Different approach to Sculpt Textures

I want to quickly run past you all what I've been working on. Instead of teaching myself Blender or going out and buying Maya (or choosing any of the other possible options along those lines) I decided to go for making a very basic set of tools for Sculpt Texture generation. Instead of jumping into 3D apps I'm using PHP to generate a JPG from a series of points. My first test was taking 16 radii and revolving them around the z-axis, this proved the idea possible but the output was a little rough (a solution to which is to apply a blur effect to the texture using a graphics app, something I'll need to read up on doing in PHP).

As I continue to work on this I'm updating the webpage www.nandnerd.info/sculpty.php so if you take a look and it's not working then I'm probably in the process of working on it. I'll try and make working copies as and when I create useful functions. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Wow, thats a real nerd thing

Reminds me of Modeling in PovRay.

Shame on me, I even understood the 7400 quad-2-input-NAND Thing on the website

I was thinking along the lines of a tool sort of like the beloved terrain editor. That is, you rez a plain sculpty, and then you bash on it here and there to make dents, or you pull on it here and there to make bumps. Eventually, you end up with a banana.

...and then, maybe some spray paint...Some flies can get stuck in it while it dries.

That makes two people who understood it.



It would be entirely possible to put the interface for such a tool in SL, with prims to mark waypoints and the data passed onto a PHP script (or similar) which turns it into the Sculpt Texture. Uploading to SL would still be manual until we can reference the Sculpt Texture to an URL.

Wow nand, that's the best argument against Blender I've ever heard. "Rather than teach myself Blender, I'm gonna go do a ton of complex math, because that's probably easier." I don't like Blender either, but Blender vs. lots of math, that's a thinker. I gotta say, I'd probably opt for Blender in that situation, so I think you have me beat.

Anyway, on a serious note, I'm way impressed by your creative thinking on this. Really cool. I can't pretend to understand it very well, but it's definitely impressive.

You're absolutely right, little to no logic went into my decision however, now that I have started it doesn't seem that hard, for example the maths involved in my first tool "revolve" simply took a radius value and produced the x and y values (Red and Green) using sin and cos, revolving the line around the point x=127, y=127.

Have I convinced you that the maths isn't that difficult or convinced myself that I'm way too geeky?

If it's any consolation, I went straight to writing python programs that write the output from parametric equations directly to bmp files. I don't know how to get blender etc. to do the things I want to do!

It's not Seifert I wouldn't have expected any less of you
If you're willing to I'd like to see your python code with a view to porting it to PHP.

Edit: I shouldn't attempt humor, especially on a Monday morning. No offence intended Seifert.