Sculpty map is already deformed IN Blender

I am building the start of a simple foot for a parasol in Blender-Primstar. It's a sculpty cylinder with 16x 64y faces (2-multires) and I've created a few seperate parts by scaling down rows of vertices to zero. So nothing unusual, I think.

Then I baked the sculpt map at 32x128 pixels. When I imported it in SL it looked all deformed. I thought it was the SL import. But then I imported the same sculpt map into Blender again, and much to my surprise it was also deformed! Many vertices are messed up. So the baked sculpt map itself is not okay.

Here's the picture: above = good, below = deformed.



What am I doing wrong?

You aren't doing anything wrong. You are falling into the space resolution pitfall. Remember, that along each axis of a sculptie you have only 256 evenly distributed points in space which can be used for the sculpty (limit due to the way how sculpties are constructed using an RGB image as transport medium). So you have created very tiny sub-objects and you get fully hit by the effect. You even can see the grid in the middle of the lower right image where you quickly can see that for the central cylinder you have only a grid of 7*7 meshpoints available. And that is too few to make a good arbitrary cylinder.

The only way to get out of this mess is to align your meshpoints regarding the grid. You can achieve much better results but it will take you some time to do it. And just to say that: There is no way around this! Don't try to use sculptmaps of higher resolution! It won't help...

Oh boy Gaia, I understand and I see it too now. Obviously that's the price to pay for making a complex sculpty cylinder object. I guess that's why most 1 prim sculpties with many seperated parts all use rectangular forms (cylinder with 4x faces).

But what do you mean with this:

How do I do that and where? Is it in one of your tutorials? Thanks ... again!!

[edit:] Ahh, you mean the Floor grid in the Blender 3D window? I see what you mean with the 7*7 meshpoints. It really looks like the vertices search their way to the nearest pixel and thus get deformed. Is this what you mean? So i should manually adjust the mesh to the Blender Floor grid as if each grid piece is sort of a pixel? It won't be a perfect cylinder shape, but more like a octagon (??) lol, don't know the word. I mean: a cylinder with just 8 faces hehe.

The basics of "precise sculpting" are here:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/16/the-arch-example/

It takes a long time to make a smooth arch, but the end result is not bad no ?

BTW: Meanwhile i have learned that you can get along with less smooth objects when you know how to bake the textures to compensate the roughness of the sculpties. But in your case the only way i see, is to arrange the mesh points carefully and find shapes which match the grid. I mean, maybe do not try to make a cylinder, make more squary elements, appy a bit of bevel to avoid making them square...

This is a good replacement for a cylindrical shape and it uses only 4*4 grid points. If the texturing is done right, it looks almost like a cylinder (even from very close):

There are a lot of tricks to make tiny sculpts look good But it is quite a bit of work to get there

Yes! I already edited my post above, and I think that is what you mean, right?

yes a cylinder with 8 faces, an octagon

I found this idea elsewhere but can't find the link to give credit so I'll reproduce the general idea here.

For total accuracy, as Gaia said, the verts must be aligned to the grid.
One way to do this is to set the grid up so it matches the sculpt map rather than the sculpt aligning to the default grid.

Bring up the view properties: 3D window 'View' Menu: > View Properties
Show the Transform properties: In Object Mode (cursor over 3d window) : press N



Set the numbers as shown.
The grid may appear to disappear but scroll in with the mouse-wheel to show the grid.
Now the sculpt has been stretched to the grid size, goto edit mode, press 'A' to select all and press SHIFT + S and select 'Align - Grid'
Isn't perfect but does make the sculpt better.
May need some tweaking if verts have moved too far but once cleaned up, it will be exactly the same in Blender when imported back in. It will keep all verts in place.

Oh, and you may want to keep this as default for creating sculpties.
Open a new Blender, throw in a PrimStar cylinder, set the options shown and press CTL + U to save as default setup.

This isn't a rule, it's an option. YMMV, HTH etc etc...

isn't it better to set dim-x, dim-y, dim-z to 2.55 each ? then the mesh points can be directly adjusted to the grid. BTW the idea is described in our arch-example tutorial

You may be right Gaia.
I probably have it wrong as usual as I couldn't find the link again.
I saw it somewhere else though.

So try it with 2.55 instead.

Apologize. I did not want to claim that this idea was originated by me. So it is very probable, that others have reported this trick independently.