Hexagon Sculpties: any success?

I took a gamble and bought Hexagon by Daz3d, due to its native SL Sculpty support, and been a little difficult...First off, there's a (now official) bug that causes much of the functionality to hang if you leave the window in OSX Leopard. Since i was reading the manual, i had to leave the window so....osx-only users might want to wait for a patch.

I installed the Windows version on my PC and it works. But the sculpty exports look a bit like when sculpties were a new thing here... jagged where it should be smooth, smooth where it should be jagged, that whole bit. I used lossless compression to upload. Only seem to be able to export at 64x64 (is that enough for precision?) and there's no preview image (the texture itself appears blank)

Just wondering if this is normal new-featureisms for now, or if im missing some steps. Coming from Blender, The Hexagon GUI is well-built and extremely intuitive, Ive been able to sculpt in the app like second nature. So if it can export a nice high qualioty map, i'd be one happy avatar.

Anyone else have better luck? Or if i havent found a thread on the daz forum that regards this, any URLs are much appreciated. Thanks

Can't help with most of your questions as I have only used the demo version of Hexagaon. But...

64x64 is the preferred and recommended size for sculptmaps. Higher resolution sculptmap images don't result in higher resolution meshes in world. All sculpties have the same mesh resolution. Some are using larger sculptmaps to get around a current glitch with loading lossless sculptmaps from the cache, but once that is fixed there should be no need for anything larger than 64x64. Here's a JIRA entry on this bug:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2404

The lack of an image preview on the actual sculptmap is a feature of the Hexagon software. The exporter ads a 100% transparent alpha mask to make it harder for people to steal your sculptmap image.


I'd love to hear from some other Hexagon users who are making sculpties, too. I liked the interface and some of the features and am tempted to buy a copy. I like how you have full control over each vertice. I generally use ZBrush to create sculpties - which is a very organic, freeform modeller with almost no control over individual vertices. Might be a good combo.

I use 64x64 for nearly all of my sculpties, and with lossless upload it's enough for most uses of sculpted prims.

As an example, the sword in this picture is made entirely out of sculpted prims made from 64x64 sculptmaps, and you can see that was sufficient for a pretty decent amount of precision :




.

Thanks Vlad, and i suspected a possibility of the preview image being hidden, and yes thats a good thing. i'll try again with these textures with workarounds to see how they turn out.

Workarounds? I'm interested in any workarounds for this program as I plan on getting it tonight.

i tried increasing the sculpty texture in photoshop to 128x128 and then upload lossless, but the object appears just as it did in a 64x64 texture. I tried installing SLImage Upload, but couldnt get it to run on both my PC & Mac. I'll keep checking, and starting to bug forums at Daz as well.

I'm trying the Hexagon too.
Yes, I have the problem of smooth sculpties, but I have it too in 3D Max with projection method, and Blender is obscure for me, and don't work.

Another problem that I have with Hexagon is about the textures of the sculpties. I'm trying all imaginable methods to make that, but always the same thing happens: the sulptie is almost Ok, but the textures don't fit in the sculptie

I'm very dissapointed with that.