lack of artistic talent that comes in here.

Using materials with lighting and shadow I do understand at least. I recently watched a blender tutorial that showed how to use the UV map to create a template on which to place photosourced textures. This may be my current best option as it stands at this time. I do have to admit though, I don't quite understand what you mean in your option number 5.

Again, thank you all for your answers. I appreciate it very much and they have already been very helpful.

Awesome Cylon, Chosen!

You nurb.

Watching the status bar in the active window can help. Once you have a bit more experience you'll find you can follow quick videos like these as easily as full tutorials. As my videos cover the entire development of the scripts, a lot of the early ones show overly complex ways of approaching things. The flask one is the best to see the current state of the scripts and my preferred way of working with them



Yeah I'd be discouraged trying that too.. Create a 5 X, 3 Y, 0 Multires sphere. Now press ctrl-t to convert the quads to triangles. Select the bottom pole and the loop above it and rotate them 35 degrees on Z. Again as this is using non power of two faces for the base, you'll get best results by editing the UV map.

The best way to understand the UV map is to look at one for the default settings. This is a grid of 32 x 32 equal sized UV faces. If you switch the multires between levels 1, 2 and 3, you'll see both the mesh and the UV grid update between 8 x 8, 16 x 16 and 32 x 32 faces. So when I talk about editing the UV map, I just mean to move whole rows of points to match the standard grid positions.

You can make this easier by creating say an 8 x 8 image and enabling "Snap to Pixels" in the UV menu. So for the D20 on an 8 x 8 image you'd snap to rows 0, 3, 5, 8 and columns 0, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8 ( where 0 is before the first pixel and 8 is after the last one ). This just ensures that the vertice match the lowest LOD positions so that the sculptie retains its shape nicely. Don't forget to remove the 8 x 8 image before baking the sculptie map though

With powers of two for the faces, you get the right alignment on the UV map automatically so don't need to manually adjust things.



It's a variation on subdivision surfaces where you can go to any multires level and edit the mesh there. It's most useful in Blender's sculpt mode, but also provides a handy way to check the LODs on sculpties as you are modeling.

On the subject of Blender sculpties and tutorials, I'd really love some feedback on the new version of my tool:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/primdotblender/

... which is hot off the presses as of a few days ago (and an update of a stable tool that's nearly 3 years old now).


I've worked hard on making sculpties in Blender even more user-friendly (naturally, I merged Domino's code), including being able to throw in regular prims, use a handy GUI that mimics SL's, copy prims, mirror prims, automatically cull images saved with duplicate sculpt maps, save and load your work in two strokes, and import the whole thing straight into SL.


Please?

I'd love to check it out, Jeffrey. I don't think I'm comfortable enough with Blender to give you any useful feedback, though.

If you'd care to apply your considerable genius to MEL, and create a similar tool for Maya, you'd be my hero from now until the end of time.

Buy me a copy of Maya and I'll consider it.

I *think* I did this part. Your suggestion had me end up with a perfect tetrahedron as you said. I even edited the UV map and moved the points to be on the 8x8 grid.

After that I baked it to a sculptie and then re-imported it to get all the verticies as you suggested I ran into a problem. There ends up being a strange smashing of verticies along the edges that were in the original mesh. This causes the edges to be not sharp and bumpy. I included a picture.

I can go through and fix it by hand by selecting the bunches of verticies and scaling them together to 0 I guess, but I want to make sure I actually need to do that and I didn't make some kind of mistake in baking my sculptie in the first place.

Late to the thread, and absolutely nothing intelligent to say except:

OMG!!!! Look at Chosen's robots!!!!!

I know, I feel that way too!

The easiest way to get a better result is to add 4 levels (amount to add depends on base mesh, but here 4 is ok) of Multires (simple) before baking. When you let my scripts do the interpolation then it's triangle based due to using a triangle fill routine. When you do it by adding multires levels then it's quad based so you should get the result you expect. Neither is wrong as such, they just have different strengths. The triangle one will give more even face sizes which can be a benefit for texture baking, whereas the multires approach gives a more sensible mesh for later editing. There's the third approach of adding a subsurf modifier too, for this model you'd also have to edit the crease values for the edges with subsurf. I'd recommend playing with all three approaches so you get a feel for when each is most useful.

As far as bumpy is concerned, you have to do a lot of work to totally eliminate bumpiness. Gaia's arch tutorial explains this the best ( /8/75/257428/1.html ). This is due to quantization effects that happen no matter how you make the sculptie. You can see the minor bumpiness you can expect on Chosen's cylon - it's particularly obvious around the chest plate and top of the head.

Just for us mere mortals is there any chance we can have an English translation of all the tech speak.

I have had some success with sculpties using blender 2.43 and 2.46. But I have noticed the UV face select option is missing in 2.46 what happened to it?

Any parts in particular? "All the tech speak" is a pretty broad request, and I've mentioned before there's enough material with sculptie making in Blender to fill a book



In 2.46 the UV Face select mode was merged into edit mode. The faces you select in edit mode will show up on the UV map. For the type of editing I mention in this thread you'd normally just select all faces on the mesh so you can see the full UV map.

