3ds Max - Sculpted Prims exporter Petition / pledges

Will some one make a exporter?
Why did LL not think of the lower end software?

Ill Pledge 10k for a working exporter (that does not use blender (blender is a pos))

I wouldn't call Max "lower end software", but in any case, I'd guess that the reason the first incarnation of the exporter is for Maya is simply because Qarl Linden's background is in Maya, and sculpties were his brainchild. That's it.

That's the same way we've gotten lots of features in SL, by the way. Wanna know why SL video uses Quicktime, for example? The Linden who wrote that feature happened to have a background in Quicktime. That's all. Had that particular person not come along (sorry, I don't know his name), it's possible SL wouldn't have video at all today, just as we wouldn't have sculpties had Qarl not come along.

Qarl's officially my new favorite person, by the way.


Anyway, I do agree with you that someone should write one for Max. I doubt it will be all that long before someone does. There are an awful lot of Max users out there.

Yeah,

I figured a Pledge drive would get someone working on a exporter (not a method not a blender thing).

I paied to much for max and wanna use it LOL.. Actually i bought it but never used it LOL.

I've been playing around with Max today trying to figure out how to get a useable sculpt map out without any luck. I have made some lovely random tangles of vertices though.

How different is Maya script from Max Script?
Both python yes?

Neither of them use Python. They are both proprietary scripting languages.

Chip can you point me to a modeling tut that the model would work with sculpted?

No, sorry, not until I figure out how to get a working sculpt map and then have a chance to experiement with what works and what doesn't. In theory, any modeling method should work. The complicated bit is that SL is deforming a sphere so the object will have to have spherical UV mapping to bake out to the sculpt map. If you have max, I highly recommend doing all of the modeling tutorials. Get yourself familiar with the tools. When I know more I'll share what I learn, but I'm guessing it's going to take someone smarter than me to figure out how to get a useable sculptie out of Max.

Have you seen some of the tutorials people have posted for Blender? Yes, it's Blender, yes, it's a process and not an exporter, but the same concepts should apply with Max too, right? There's a step-by-step guide to setting up the 'correct' UV sphere, and generating the 'correct 'texture from it. I did that with Blender, and then I was able to deform that sphere into whatever shape I wanted (read: whatever I was able to do, I'm brand new to all this), re-bake the texture, save, upload, and have a sculpted prim. My wife made a pretty cool penguin.

The key seems to be in how the texture is set up. The instructions follow the same process for making a normal map, but instead of encoding the normals into the RGB channels, there's a setting to encode the ORiginal COordinates (orco) instead. The X-Red mapping also needs to be inverted, I think. I've never used Max, but if there's something equivalent to that, you should be able to duplicate that process and get a sculpt texture?

Of course, this limits you to only deforming a pre-made sphere. You can't add/delete vertices, you can't build your model any other way. Someone's working on a new process that gets past that.

And once again, total noob disclaimer. I'm a programmer, not a 3D modeler, up until 3 days ago I didn't know what "a NURB" was

I also looked at the MEL exporter script. Most of it is scaling the mesh, and then doing some math to figure out if the normals are pointing the right way, and inverting something if they're not (didn't understand that part). But all that was prep. The main work of [mesh --> texture] seemed to be just one call to a built-in Maya function. So I didn't learn much from that that could be used in another application that didn't have that support built in. I could be reading the script wrong, of course.

I've skimmed all of it, including the Blender tutorial. I'll experiment with it more when I have more time. The method I thought would work, didn't, which is a shame because it would have been ideal. Max has excellent tools for creating normal maps but not enough information has been published yet for me to figure out how to get them to produce a workable sculpt map. Being limited to just deforming a sphere is far less than ideal. There has to be a better way. I just haven't stumbled across it yet.

Yes, hopefully people will figure all this out soon.



You'd said something about trying to 'project' a complex mesh onto a bounding cube, or something like that... is that what you're referring to here? That would have been very cool if that worked.

Sculptie_localxyz.mat in a zip.

Few things.

It is in local space, so the bounding box might cause a scaling problem. Once in-world, you will probably have to scale xyz of the sculptie independently. If you want to fix scaling in 3DS Max, you will have to either hack the bounding box or take things down to world space.

I'm not on the beta grid and I don't know when I will be able to make it there. The shader should work dandy, but I have yet to test it. If something is wrong with the shader, should be easy enough to fix.

