Tutorial: Creating Sculpties From Arbitrary Meshes in 3ds Max 8/9

For everyone who's been asking how I created the one prim head scultpie shown in the wiki, here's a tutorial on how it was done. Enjoy!

http://home.comcast.net/~pixelforgeltd/Tutorial.htm

This kind of thing will make it possible for everybody to able to create great art in SL.

It's a good thing!. Art should be about expressing ideas and capturing moments, not about spending a lifetime chipping away at a block of marble.

Thanks, Chip!

I'm really looking forward to the second part: Method 2: The Conform Method!

Thank you Chip!

Hey Chip, just one correction. In Max 9 at least, there's a handy button in the projection modifier rollout labeled "Reset" right under the Auto-Wrap settings that will snap the projection cage back to a sphere.

Hope that helps...I've gone to doing sculpties in Wings for now but I'll be awaiting part two of your tutorial.

Yep, I've used that too. The only gotcha is that you have to reset immediately. Seems like if I did anything (like expanding the cage) before pressing reset, then reset didn't bring the cage back to a sphere.

I never noticed that. Amazing how I can look at a dialog box 1000 times and never register part of it in my gray matter. Thanks for the heads up! I'm not sure how soon I'll have time to do part two. I'm guessing it won't be until next week some time.

awesome you're a champion chip

GREAT TUTORIAL CHIP! I can´t wait to come back home and test it!

Just a question:
A sphere with 33 segments has 497 vertex and 990 triangles. As far as I know, every pixel in a sculpt texture represents a vertex (not a triangle).
So wouldn´t be more correct to use a sphere with 46 segments (1014 vertex)?

Please post your second tutorial soon, or if you don´t have enough time give us some clues at least...
Thanks for taking the time to write this cool tutorial.

Is there a method for those of us who only have max7?

When I was first playing with this technique I used a sphere with 34 segments (1088 polygons and 546 vertices). More often than not it would create a gash in the sculptie at the vertical seam. Using a sphere with 33 segments seemed to correct that problem. It still occurs now and then but not nearly as often. I haven't tried using a sphere more detailed than that so if you do, please report back how it affects the results. My initial experiments seemed to indicate that it works better to use a mesh with less detail than an actual sculptie. The projection modifier works by polygon rather than by vertex, so no matter what you do with this particular method, the sculpt map will represent polys rather than vertices, even though SL will interpret it as vertices.

If you need your sculptie to have precise vertex placement this probably isn't the best method to use. For that you'd be better off creating a base mesh and modeling it manually. I'll be covering that in part two - in that method I start with a manually created base mesh, use conform to wrap it around the target mesh, and then manually edit the result. The sculpt map is then rendered from that mesh rather than with a projection. The projection is used only to generate the texture map.

I'm still learning like everyone else so there might be much better and more accurate ways to apply this technique that I haven't discovered yet.

Edit: Okay, just tried it with a sphere with 46 segs. There was no appreciable difference in quality. That makes sense, actually. The projection modifier renders each polygon as if it were a seperate little image and stitches them all together. The color of the sculpt map isn't really affected by the complexity of the cage much. It might make a very big difference in the conform method though and I'll definitely test it out before I write part two.

The second part of the tutorial will work in Max 7, with the exception of generating the texture map.

lovely tutorial chip, my only question is why not just use the padding option while baking instead of the solidify plugin? Is there actually some major difference in output at the poles with this plugin? Just curious

The reason is simple. I hadn't thought of it.

Thanks for the tutorial Chip.

I am using Max 9, but I think I must be doing something wrong.

The image attached is what I generate during the Render to Texture phase. Any thoughts what I might have missed?

Cheers,

Iron.

It looks like you have automatic unwrapping selected instead of a specific mapping channel, try checking your render to texture dialog settings.

Cheers, that was it.

That's what it looks like to me too. Also, make sure you have the projection modifier enabled in the render to texture settings as well. Looks like you're just getting the sphere's texture instead of the target mesh.

I was actually just rendering a sphere.

Hi I followed every step of ur tutorial couse I wanted to make a sculptie collar for a shirt but thats the result and I dunno what went wrong , can u help me ? ....

http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/4151/17672369sw2.jpg

You have automatic UV unwrap enabled instead of baking out the existing UV channel 1.

Thanks for the great tutorial. Any word yet when "Method Two: The Conform Method " is going to be released?

My guess would be some time shortly after the holidays, provided I find the motivation

I'm really glad this turned out to be so simple.

lee

Chip, nice tutorial. I'll run through it tonight...

Hey, will this work with Max 8 as well?