Scultped Prims: tied ends, tips to minimize impact?

All sculpted prims as those two tied ends, and as far as I know no way to get ride of it or any upcoming way to get ride of it. If there's, I'd be happy to know it.
I'd like to know any tips to minimize the distorted tied ends, or remove them completely if possible.

If you don't want the ends tied, you can choose PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_CYLINDER, which will wrap the horizontal faces and leave the top and bottom of your mesh untied, or PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_PLANE, which will just give you a planar mesh which you can fold up like an origami model.

With these two modes closing the mesh is up to you, but how you accomplish that of course depends on what you're using to model

Aaaah! Thank you. The Sculpted Prims Portal where mentioning those flags where not available yet.

Unfortunately the base model is sphere and all sides need stitching in such way. Will have to live with the stary ends unless there's a modeling trick to lessen the effect.

Actually they are available, in a roundabout way. You can change a SPHERE type sculpt to the other types by using a script. Poke around, I'm sure it's been posted.

For a spherical shape, it is difficult to get around that problem. If you texture a regular sphere prim in SL you'll notice they have the same texture pinching.

As Daniel said, pinching a the poles is always going to be an issue with spheres. I would suggest three tips for minimizing the visual impact:

1. Do your best to hide the poles whenever possible. For example, if you're making something like a couch cushion, have the poles run horizonatally, so that they're hidden by the arms of the couch. Don't orient it vertically, or you'll end up with the North pole right in the middle of the cushion, in plain sight.

2. If the poles can't be hidden, do your best to keep the area immediately surrounding them perfectly flat. Any distortion will be amplified if the surface is imperfect or curved.

3. A good texture bake can do wonders. I realize with everyone using different 3D software, not everyone is going to be able to do this, but really, you'd be surprised just how much of a difference a really good renderer will make. I use Turtle with Maya, and it's pretty rare that I ever end up with visible pinching. If you can afford it, I highly recommend Turtle. It's the only renderer on the market specifically designed for this type of work.

What you can do is take your current sculpty bitmap and import it into Wings 3D as a cylinder. This will give you a model that superficially looks just like the sphere version, but the "poles" will actually be duplicated vertices that you can pull apart and stitch together in whatever way works best for your model. (A flat seam, maybe?) If you do this, you will need to re-upload the modified bitmap into SL, and then use a script to set the sculpt type to CYLINDER.

There are undoubtedly other modeling programs that can import sculpty bitmaps and let you choose the topology; Wings is just the only one I know well.

HI ! me again...

please excuse me butting in here but can you go through that again?

I've created 2 pieces - a stair case from an open ended cylinder
and a table with turned legs from a plane (it took ages to make)

I import them into Wings and they looked fine, but when I viewed
them or uploaded, those open ends sewed together and the plane
concertina'd and folded so much I couldnt find the objects !

I was looking for the buttons to keep the edges unwelded
but can't find them, or do I save differently ? what do I do?

thanks

iota

There are no buttons. If you want to make a sculpt type other than sphere, you must change the type via script.

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



Notice it says "supported in a future version". They non-sphere types are not supported yet, but they are accessible. Use them at your own risk. It's entirely possible that their implementation may change before they become official, which would break any objects you make with them now. If you're okay with that, go for it. Otherwise, make your objects out of spheres like you're supposed to.

With VERY few exceptions, there's really nothing you can't make be deforming a sphere. Things like tables and staircases are relatively easy.

How do I import the bitmap into wings as a cylinder?

When you import, click on the rectangle to the right of the Second Life Sculpty menu line. This is the standard Wings convention for getting a dialog box of options. In the options dialog, you can choose the topology (aka the sculpty type) and whether or not to put in the diagonal edges..

Being the most I can afford on programs is 0 of any currency except L$, I've to go with what's free, the third tips by you Chosen to get Maya is bit away from my empty pockets. Blender been my choice.

First, an image of a few tests I did.


Top Left: This was the first one I did, the vertices where not flat.


Top Right: I tested making the vertices be on the same Z. As you can see it got even more distorted than the first.


Bottom Left: This was using PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_CYLINDER, as I believe was Omei Turnbull suggestion, unless I did miss something here. Any kind of hole will be enlarged.
If you could show me how you do it, pictures or something.
As far as I know it's impossible to choose how to stitch in a modeling program and have it work that way in SL, for that one would have to upload it in a 3D format with all necessary data.


Bottom Right: This is the best one. And contrary to making it all undistorted, I distorted it more. The result being that the pinched and distorted pole blends more gently into the rest of the sculpted prims.
Here it's in Blender.

