Sculpty Maker V1.5

I love you.

Doesnt Zbrush and Wings/Ac3d have a different set up on the required vertices? I thought if I remembered correctly the wings exporter and all the tutorials tell you to use figures like 16/15, 32/31 etc whereas Zbrush tells you to use 32/33 etc

This has always bugged me, that they dont match up across the board. However it seems Maya will accept either if I recall as I have had to use Maya for sloft objects I have messed with in wings and Zbrush to get it to convert correctly as neither the Zbrush converter or the wings converter will accept them. And of course anything I have set up with Zbrush cant be converted with wings and vice versa.

ahh i suspected something like that... 'fraid the whole UV map issue exceeds my understanding, and while i could swear i was exporting .obj's that had been UV mapped, it would appear neither Wings nor AC3D was truly creating a proper UV map for those spheres.

i guess i was trying to do something with your app that it really wasn't intended to do. i'd attach an AC3D sphere but LL/SL is being way wonky today and won't allow attachments right now.

Nectare, you're right about the difference in allowed vertex counts between the various apps, but i was specifically trying to use the right count for 2k's convertor. Guess without certain UV map info provided by Zbrush it won't work even for Wings .obj's with the correct vertex count.

I'm gonna risk getting beat up off Omei, but when I tried the Wings converter the sculpties seemed to be missing a row of vertices. I counted 32 vertically and there should've been 33. I may have been hallucinating though.

Maya wont accept a Wings sphere because it needs the UV map to be present. Instead a Wings user has to import a sphere from another program. My converter should also accept the same imported sphere. I've never tested it though. I'm gonna try it later!.

...and best first post ever!

Update!:



Okay, after looking at .obj files produced by other programs like Cinema 4D I'm gonna have to declare my converter a Zbrush converter only.

I never realized just how varied the .obj file format can be. Especially where grouping info is concerned. And while I could in theory make my converter check for all the different variations of the .obj file format, it's just not a rabbit hole I wanna go down.

"Alice, you're on your own."

Now having said all, the next version I release may indeed work with .obj files from certain programs that the current version doesn't. I've made a few changes.

Heya, i just downloaded the new converter and started using it, but when i click make sculpt it exports the bmp file with a black line through it. I was not sure how this would affect the prim, if at all so I uploaded it into SL to check it out. The prim looked fine except where the black line was it was like carved in half.

I am prolly doing something wrong, but how do I get rid of the big black line, or make it so that SL does not carve right through my prim where the line is?

Hia Kia!,

Sounds like you need an extra row of vertices. If the line is running vertically down the sculptmap then increase the HDivide by 1. Or if the line is running horizontally then increase the VDivide by 1.

Cube, sphere or cylinder = 32x33
Plane = 33x33
Torus = 32x32


G'luck!

Thanks for the tip, I was able to fix the sculpt with it and it looks great!

After a bit more work in Zbrush and importing I managed to hit yet another snag. I decided to give the gear shape a whirl and try to mess around with it and uploaded a sculpt.

I used 32x32 on the first sculpt and it turned out perfect.... except a chunk of it was missing much to my dismay. I figured that once again I did not put the right number for the vertexes so I went back into Zbrush and just opened a regular gear and gave it 32x33. After converting (no black bars or anything strange on the bmp file) I found that a chunk was missing from it as well.

So I am back again asking for some insight as to what caused this and how it can be fixed.

Heres a pic of what happened with both sculpts, to the left is 32x32 and to the right is 32x33.

http://tinyurl.com/49tozg

Thanks again for all the help!

I reckon the gear should work best with a torus topology. So it may be best to create a 32x32 cog in ZBrush.

Problem solved, thankyou so much for your patience and assistance with the problems I was having. Everything is working perfectly and looking great!

Sculpty Maker V2 now available. See the original post above for info!.

Changes:

Sculpty Maker now supports multi part objects/meshes. This means you can create an object in ZBrush using multiple subtools and then have the whole thing converted with Sculpty Maker and reassembled with my new "Sculpty Rezzer".

Another big change is that a sculpties scale is now maximized for maximum quality. Flat or long skinny objects like swords will look 10x better using the new converter. But keep in mind that unless you're using the new 'Sculpty Rezzer' you'll now have to rescale your sculptmap manually after uploading.

and finally!:

and last but most definitely not least!:

Get this!!:

Ready?

I've added a maximize and minimize button to the interface!!! WOW!!

Awesome!

I have just started experimenting with multi-part sculpties and quickly realized what a chore it is to assemble the pieces in-world. Great timing.

/me runs off to try out the new features.

Q:
After converting your exported .obj file into sculptmaps using Sculpty Maker
q

-I dont have zBrush (dont even know it, but can this tool take any *.obj file and create a bmp-map ? -or is it restricted to .obj files made with zBrush ?
tyia.
ab

Hi!,

I wish I could say that it'll work with any .obj file, but after testing it on a Cinema 4D object I learnt that the structure of an .obj file can differ from one program to the next. But it's quite possible that there are other programs that use the same layout as ZBrush.

