Tips of sculptie off center?!

Hi all -

I hadn't noticed this until i got to the texturing stage of something I've been working on... but perhaps you can see my problem based on the attached snapshot.

As you can see, the center or the nose here keeps going off-center.. and it is posing some major problems when it comes to texturing.

How can I avoid this? The rest of the sculpt is symetrical along that axis.

//edit: i should also note that the mesh itself doesn't look like this in blender. it looks completely symetrical

I can't see the picture since my forum account is STILL broken (Lindens, this really isn't funny anymore), but what I can tell you (unfortunately) is that it's not uncommon for sculpties to come out off center. It has to do with the way the surface is sampled for export. It's not a true copy of the surface shape, but an approximation.

Last I heard, LL was working on improved centering. Until then, the only work around is to offset your texture as best you can.

Blaaaah. Is there a JIRA listing for this?

I've noticed it only does this between the tip and the first band of vertices... i suppose i could have tried to minimize this problem by grouping more vertices towards the tips... but hindsight is 20/20 So much of this sculpty has already been changed beyond allowing for this.

Anyhow - Thanks Chosen!

If you use Blender you might find my importer at /8/60/203571/1.html useful for texture mapping. When you import a sculptie with it, it does the same distortion as SL does. By doing your texturing on an imported sculptie rather than the original mesh you should get a better texture bake result.

Are you using Blender's "sculpt mode" to create sculpted prims? If so I think I might know why it could be off center so much with the texture.

When you sculpt and mirror an axis with the sculpt mode it doesn't always keep things perfectly symmetrical, especially when trying to do more complex shapes. The problem is that it doesn't divide the vertices perfectly.

For example, you have vertices that start off looking like this, with the | being the center:

._._._._|_._._._.

But when you start to stretch & pull something vertices can get pulled over slightly leading to:

._._.__|._._._._.

What you end up with is a face that's more stretched trying to create the same shape as the other side. That results in stretched textures, I had the problem a few times myself when trying to make things using only sculpt mode until I switched back to more reliable vertex modeling using sculpt mode only for touch ups.

I can't really tell if the "nose" is flat against the body or protruding out very well. Anyway, this is the only explanation I can think of.

I've never had any noticeable centering problems myself fortunately.

Actually Chosen Few, it seems that, due to your inability to see the image, you've missed what happened here. (Since I wrote this, others came in and saw it, but I'm not sure whether they get it either, so I'll submit this anyway....) It's an issue with the poles of the spherically-mapped prim, which have essentially gone missing. A point from the row just before the pole ends up substituting for that pole.

Personally I was unaware that this was still happening, but then I haven't been following sculpted prim behavior as well as I ought to. I might wanna ask what's up with that at the next Sculptie Dev meeting.

To this issue, I would think the workaround is to attempt to sculpt with one less row, bunching the last row of points into a pole. I'm sure that it would fix the issue, but not so sure whether it's the only fix.

I have been starting off with a Nurb sphere, subdividing as necessary, and manipulating size & rotation based on axis, making sure to keep symetry by selecting full out bands of vertices using 'B' while viewing the model from a flat view. When I have a rough idea of what I want, I convert to mesh and do further manipulation to better define edges and shapes.

Please do - any fixes for this would be much appreciated.


Alrighty - will keep it in mind for all further sculpts.


Thanks all!

I'm still trying to track down the exact cause of the off centre poles, but think the way images are baked in blender may be the major problem. The black spots you see with the Bake Margin set to 0 show where Blender extends the nearby colours. These tend to be mainly at the poles. Of course in a sculpty, the next row along is generally further out, so this colour extension pulls the pole outwards. I think the solution is in coding an exporter rather than using texture baking, it's on my todo list

A quick and dirty fix is to touch up the image by setting red & green to 50% at the halfway mark of top and bottom rows of the sculpty map. on a 64 x 64 map it's the 33rd pixel ( most apps count 0 as first pixel so look for 32), though you can just do the entire row if you don't want to count

@Domino > i'm not sure I understand what you mean as far as 50% red & green. I can locate the center of the row just fine... but wonder if you mean adjusting the channels. The pole in question shows up as a bluish violet on my sculpty map.

Red & Green are the X & Y vertex position with blue being Z. 50% grey is the middle of the sculptie, but we don't want to move the Z co-ordinate, so just alter the red & green channels and set them to 50%, so pixel color is 128,128,Z

It was the method of baking sculpties in Blender that was a major problem. I've added a sculptie baker to my Blender scripts in the other thread. You should get far better results using it