Sculpties are making me NUTS!

I am venturing into sculpties (need to thank the minds who brought us sculpties, and no tools to make them with less than 3 programs).

Here are the programs I am using: sometimes Rokuro to make a basic symetrical shape, then load the TGA into Blender. Now I seriously don't have lots of free time to learn Blender from top to bottom. I also have Maya 2008. Anyway, I export the TGA into .obj format, then load it into Art of Illusion (I wish AoI could just do it all). I like AoI because manipulation is SO easy.

SO...now I shape it into anything I want, and export it BACK into .obj. In theory, I should be able to load it back into Blender, and then bake it and save the sculpty texture back out... when I bake it, all I get is a block with a diagonal line that is black on one side and green, blue, or purple on the other.

I think that in some way, AoI is adding more faces or points than a sculpty can handle. Does anyone have good clean instructions that don't assume that I am a Blender or Maya expert. I have ADHD, and I get lost in a lot of the tutorials... I need A, B, C

...help?

Oh, just FYI: the OS is Ubuntu, I also have an XP box available. Wings3D does not run right on my laptop. I have Art of Illusion, Blender, POV for Linux and all plus Maya for XP. Rokuro runs in both.

It is not soo easy to create an UV map from an arbitrary object. It has been covered by Domino, look at this thread here:

/8/60/203571/1.html

But it is not necessary to forward backward your objects into 3 different programs. you can do everything in blender and it is not tooo complex. You need some days of playing around with it though. But with Domino's scripts (see thread above), you should be able to jump start in 15 minutes. You might also want to look into some tutorials. We have added some video tutorials too, look at

http://blog.machinimatrix.org

Or look into the SL wiki:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_3d_Software_Guide

You find additional material in the blender section, or even other tools, whatever your heart desires

i hope that helps a bit.

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Thanks for the response. This is where I found AoI and the others (actually found one NOT mentioned in tha Wiki article for Linux called K3D, looks like a Wings3D on steroids). I am going to look at the vid-tutorials. Like I said, and was very serious, I do have ADHD...so my creativity is incredibly high, and my attention span is like a one eyed dog in a meat packing plant...

Thanks again

Huh? All you need to make sculpties is one program. Take your pick. There are dozens that can do it.

Anyway, I really don't think it's useful to complain about the fact that there are no tools for making sculpties built into the viewer. There are likewise no built-in tools for making textures, animations, sounds, etc., but you don't see anyone complaining about that. Learning to be a digital artist means embracing lots of programs. There's no way around that.

Seriously, how complicated do you want the viewer to get? It is a fact that 90% of all people who join SL quit after 20 minutes and never come back. Most common reason given, "It was too complicated." In order for SL to become the true 3D Internet that it needs to be, the viewer needs to get much simpler, not more complex.


There's no reason to do that. If I'm not mistaken, Rokuro revolves a surface from a control curve, right? Blender can certainly do that too. There's not a single shape you can make in Rokuro that you couldn't make just as easily in Blender. It's just a question of learning how.


I would say two things to that. First, no one knows Blender from top to bottom, so don't worry about that. It can do too many things for any one person to master them all. Second, I don't blame you for being reluctant to invest a lot of time into it. Blender is a great program, but its interface is very off-putting for most people (myself included).


Wait a minute, you're saying you've got the most powerful, and arguably the most user-friendly, 3D application on the planet, and you think you need 3 or more other programs to do what you want? Dude, there's nothing Maya can't do. You've got it; use it.

Spend a few days to a few weeks going through all the Getting Started tutorials in the help file. They're really good, and they'll teach you everything you need to know to begin. Resist the temptation to skip around. Go in order, and let each lesson build on the last, just as intended. It will be well worth your time.

Once you've done that, you'll have a solid mastery of the basics. Then you'll be well equipped to learn how to make sculpties. (And yes, Maya absolutely can do the kind of revolves your used to from Rokuro.)

That's assuming, of course, you're talking about a licensed copy, and not the Personal Learning Edition. PLE is useless for sculpties, since it watermarks all renderings, including sculpt maps.


What a convoluted process. Stick with Maya or Blender from start to finish. Trust me; you'll be much happier.


Not sure what's going on there, sorry.


I have ADD myself, so I can relate. No H, though, for me, thankfully. All I can say is do whatever it takes to concentrate. If it takes you longer than it takes the average person, so be it. There's no rush. I know it's no fun to read the same paragraph 12 times just to absorb it once, because your brain is elsewhere at the time, but if we have to do that, we have to do that. Life is what it is.


