3ds Max - Sculpted Prims exporter Petition / pledges

Nope. Both of these methods work best for objects with generally organic shapes without concave surfaces or complex protrusions. It's just a quick way to get an approximation. For anything complex your best bet will always be to create an appropriate base mesh and then shape it into your desired configuration by hand.

You want me to work don't you? hehe

Will sculpties be animatable? Can you--for example--make a sculptie head talk? I don't imagine you can deform a single sculptie?


ps. that head looks nice.

Hi, Michael. Yes, it's possible to create animated deformations by using LSL to cycle a series of normal maps with each normal map representing a frame of the animated sequence.

Some examples:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZGFyN0GwZs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWd9Y65V3CA

Someone mentioned an issue with sculpted prim animation that might be worth noting:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1042

-Locke

Also be weary of your pivot points. I animated an arm and it moved alright, but since I had the projection sphere sitting in the elbow, the shoulder and hand moved relative to the elbow, instead of the arm moving relative to the shoulder. I made a head animated and I didn't animate the actual shape, just the texture it didn't look too terrible, a bit cartoonish, but decent.

I wonder if it would ever be possible to stream the video to define the sculptie, that would make animating them very cool, and would (hopefully) eliminate the spheriphying of the sculptie when the textures aren't fully loaded. A 64x64 video wouldn't take up much space even if it was lossless.

I"m lost. Do we have a general solution for Max? Can someone post the link to the procedure for max that we are talking about here, or better yet, edit the first post of the thread to contain the link to the "final solution".

Thanks much,
ww

Guess I'm just too lazy to read 8 pages of postings looking for a link.. Only read about 1/2 of them...

There are a couple of different methods talked about in this thread. It breaks down into two basic approaches.

Method 1: Take an arbitrary mesh, apply a special texture to it, and generate the sculptmap by projecting the mesh onto a sphere. Described in detail by Chip Midnight.

Method 2: Start with predefined geometry (e.g., a cylinder) and manipulate the vertices to form your object. Then, apply a special texture to it and bake the diffusemap to get the sculptmap. This is described by Gearsawe Stonecutter and Abu Nasu.

SculptGenMax is a Maxscript that automates a variation of Method 2. There's a link to the forum thread for SculptGenMax at the top of the wiki entry plus other 3ds Max related links later on.

There really isn't a method that is "best".

Method 1 is good for mostly spherical, convex shapes such as a human head. It has the advantage that it works on arbitrary meshes, but there is a large class of shapes that it fails with.

Method 2 is extremely accurate, but you have to build your mesh from scratch which is tedious. You can't use extrusion and are mostly limited to moving the vertices of the predefined mesh.

All of these methods are limited to one sculptie at a time. So you can't export a scene.

I'm still actively pursuing an integration of SculptGenMax with your SLPrims Maxscript. I've been delayed for the last month and a half while I bring up my own website for documenting and discussing the project. Just about finished with that. I'm calling the integrated product Prim Composer for 3ds Max and it will support exporting a scene of prims and sculpties. I'll be announcing that officially in the next month.

There are also some tools that people are creating to import sculptmaps from files such as OBJ files. I think some of those were going to try to break up an object into surfaces so that one OBJ file might generate several sculpties. This might get you the ability to import something like a scene if they worked well enough. But someone else will have to comment on those. I haven't been following them.

Anyway, hope that helps...

(damn, LL still hasn't fixed the embedded links!)

There's also a 3rd method, you can make your mesh as you would any other in 3d studio using standard modeling techniques, then unwrap it by hand to meet the sculptie mapping requirement. The down side to this is that unless you plan it into the mesh you usually end up with distortion around the poles, the upside is that if your mesh contains more detail then the sculptie can display you can make an ambient occlusion map that will less distortion then the projection method.

But that's just from my personal observations, I find ray caging very annoying and building approximate meshes takes too long to plan out proper polygon densities where I could just work it into the unwrapping process, each modeler has different preferences so try them all and see which gets you the best results and more importantly which you are more comfortable with.

I'm so close to making this work, except I cannot extract your material. Using both WinRAR and the Zip util built into Win, errors occur. With WinRAR it states that the file is corrupt. With the second util, it says unexpected end of file.

Any suggestions? Can you repost? Thanks for your help!