When I do finally get to the beta grid, I'll start working on modeling tutorials. There are already a few out there that are certaintly applicable, but I will write some that are 3DS Max specific.

The modeling is going to be bit different because you have to work a bit backwards. You know, keep specific UVs in mind before you model. Luckily, I'm used to thinking this way and I'll try to pass the saving on to you.

10k please

Yep. I used a sphere shrunk down to a point and placed it in the center of the mesh I was trying to create a sculpt map of. I then created a projection cage for the sphere and scaled it up so that it completely enclosed the mesh. Then I tried various flavors of rendering out normal maps and maps generated with custom materials (as used in the Blender tutorial). None of it worked. Then I got discouraged and quit messing with it.

my sphere projection method with your texture almost worked, Abu, except all the normals were flipped and when I tried to move the prim I crashed, hehe.

Okay, had to invert the baked sculpt map and then it worked like a charm! I must have botched my material setup when I tried it earlier.
Here's the result...

OMG!!! *jaw drops* That has to be the most impressive sculptie I've seen yet. Amazing.

And congrats on figuring out a way to make this work

It's not really that detailed, but baking out a texture map to go with it helps a whole lot. That mesh was a bit overly complex for a single sculptie.

List of things to do when I get the chance:

1. Invert the shader and upload it, or trick Chip into doing it. All you got to do is swap the stoppers in the Gradient Ramp maps.

2. Get on beta grid.

3. Write tutorials.

If I understand your method, Chip, you are modeling and then adding UVW > Spherical. Is that correct?

Here is the a tutorial for Max5. I can probably simplify it and have a "template" made so you don;t have to do as much work.
/8/3b/182540/1.html

Is this a sculpt map exporter for 3D Studio Max ?

I'll put together a tutorial for my method when I get a chance, but briefly what I'm doing is using a sphere, shrinking it down very small, adding a projection modifier to it, scaling the cage up large enough to enclose the model I'm creating a sculpt map for, associating that model with the projection modifier on the sphere, and then baking a diffuse map from the projection. The UV mapping on the target mesh doesn't matter because the map is rendered using the sphere's UVW's. That gets around the limitation of having to model using a sphere or cyllinder. Having to invert the rendered map isn't really a big deal at all because this method requires a final step in Photoshop anyway. The top and bottom rows of polys in the UV map are tris, not quads, so it needs to have Flaming Pear's Solidify plugin run on it to fill in the holes.

You really should not have to Photo Shop anything or need plugins. You might want to check my tutorial. The max file contains the texture I used. I have it setup so you don't have to project anything onto another object. just striaght mapping onto the object itself. The texture itself does the projecting in the 3 axis, to make life simple. Also had good result making a spline renderable and giving it thickness. It is amazing how well sculpty prims work. there is really no limit to what you can do with these things now.

I was trying to understand what your tutorial did. After you set up the cylinder, did you create the 'vase' prim by deforming the cylinder? Or is that a brand new prim that you started with? I've never used Max, but looking at that web page, it looked like you formed the 'vase' by editing the cylinder prim. In which case approach would be similar to some of the Blender tutorials, which also start with a 32x32 cylinder or sphere. What Chip's managed to do is make a sculpt texture out of any mesh, with any number of vertices.

Or maybe I'm reading your tutorial wrong.

I did look at your tutorial. The reason why the photoshop step isn't necessary in yours is that you're using an uncapped cyllinder which is all quads, not a sphere, which has to have triangles at each end because the poles end at a single vertice. Your method, and the one in the Blender tutorial which is similar, limits you to the topology of the cyllinder. The projection method allows any mesh topology to be used, such as the head lopped off of a Poser 7 model as in my example.

Edit: The projection modifier in max was introduced in Max 8 so my method is only possible in Max 8 or 9. Your cyllinder method will likely be the method of choice for anyone using older versions of Max. Kudos for figuring it out and many thanks for the tutorial.

So once again... one would have to start with that cylinder, which has the material/texture applied to it, and create the sculpt prim by modifying that object, correct? Or can the method in this tutorial create a sculpt texture from a different object/mesh?



camilla Yosuke posted a tutorial here which I think addresses that. She takes a sphere, deletes the 2 pole vertices, extrudes the row of vertices right below those (the top/bottom latitudes), then shrinks those down to almost a point. This gets you a 'pole' that's really a group of vertices, and makes the 'sphere's' topology the same as a cylinder. At least, I think that's why she did that.