Here are some tutorials:

Sculpties from NURBS in Blender by Lex Zhaoying: http://iramblesorry.blogspot.com/
Sculpty from polygons in Blender by Amanda Levitsky: http://amandalevitsky.googlepages.com/sculptedprims


For Maya, here are some instructions I posted for setting up the script as a button on your Maya shelf, along with a few pointers on shaping NURBS spheres into cylinders and cuboids: /8/06/257778/1.html#post1983492

I'm working on a detailed A-Z tutorial, but it's not ready for publication yet, sorry. If you go through those Help tutorials I mentioned earlier to learn the program, you'll know what you need to know, modeling-wise. After that, it's just a question of getting used to the specific quirks of sculpties themselves, which you'll get the hang of quickly.

Gaia, I doff my (sculpted) chapeau to you! The tutorial was EXACTLY what I needed! Thank you! Once I got the hang of it, it is (almost) as easy as making alphas.

Chosen...dude appreciate the input but LIGHTEN UP man! You were a bit rough. If I was a noob, I may be intimidated, but since I am one of the top selling designer of men's clothing in SL, I can pick the good bits out of your statements and ignore the rest

Thanks All!

I didn't mean to come across as "rough", Andru. Sorry for any misunderstandings. I did feel you were being a bit unfair with your little jab at "the minds who brought us sculpties" when it was in fact your own methodology, not theirs, that was flawed, and I didn't hesitate to say so. I didn't think my tone was "rough" or "not light", though. In any case, I'm glad you got the information you needed. Happy sculpting.








Oh, and a little food for thought. Since you're a "top selling designer", I think you'll appreciate the following, regarding the 'simpler viewer vs. more complex viewer' debate. I think it's an interesting topic, anyway. If you do as well, read on. If not, no big deal.

SL, as I said, has a 90% dropout rate, mostly because the viewer is at present too hard for most people to understand quickly enough. If it were made simple enough that even half those people were to stick around, your customer base would increase by 500%!!! In other words you'd sell five times as much as you're selling now. I don't know about you, but I sure wouldn't mind that kind of increase in my own business.

I used to think the viewer should be able to do every last thing. But when I was confronted with that 90% statistic, I realized that those of us who are in SL now are, for whatever reason, quite a bit different from the rest of the world. Complexity, while fine for us, is not what works for everyone else.

The Web was able to become mainstream because browsers are easy. Web content-creation programs, on the other hand, are anything but simple, which is why most people never use them. I'd like to see SL follow that same model. Make the viewer as easy as a browser, and the mass market will arrive. Leave content-creation to other, optional, programs.

Bottom line, those of us who want to make content will always do whatever we need to do to achieve that goal. But the rest of the world need not be overwhelmed by tools that don't interest them.

When working with sculpties, I find it best to keep things simple.

In that sense, I'd start by NOT working with the importers and exporters for Blender (!) and start much simpler. Specifically, this template:
http://www.bentha.net/sculpted-tuto/Blender-export-template-tut.html



... and then use Blender's in-editor "Sculpt Mode" to make things the way you like them. When you need another sculpty in the editor to play with, Shift-D will let you duplicate the template sculpty fresh.

This is the easiest way I know to work with sculpted prims, since the final product is VERY close to that displayed in Blender, and this method does not require figuring out third-party exporters (just press "Bake" and save your image).


Hope that helps.



I am, however, considering a batch exporter for this mode specifically, but that's water under the bridge.

That was exacty my way, before we detected the Scripts of Domino. I personally liked the template approach, but i can say, that working with Domino's software boosted our productivity. I would never go back, instead i am really looking forward what comes next


We could show, how to create sculpties which are not close to what you can see in blender, but are the SAME, as you can see in blender ...

You definitely should look at Domino's scripts...

From a marketing perspective, Chosen, you are right on target. The average consumer is less interested in how things work than in making them do a handful of simple things. Hence, the popularity of WYSIWYG devices and the endless supply of jokes about people who can't program their VCRs and cell phones. SL today does appeal to people with patience for complexity -- not geeks, exactly, but at least geek-tolerant folks. A simpler interface would greatly improve retention.

That said, I have a silly elitist reaction when I encounter people who can't handle a manual transmission, can't manage long division without a calculator, and can't make even tiny edits to HTML code without a GUI to guide them. I'm no purist, but I think we start to lose something when technology becomes so easy to use that people are no longer even curious about how things work. We aren't well served if science and technology transform into mystical fields that only geeks can love. Ease of use may be a good marketing imperative, but there has to be a limit.

/me clears her throat and sits down.