Okay, taking as much advice as I could from all the helpful people here, I set off to make the first piece of the set. I decided to start with the 8 sided one because it seemed easiest (aside from the cube of course). I would appreciate any feedback, especially about the texturing. I know it can be hard to tell too much just from the picture, so if anyone is really willing to give a critique I'd be happy to send a copy in world.

Thank you all again

The forum upload seems to not be working at the moment so here is a link to the picture.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28319180@N07/2643479655/

Hi Stacy,

Looks like you have figured out this shape

The texture matches the source well but has a bit too much black for my tastes. I don't like the original dice either though. I always preferred the transparent dice.

You could hint at translucency by using a lighter green for the accent colour, it'll generally be vaguely shaped like the dice faces. Think of it as reflections from the inner faces. Having a little more white on the corners and some edges (perhaps alternate ones) would give some specular shading too.

This link shows specular highlights and translucent shading fairly well.

http://paizo.com/store/gameAids/dice/byManufacturer/generic

This link is just for fun

http://www.christies.com/Lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4205385

Thank you, great suggestions.

Once I get this set done I am planning to make more sets with different textures and am hoping to do at least one translucent set too. My thoughts for the moment are that I can do it by messing with the opacity of that layer in Photoshop while leaving the layer with the numbers on it completely opaque.

I'm using Maya to do the lighting and shadowing effects, so I'm not entirely sure if that approach will fly but I'll have to experiment.

There is a little bit of specular effect going on from the lighting in Maya but I definitely agree I'd like to have more. I'm not quite sure how to pull it off though, yet. I might try to edit the final bake directly in Photoshop but then I'm beginning to run into my own skill limitations.

Dice are a tough one to used baked textures for if you plan on rolling them. That's where my alternate edges suggestion came from as at least then it will look something like right no matter which way up it is. A low shiny setting in SL might help too.

If you do plan on rolling them, you'll need a script to get them to settle correctly as sculpties don't use their actual mesh for physics.

PS: I'll have to tell Dawn her T-Shirt is famous

As it stands now, not planning to physically roll them. They're more of for show while a script will be used to simulate the actual rolls. I'm planning to make several sets with different texturing (same models just different colors) so I think I'll stick with this texture style for now and then try to use more of the texturing suggestions and do even better on the next set.

As of now, I've managed to get the 3 easiest of the 6 models made to where I am happy with them. So far I have been using Maya. I have liked it for the shapes done so far as the nurbs seem to do well in rounding the edges the way I want without me having to do it by hand.

The harder 3 shapes are a totally different story, I'm willing to compromise the rounded edges for sharp ones here if needed, but even so after quite a bit of trying on them I have to admit I'm stuck again.

I tried Domino's suggestion of making a 5 X, 3 Y, 0 Multires sphere in Blender and rotating the bottom for the icosahedron but the result ended up all lumpy (specifically where the triangle edges were going backwards on the sides) and I ran into that vertex smush on the seams again. I tried adding multires levels as suggested (I could only add 1 level, any more and I ended up with too many faces and black holes in the UV map) but the problem persisted and it appears to be beyond my skill in Blender to fix the mesh by hand. In Maya I don't even have any idea where to start. I tried a few different approaches but none of them even remotely worked.

As for the Dodecahedron I have no clue how to approach it in either Maya or Blender. One thought I had in Maya was to create a polygon Dodecahedron around the nurbs sphere as a template and then drag the vertecies of the sphere on top of the verticies of the Dodecahedron template. Unfortunately that idea failed horribly. I am also very much unsure how to approach the d10 shape (thank you Cel for sharing with me your d10 rendition, by the way).

As always, any further suggestions for approaching these 3 elusive shapes is greatly appreciated.

I'lll send you my icosahedron - sharp, but maybe you can play with it to get the edges how you want. It was all calculated. I haven't worked out a dodecahedron, but I am intending to truncate my icosahedron, to make a buckyball, and the extreme of that truncation is a dodecahedron so ....

Thank you, your sculpt is just perfect, I wouldn't mind sharp edges in the more complicated shapes too much if I simply can't make it work with rounded ones.

I know that you created it by mathematically calculating all the verticies. The only problem is that it doesn't help me figure out how to do it myself.

Do any of our Maya experts have any hints to offer as to how one would approach crating a nurbs Icosahedron or Dodecahedron? After another day of playing with it, I'm still stuck.

I finally figured out how to make the Icosahedron (and presume I'll do the dodecahedron the same way) in Maya. I thought I'd share what I came up with in case anyone else is attempting the same thing.

It all came together when I discovered the make live object function when looking through the help files on the move tool. First I created a polygon platonic solid (they have them right in there for you to place, no need to make that yourself). Then I scaled it larger and placed a nurbs sphere inside it. Once I made the polygon object into a "live" object, I was able to use the move tool to snap verticies to the edges, faces, and verticies of the polygon I used as a template. Since the more verticies you use, the sharper the edges, I used just enough to keep the edges rounded.

The down side of this method so far is the texturing. The faces, at least the way I did it, were stretched and so the texturing was stretched as well and only allowed for low detail for the numbers. I'm not quite sure how I'll get around that one just yet but it might be possible. I included a picture.