Getting more detail out of sculpties

Hello! I've been playing around with sculpties and having a great time, but at the moment the thing that's causing the most trouble for me is the reduction of detail you get when you export to a sculpty texture. Right now I'm trying to sculpt a rocky waterfall basin, but all the edges get smoothed out, rounded and reduced so it ends up being less rocky and more blobby!

I realise that a reduction of detail is going to be inevitable because of how small the sculpt texture is, there's only so much room in it, but I've seen some sculpts with lots of details and also sharp edges - I assumed they must just be using several prims but from what I've seen that's not the case! For example, I've seen one prim heads and mannequins with lots of detail, but when I tried to model a head of my own it just sort of ended up as an oddly shaped blob.

I wondered if there's some way of teasing some extra detail out of the sculpt map... for example, with my waterfall basin only the top part is visible, so the bottom could be an entirely flat surface since it's underground. Is there some way to devote more of the map to the upper surface?

Do people tend to exagerate the contours of their sculpts so they'll stay more defined when they're exported?

Any tips at all would be a huge help! Thank you

You may be stuck with your level of detail (LOD)--so, I would suggest creating the rest of the detail in the texture work--create the illusion of more mesh with light and shadow. If you light the scene properly in your 3d application, and bake that shadow map in, the resulting surface will appear higher detail (almost like normal mapping).

It may be helpful for you to say which software you are using and how you convert your model to the sculptie map. Also you want to use lossless upload to SL. You can do this by using the Release Candidate viewer and there are also utilities available.

It is indeed challenging to get detail on the sculptie. Texturing is key. But there may be things you can do in your modeling software that will help.

I found it helpful to push the polygons around in the modeling process. You want as many (smaller) polygons as possible where you have the most detail. You can have fewer (bigger) polygons on the areas that are simpler or won't be visible in your build.

Here is a model of a maple leaf I made in ZBrush. I pushed polygons to the edge and to the leaf lobes from the middle before making the details on the edge of the leaf. Also I am making the leaf from two prims so I can get more detail on the edges.

The resulting sculptie is not as exact, and I lost a little on some of the curves, but it is pretty close.

I have little experience with using 3D modelers for sculpts, but it seems that a lot of the applications that have plugins to be used with sculpts don't have nearly the precision as tools created by residents specifically for sculpts. I do know that TheBlackBox's Sculpt Studio is capable of 100% per-vertex sculpt precision, so that the end result will look exactly how you want it. Same thing with Cel Edman's sculpt paint. I've heard that Blender is the most precise general 3D modeler for sculpts.

Hm ok, thanks very much for the replies! It seems like I'll have to practice lighting a scene properly for texture baking It is amazing how much of a difference that can make!

I haven't done a lot with sculpties yet, but yes, you can push the mesh around and streach the low-detail areas to get more mesh detail where you want it. Really sharp corners that remain sharp are usually two rows of verticies collapsed to the same point. Just remember that when you texture it, your resulting texture has to take those distortions into account!

I agree with Ceera here.. and would not suggest pushing the vertices around too much if you plan on texturing the sculptie.

In fact I would say that a common problem I have seen in my students' sculpted prims is they loose detail because there are areas of the mesh that are disproportional compared to others.

The worst situation for LOD as well as texturing is having areas of widely spaced verts right beside an area of closely spaced verts. Say for example you take the base sphere and pull a single vert away from the sphere so the polys are now streched out 50 % compared to the rest.. this will produce poor results in SL.. you will see major LOD popping, texture distortions etc.

If you want to make a hard edge by bunching the verts in an area it should be an even transition from big to small as smoothly as possible.

The best way I have found in Blender and Zbrush is to drop into sculpt mode and do some smoothing to get the verts more evenly spaced for best results. Also during the intial modelling use a proportional falloff control to effectively pull the surrounding verts with the one you are moving.

allthough texturing and baking shadows can really help, they will not save a sculptie that has LOD issues..

-w

The biggest thing to learn is the LOD levels. Understanding how the sculptie will be simplified at different distances in SL will let you put key details where they need to be. The top three levels are simple subdivisions. So from the 32 faces across it goes to 16 and then 8. The smallest level is 6 faces across so it is pretty much impossible to allow for this one as well as the main levels.

Knowing this, you can put the major details on the vertice that fit the 8 faces, more refinement on the ones for 16 faces and the smaller details on the 32 faces. This will help minimise LOD popping and ensures even when your sculptie is seen from a distance it has basically the right shape.

This is the method of making sculpties I've been working to perfect in Blender. You can see how it works here:

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/multires.avi

thanks again Domino!.. I have been wondering about this.. great video.. I am going to incorporate it into my workflow.

-whyy