I'd be impressed if that were the case, seeing as "exact" is impossible due to a minor bug in "lossless" sculpty textures. This is what I was speaking to.



As for Domino's scripts, there's one thing missing that I'd like to add: the ability to import sculpted shapes to their original (Blender) position in Second Life, using .prims format.

(And, time allowing, the ability to have the script automatically save all the images to a target directory)

That way I won't have to spend time building complex sculpted objects twice.




PS: Technically Domino's scripts already do this, but it doesn't look like it prints to a file format that is recognized by importer tools (just LSL):

...
print "llSetPrimitiveParams( [ PRIM_TYPE, PRIM_TYPE_SCULPT, \"%s\", PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_%s, PRIM_SIZE, < %.5f, %.5f, %.5f >, PRIM_ROTATION, < %.5f, %.5f, %.5f, %.5f > ] );"%priminfo
...

I have heard often about a bug, that makes sculpties look different in SL. And it often is refered to a problem with lossless compression. But i can't see this bug. I am using the RC viewer and my sculpties appear in world exactly as i want them to be, better said, exactly as i see them in blender....

Maybe this bug has been solved in the meantime? Or i just happen to avoid the bug somehow. Maybe someone can explain me, how this bug can be reproduced ? And possibly avoided ?

It's not something very easily noticed. Rarely, a vert will be seen as slightly off its "correct" value in the SL viewer when zoomed in enough to get the full sculpt mesh.

This does not appear to be related to how the map is set up in Blender, since a mirror of the exact same map (in Imagemagick) produces the "correct" map in SL, whereas the original does not.



It's theorized, then, that lossy textures are used to create the map as rendered in the viewer, and that this is related to the "sculpties being caught in low detail" bug. I, however, am much too lazy to go into the viewer source to confirm this.


Another (more common) issue involves having the verts not match up perfectly to their sculpted equivalents in exporters and template files. The exporter for Max has this problem I believe.

Well, i can tell, that Domino's scripts do NOT suffer any more from this problem since about 3 weeks .

Dumbish question about sculpties: is there a limit on how many vertices a sculptmap should have? Or some ideal number? Reading the wiki, my understanding is that anything with a high poly count is sampled down. I think that in theory I should be able to make something fairly smooth but without it appearing distorted.

My experience with Hexagon (the modeler I purchased) is that it provides SL-ready prims ready for squishing and manipulation, but you can't delete any of the faces. I understand "no holes" but I just want to use fewer polygons than the thousands already in there. Smoothing a cube or cylinder with the Hexagon prims was a nightmare and I don't have the patience to do the math and model edge by edge. When I tried doing a normal object and obj to sculpt, I got an error about the number of vertices being bad.

So now I just have it in my head that I need to worry about the vertices. Am I mistaken?

sculpties have a fixed number of vertices, exactly 1024 (32*32) . No chance to modify that. Also the sculptie's "mesh topolgy" must be preserved. this is the "no holes" rule. (just to mention, the torus type sculptie allows for exactly ONE hole!)

So everything you do with your sculptie mesh must preserve all connections between the vertices...

I have been told, that despite the fact, that sculpties have "so many more vertices" compared to standard prims, they are not much less effective. I am not sure here, but i think, this is, because also standard prims must be rendered somehow and maybe they use much more vertices, than one might expect (but to be honest, i don't know this for sure, just guessing here ...)

Let me rephrase my question, because I'm not using the terminology correctly.

The map itself has 32x33 vertices. This I know. But when modeling, are you concerned about the number of vertices your model has?

the answer is twofold:
"short answer": Since each vertex of my model MUST map to a location in the 32*32 map, and at the same time, each location in the map defines one vertex...
No sculptie can exist, which has more or less vertices. So i am concerned about vertex count all the time. I MUST ensure, that my model does neither loose vertices, nor get additional vertices from somwhere.

BUT ... I detected, that in my software (blender plus Domino Marama's sculptie export/import scripts) it is not a big problem to have MORE vertices than allowed. The sculptmap generator simply reduces to the correct number of vertices. It also "fills up holes" in the case i lost some vertices... But using more vertices, than allowed does NOT make the sculptie better. In fact i loose a bit of control about where the 1024 vertices will end up in SL.

So to sumarize this: If your software can handle odd vertex counts and it can "repair" the model, things are fine, otherwise you get weird results, or export/import errors... I personally try to keep the mesh intact all the time, having the benefit to know exactly, how the sculptie will look like all the time even during sculpting and without "testimporting".

At least this is, what i found out while working with sculpties.