3ds Max - Sculpted Prims exporter Petition / pledges

You're not getting the native uv mapping of a sphere. You're getting the result of an automatic unwrap. Did you at some point put an unwrap uvw modifier on it?

So I gather this is not something one can do with a UV mapped arbitrary mesh?

I'm thinking I'd rather not have the baked texture anyway. Even deselecting the lighting options in a blend map leaves too much in shadow.

That's not it. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I can get the tutorial from Abu to kind of work though I generally get a weird stretch to a point. I go to photoshop and then try to fix it and get limited success. For some reason though I always get the type of rendered tga that's on the link.

Not directly. But you can do it indirectly. You'd start with a model with the correct topology and UV mapping for a sculptie and manually edit it to fit around your arbitrary mesh as closely as possible (and by edit it I mean just moving the vertices around. You don't want to do any extrusions, cuts, welds, or anything else that will change the topology and uv mapping). You'd then render your sculpt map directly from that sculptie mesh. For the texture map, you'd add a projection modifier to it that references your arbitrary model. That will render the surface texture of your arbitrary mesh projected onto the UV mapping of the sculpt mesh. It's a variation on my sphere projection tutorial (home.comcast.net/~pixelforgeltd/Tutorial.htm)... basically the second part which I haven't written yet.

I don't suppose someone wants to e-mail me a *.max file with a successful render that I can compare my settings to? Send me a PM if you do .

When I get time to do the other part of the tutorial I may put together a sample file or two. I'm busy with non-SL Max work at the moment so I'm not sure how soon that'll be.

Thanks for the responses, Chip

On the way! Vote here!

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1110


If I get more votes on it, I'll make a binary available -- ASAP!!!

Aside from packages that do not have texture baking..why move the baking method out of the original software package, what is the advantage? Is there a clear difference in quality of results?

Okay... I'm actually making progress. I don't seem to lose the saw pattern in photoshop though when I run the Solidify A. I get a message "This filter cannot operate on the image's background. Use it on a layer with transparent regions. Well, it's a 32 bit tga file and the alpha looks correct... any ideas?

[EDIT] Interestingly... my scupltie seems to be inside out now that I've uploaded it .
Anyone wanting to take mercy on me IM me in world.

Make sure you're baking to a 32bit TGA with premultiplied alpha turned off. Sounds like you baked to a 24bit TGA. You need to invert the sculpt map in PS so it won't be inside out in SL.

Well, I did bake to a 32 bit TGA. I'll try inverting the sculpt map.

[EDIT] Inverting worked! Now for that damned saw toothed problem.

I got a tutorial on the way that should go a long way to avoiding saw-tooth all together. Already got the snaps and stuff. Just gotta prep the graphics and actually write it. Might even provide some insight into some other things. I'll post in that other thread when I get it finished.

But first, I'm off to take a bath.
See y'all in a few hours.

Two days old but...

Is there any type of plug in out for 3ds max yet? Rokuro might be good for table legs or something.. but I don't see great use in it beyond that. I can't stand Blender.. and my objects come out wrong in wings 3d.

Give me Max plugins or a way to work around it.

check further back in the thread , there are several material libraries attached in zip files. Use render to texture to bake out the sculptie map with those as the objects material ( simple explanation).

Hello everyone,
I've been trying to create a sculptie texture following Chip's tutuorial and using Abu's material. I can get the grey standard texture to render the way I thought it would, however, when I apply Abu's material and render the texture I end up with a completely white image. It has the saw teeth at the top and the bottom, but there's no information in it. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Using 3ds 9. I'd post a picture of my results but I'm at work right now and don't have access to it. There's got to be something I'm doing wrong.

Thanks everyone!

Did you assign the target object to the projection modifier on the sculptie mesh? It may be that your projection doesn't have a target.

Thanks Chip. Although I gave up on the mesh I was trying to make a sculptie, I used another one and got great results. Thanks to both you and Abu. This is so fun!!

I took a snapshot, check it out. Waiting for method two Chip.

Thanks again,
Hitomi.

That looks great, Hitomi I hope to have time to get the rest of the tutorial done this weekend.

Using Chip Midnight's arbitrary mesh method, I found that for not so round objects(flat or long), you lose alot of detail, but if you scale them in a way that you could reproduce the opposite scaling in second life, like scaling along axes, you can retain a bit more of the detail you would lose if you didn't scale.

I agree with you Dirken , I too have been scaling down long and or flat shapes to get them as round as I can .When I upload the textures and apply them to the prims I just reverse the scaling process in-world and been getting decent results . Also give conform a try , it's much easier and faster and pretty much gets the same results as the other methods talked about here , I believe Chip made reference to it so I gave it a try . But you can't use it the way the manual say's to , surround your object with the mesh ball , and select your object to conform to , then apply Abu's texture to it and render to file , done deal and fast .

I'm assuming you mean the conform compound object type? I tried using that and got pretty awful results, not nearly as good as with the projection map with the object scaled to be more sphere shaped. I didn't try the conform object with the object scaled though, I'll try that on my next sculptie.

Will there be an option to import editable meshes from 3dsmax into SL and treat them as such? The SL prims are very limited in their features, but sculpties are extremely uncomfortable. PLEAZE I want my 3dsmax back!

Yep, that's what I mean. It has the same limitations that the projection method does but has the benefit of being able to see what the sculpt mesh will look like. Typically what I'll do is use the conform compound object to wrap a sculpt base mesh around the target, convert it to an editable poly, and then adjust the result by hand. The nice thing about that method is you use the sculpt mesh to bake the sculpt map and then use projection to bake the texture map from the more complex original object. Both methods are best for organic shapes. For anything where fine control or detail is needed, your best bet is to do the whole shape by hand.

I'm having trouble using both the conform method and the projection method with concave shapes. If there are deep indents on an object( like a asymmetric cup or tulip), the indent gets filled in by polygons, but, the vertices that make these polygons are those on the cup part of the object kind of like:


x
x _____x
x \?\/| x
x \/\_\ x
x _-x
xx

where the xs are the vertices on the edge, but they get interconnected by polygons at seemingly arbitrary angles, making it impossible to sort them out and rearrange to make it look nicer, is there a workaround using these methods?