Help! Holes & protrusions in sculpties.

Hello,

I've been trying to create some scultpies from models I have made in 3ds max 7. I am using a sculptie shader in order to create the sculpt map, and everything looks fine in max - but when I apply the sculptmap in SL there are often holes or strange pinches/protrusions in the model. Capping doesn't appear to be the issue, as some sculpt maps have been exported perfectly without it.
Can anyone help me with this?

Since no one else has chimed in yet, I'll give it a stab. I'm by no means an expert on Max, though. I could count the amount of times I've used it on one hand.

If you were talking Maya, I'd say you probably just need to delete history, and freeze & reset transformations. I don't know if the same holds true for Max. It's worth exploring, though.

It might also be that your objects are not correctly UV mapped. Sculpties require a perfect UV space. If you're using polygonal spheres as your starting point, they might not be mapped the same way SL requires. Many 3D modeling apps will give a spherical UV map a sawtooth pattern across the top and bottom by default. I don't know if that's what Max does by default or not, but again, it's worth exploring.

Or it could be that you're just not modeling things in the manner required for sculpties. It is a bit different than what you'd do for any other kind of model. If you're building arbitrary meshes, it's not going to work. For the default sculpt type, you need to maintain spherical topology for each object. In other words, it needs to be a closed mesh, stitched along one side, and with two distinct poles. If you're using one of the other types (accessible via script), you need to keep the topology matching the type you're using (cylindrical, planar, or toroidal). You can deform the object into just about any visual shape you can think of, but the actual mesh topology must remain intact.

Also, you need to maintain the proper mesh size, 32x32 quads.

If none of those things are the culprit, then I'm out of ideas. As I said, I don't know much about Max. Hopefully someone more versed with it will jump in.

It's a good idea to do the same in Max unless you don't mind working with odd scaling and rotations. Before baking the sculpt map, I'm in the habit of tossing Reset X-Form on the top of the Stack. That basically resets all transforms that are in the mesh (or normalizes the transforms to the mesh, whatever you want to call it).

But it definitely sounds like a UV map thing. Here's one I threw up some time ago: Sculptie Chamfer Box with some talk about UVs for arbitrary meshes.

Mayhaps Chip will chime in with that one thing that he did using Projection. Different approach, but the UV correlation is in there.

Thank you both for replying so thoughtfully!

This will likely be the solution, since I was not aware of this before now.

However, I will try everything that was suggested, with fingers crossed