Ok thanks, i gues a test should be done
BR ab

Just a little update:

I've released yet another version with a couple of changes.

-- Objects mirrored in ZBrush are no longer inside out after uploading to SL.

-- Added an option to prevent scaling of objects. This is ideal for creating frame based animations.




Here's some tips on how to create animations within ZBrush:

Because Sculpty Maker can now handle multipart objects it's now much easier to create animations.

I've attached a ZBrush .ztl file to this post that demonstrates how to create an animation sequence using several SubTools.

Steps to follow:

Step 1:
Load the attached file into ZBrush and click on the SubTool panel down the righthand side and you'll be able to see all the subtools that go to make up our animation. It's not really an animation sequence, it's actually just several clones of the same object modified slightly using the Defomation panel.

Step 2:
Merge all the subtools together into a single object using ZBrush's SubTool Master plugin and export it.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=057154

Step 3.
Convert the exported object using Sculpty Maker with the 'Scale' and 'Center Axis' options disabled. Sculpty Maker will break the merged object down into its component parts and convert them into sculptmaps with a shared scale.

Step 4.
Upload the resulting sculptmaps into SL and drop them all into a prim along with this script:

http://www.mediafire.com/?vbctqoymmtd

(Sorry, I tried to quote the script in this post but it was messed up)


If all went to plan, you should should now see a strange blob type thing slowly waving back and forth.


Note that it's probably best not to use the lossless option when uploading sculptmaps that are intended for animation. Because of some strange bug relating to small lossless images the sculpties can sometimes take seemingly forever to fully rez.


Forum attachments broke for now so the ZBrush example file is here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?4zm5hitxuuw

Since I'm on the teen grid I can't ask you for the Sculpty Rezzer in-world. Is it open-source? If so, it would be great if you could you post the script(s?) in here.

I love the Sculpty Maker! So far it's worked perfectly. Thanks a bunch.

2k, you rock! You've just completed my wish list for a zBrush object converter. Can't wait to try out the new animated sculptmap feature.

Wow. 2K, you are almost reading my mind (of course, said mind is in large print with lots of colourful pictures, but still...)

This is precisely what I need for some animation projects I've been working on. Good tip about the lossless, btw, as I think that's been causing some intermittent issues for me: I use Vlad's technique of preloading the textures by putting the sculptmaps on a tiny prim, but even so, every so often the sculpt bloats up , making animations more complex than two or three frames a tad "dicey"


Edit:


Yay! Sculpty fish animations combined with swarm modeling:

http://www.wegame.com/watch/Fish_School_Rezzer/

http://www.mediafire.com/?nh1yjwimy3j

1. Create a regular prim sphere and name it 'Sculpty Rezzer' and drop the provided 'Sculpty Rezzer' script into the sphere.

2. Create a cube and name it 'Section' and drop the provided 'Section' script into it. Then finally drop the 'Section' cube into 'Sculpty Rezzer' sphere.

You're good to go!

Very nice!

You could also try making the fishes tails a seperate sculpty and have their tails rotate back and forth using llSetRot(). It should give a much smoother animation effect.

But in an ideal virtual world the frame flipping method would always come out on top. Who knows, maybe one day SL might be that world.

Perhaps LL will make it so that we can drop a gif animation onto a sculpty. I'm not convinced that having a script manually frame flipping is the way to go. To get smooth motion would mean the script executing every twentieth of a second. I've made a script that does this but it may be a little demanding on system resources. LL added delays into their functions to prevent people from abusing the sims. So it's probably a little naughty to get around those delays as the workarounds are notoriously convoluted and therefore quite demanding on sim performance.

Anyway, nice fish!

I would dearly love to see LL relax some of those arbitrary delays when Mono is finished... Seems to me that if Mono were in general less processor intensive than equivalent LSL, then there should be some wiggle room to do that, though I strongly suspect that the delays will remain as they are. At least our workarounds will probably be smoother

BTW, love that fish swarm! Neat stuff!

.

You have a script that can create a 20 fps??? Please, oh please oh please share!!

Right now, I am hard pressed to do more that a .4 sec interval. Yes, the wiki says .2, but playing about with it, I find at that speed, it becomes unreliable. The commands seem to get "queued", and will persist for a while even after the animation should stop (as they catch up).

I thought about the rotation, but the beauty of animated sculpts (when they work) is fluidity. Rather than just having the tail sweep back and forth, I can have the fins bend as if they are moving through the water. But with perhaps three frames a second, that is hardly as smooth looking as I'd like....

Still, this is all SL. Your new controls on the exporter make what we CAN do much easier!

I really liked the old lean pre-minimize-and-maximize version. It's a shame to see it turned into bloatware with frivolous features like a minimize and maximize button.

That's a joke.