Steven
aka DWhisp3rs Namanari

Sounds like the zip file got corrupted on the server, or the server is choking on serving up the file. I've attached the zip file below. I'm not sure if it's Abu's most current version.

Here is the latest I have sitting on my HD.

With some of the changes that happened with axis flipping and how NURBS are auto mapped, I did another shader. I think this one was made specifically for the axis when doing NURBS lathing, but I can't remember for sure. And I can't remember if fix10 has any funky tiling/mirroring tricks in it.

I *highly* recommend digging into the shader and doing your best to understand it. If you can understand it, you can easily modify it for a variety of other uses with some creative thinking.

Hey, guys... I've been able to make one sculpty with good success using Abu's shader and Chip's tutorial, but now trying it again, I'm coming up short. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not utilizing the .mat file right (I'm still not clear on how to use .mats in the material editor... that's probably really goofy, right?) or if my projection modifier is off or not getting used, or what, but... here.

Chip's tutorial says you should have the sphere selected when you render to texture, but I think the last time I did a sculpty, I had to select the target model to get it to work... does that sound right to you? It's just a little unclear...

Here's my model, textured in 3DS:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/2105244032_b7121476c0_o.jpg

Here's my model with the shader on it vs. how it looks when I preview render it:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2074/2104465987_7a60a51307_o.jpg

Here's what the shader looks like in my material editor (do I just have the wrong one?):
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2051/2104466069_158aaaba8d_o.jpg

Here's what I get in Second Life.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2012/2104465821_098c9d2cab.jpg

Can you help a lost girl out?

-NN

P.S. I'm starting to think it's just that the shape of my model is so long, a sphere is causing the projection to just not hit my model at all. That's got to be it, right? Do you guys have any guidelines for making the cage fit my model better?

I've used a conforming NURBS surface wrapped around an arbitrary mesh as the projection surface and that seemed to work well.

You can check if you're having wrapping problems by using a conform compound object instead of a projection modifier to render the sculpt map. By using conform you literally wrap the mesh of the sphere around the target object so you can see exactly what you're ending up with and can manually edit the wrap by both moving the sphere relative to the target (in subobject operands mode) and adding an edit poly on top and manually moving stray vertexes. Then you can still use a projection modifier on that with the same target as the conform to render the detailed texture map. That's what part two of my tutorial will show if I ever get around to writing it.

As for rendering the texture map when using the projection method, yes you have to have the sphere selected. Make sure the projection modifier is enabled in the render to texture dialog and that you have it set to use the existing UV channel and not automatic unwrap.

thanks, you guys...

chip: you're right, after messing with it some more, I understand now how it absolutely didn't make sense to think I needed to bake from my target model for the sculpt map. after trying it several more times, I'm starting to get it.

as for this "conform compound object" thing, I think I may be able to figure it out, but I've never worked with it before. It may take a few tries. I really hope you write up that 2nd tutorial soon... either way, I think I'm getting closer to understanding and I really thank you both for offering advice.

Here's the map. *LOL* I definitely need step-by-step directions.



x.o.
Naoki

I'm with you on that. It's been awhile since I've done any modeling and just recently got my hands on Max 8. So I'm really looking forward to Part 2 to help lift the fog from my brain ... lol.

*sighs and smiles* Yeah. Still can't do sculpties. Waiting with fingers crossed.

I'm back from holiday travel but busy with a big contract job. I should have time to get back to tutorial writing in 1-2 weeks. Sorry for the long delay. Hopefully it won't be too much longer. One thing to keep in mind about these tutorials is that they're designed soley as a down and dirty way to approximate models that weren't originally made with SL in mind. It will always be preferable to model by hand from scratch to get the best results. When time allows I'll try to cover that as well.

Thx for the great Tuts Chip and Abu..

Anyway...I've been following the tutorial through the texture baking part, but instead of getting a texture scrolled out (as in your example), I'm getting it broken up into pieces.

(ie...one side view of the object will in a corner of the texture, other views elsewhere).
(I've even started using a simple head object with the same results)

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Thx )

You have it set to use automatic UV unwrap instead of using the existing UV channel 1.

great..thx!

Anyone know why I have random odd spots on my sculpt maps?

Here's an example.

I seem to be getting "unexpected end of file" error when trying to unzip this. Would someone be so kind as to repost a working copy? Thanx!