How to make "tiny" sculpties?

Here is my workflow. Export obj from zbrush, import obj into Wings3D and export sculpt map. Bring into SculptyPaint for final smoothing. (I am on a mac, so many exisiting sculptie programs are not available for me.)

I want to make sculpties that can go very small for making jewelry. I figured out one way: bring the map into photoshop and decrease lightness. This did indeed make the sculptie smaller while preserving shape and all detail. The problem is that the center of the sculptie for selecting purposes is outside the visible sculptie. This would make it difficult for making jewelly, if one can't click on the prim to select it.

Is there something else I could do in photoshop to shrink the sculptie but keep its center at the same point as the visible prim?

While in Wings, define a bounding box. That is to say, make a box, go up and save the bounding box, then delete the box. Arrange your sculpt within that box, then shrink the sculpty so it only takes up part of the box.

You'll lose more detail the smaller you go, but can still be centered, and generally plenty detailed.

ETA:: The bounding box bit is shown in one of DanielFox's video tutorials for Wings, though I can't remember which shows it best.

It should leave a dotted-line box. That is equivalent to the full bounding box. So like... the square box around the sphere prim that shows it's 'true' size or whatever. If that makes sense.

Thanks for the info. Its always good to learn more about Wings3D.

But this does not solve my problem. The sculpt map that comes out of Wing3D is rather lumpy and creased. This is why I bring it into sculptypaint where I can smooth it out to a nice clean pretty sculptie. Unfortunately, sculptiepaint rescales the map and it is no longer tiny. So I can have normal scale pretty sculpties or tiny lumpy sculpts. The tiny lumpy sculpts will not do for making jewelry.

Does anyone have any more suggestions?

o.o 'sodd...never had lumpy maps from wings,

good luck

Aren't sculpties generally too big for jewelry? The LOD would be a problem. I think you'd need to use Blender and use Domino's nifty thing that shows you the LOD at different levels.

I made some experiments with jewelry recently. I found, that it works even with LOD, but only for simple shapes. I made an asymetric earring and it worked well. but i had to reduce the sculptie resolution, otherwise my earring would have been a bit too big If you want to make much smaller things, i am afraid, you will pass a border, where it doesnt make too much sense anymore to use sculpties... If LL would add one LOD level (allow for 4048 instead of 1024 faces), then jewelry would be a serious candiadate for sculptie art... (and probably for lag... ) But i myself have not yet fully given up this idea and yes, using blender and Domino's scripts would be a good option...

If you want to make sculpties smaller while keeping them centered in the prim bounds, pull the sculptmap into Photoshop, or whatever, and decrease the contrast.

Lightening or darkening the sculptmap only shrinks the sculpt in one way or the other. Decreasing the contrast shrinks it in all directions.

This tutorial uses Levels instead of the Brightness/Contrast menu, but it does the same thing.
http://robynhuffaker.com/sculptblend/tutorials/tut_restricks.html#sec3

Yup, works perfectly, no loss of detail or lod problems. Many thanks.

Just a bit of geekery on how this works: lightening or darkening the image pulls the verts to (0,0,0) or (255,255,255), respectively. Or, the bottom left or top right of the sculpty's bounds.

Lowering the contrast brings all colors closer to neutral gray: (128,128,12, or dead center. This effectively "shrinks" the image.


Another cool hack: blurring portions of a sculpty image creates a "rounded" effect that's quite handy for organic shapes.

More cool geekery that can be done with sculptie maps in Photoshop.

You can extract the differences between sculptie maps as vectors and put them in using Linear Light. The net effect is morphs and morph targets like you find in 3d applications.

Linear Light:
Output = A + [(B-12*2]*Opacity%

Being able to manipulate sculptie maps in a vector manner using Linear Light is handy.

Of course, that same trick can be performed with an overlay and some alpha hackery.

That's neat, though!

What fun, I will have to try that. I never did figure out how to do that in Zbrush.

Bookmarking this page for later


I would love to learn how to use these sculpting tools. It's so frustrating trying to figure out Sculpy Pain ... not a typo... and I brought up the page for Zbrush and started wondering how I can get $595...

I would love to be able to sculpt some custom stuff for an outfit I'm making.

So are nanoprim sculpties possible?

Shameless Plug: Tried Prim.Blender yet? It's free!
https://sourceforge.net/projects/primdotblender/

Tutorials:
http://halfpastnull.com/?cat=35


The idea is to make working with prims (and sculpties) as painless as possible.

I still need to finish writing the tutorial for using sculpty and texture modes, but Blender's sculpting tools are really neat for basic operations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxnsmeSuUyQ

(Note the "Sculpt Mode" box at the bottom of the window)

OK, I loaded Blender, and it's a lot more intuitive to start with; but I think it has lots of key commands that I need to learn. Like rotate, etc. The tutorial on the Blender site doesn't work for the Prim.Blender.blend environment, and ... well, I'm having "bottom of the learning curve blues"

but thanks!!! This is a step in the right direction for sure!