Even with Blender, I'd be surprised if you can't bake a texture so that it better hides the poles. I don't pretend to know a whole lot about Blender's renderer, but I have to assume it's got the capability.

In Maya, when you implement 3D texturing (not 2D texturing) into your shader, it is automatically projected seamlessly onto your geometry, aligning perfectly across seams and poles. I believe Blender does have similar 3D texturing functions. Have you experimented with them?

It looks like the texture in your examples wasn't actually baked, but rather is just an ordinary flat image, created in a 2D paint program. If that's the case, then one way to solve the problem would be to counter-distort the relevant pixels in the opposite way by hand. This can be a real pain in the ass, but it will work if you have the patience.

I'd recommend going with 3D texturing and baking, assuming Blender does in fact have that capability.


Without seeing your mesh it's hard to know if what you were doing what I was talking about or not. It does look, however like you're seeing a common tessellation glitch with sculpties. The poles often end up slightly lopsided and slightly off center. Offsetting the texture a little bit in the other direction usually masks this, making things appear more as they should.



Only use a cylinder if your desire is to create a shape that is well matched to cylindrical topology. If all you're planning on doing is collapsing the top and bottom to make the shape resemble spherical topology, then you might as well use a sphere the whole time.



I think you're over-thinking the stitching. If you start with a cylinder in your modeling program, you're starting with what is effectively a plane that has already been stitched on 2 of its 4 sides. The same exact thing will happen in SL, provided your UV'ing is set up properly to match the UV's of the sculpty.

If you start with a sphere, then your plane is already stitched on all 4 sides, as well as collapsed along the top and bottom rows of vertices. Again, this behavior will be matched in SL, assuming your sphere is properly UV mapped.

So I'm not sure what you're finding "impossible". Maybe I'm misreading you.



That's interesting. It seems maybe you were able to counter the tessellation glitch by messing up your model in exactly the opposite way from how the glitch affects it. I'd be curious to see the wireframe on that one.

Here's two screen shots to illustrate what I meant. I took a 16x16 sculpty bitmap file I had, which was a cube shape generated from a sphere by flattening its sides. I imported it into Wings 3D twice -- once with a spherical topology and once with a cylindrical topology. The first screen shot shows the result. In the picture, you can't tell them apart, but they are different. The one on the left (which has the spherical topology) has just one vertex at either pole. The one on the right (which has the cylindrical topology) has 16 vertices at each pole.

The second screen shot shows 3 steps in the process of modifying the spherical version. The cube on the left shows the results after I manually spread the pole vertices out a little, to expose the cylinder's hole. For the second cube, I moved all the vertices on the top face radially, to widened the hole. For the last cube, I re-stitched the vertices around the whole using a straight seam.

Does that clarify what I meant?

Thanks Ididn't understand that and I script badly so that s out !

has anyone a link for shaped sculpty-spheres? eg. cubes and pyramids etc?
it would reduce the work, just a thought,

Ta

Iota

Don't give up so easily. I'm not much of a scripter either, but all we're talking about is a script with one command in it. Where it says "UUID", just put in the UUID for your sculpt map (remember to keep it in quotes). You can get the UUID simply by right clicking on the sculpt map texture in inventory, selecting "Copy Asset UUID" from the popup menu, and then pasting into any text editor (including the in-world script editor). Beyond that, just use the line exactly as it appears on the wiki.

Here's a slightly more advanced script with two commands in it. The first sets the sculpt type and applies your map, and the second deletes the script immediately afterwards, so it won't linger unnecessarily in the object's contents.

default
{
state_entry()
{llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_TYPE, PRIM_TYPE_SCULPT, "uuid", PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_PLANE]);
llRemoveInventory(llGetScriptName());
}
}

Just copy that from the forum to the script editor, and then save the script. That particular example is for a plane. For the other types, just remove the word PLANE, and put in either TORUS or CYLINDER. Save one of each in your inventory, and then all you have to do is paste in the UUID every time you want to use one.


What do you mean by a link? Are you asking for someone to create those shapes for you and post them somewhere on the web for you to download? If someone's willing to do that, fine, but really, why not just make them yourself?

You're going to need to learn to do things far more complex anyway if you want to make, well, ANYTHING out of sculpties, so why not start by learning how to make the most basic shapes from scratch?

Turning a sphere into a simple cube or a pyramid will only take you a couple of minutes at most. And if you save immediately afterwards, you'll only ever have to do it once.

It will only take you a few minutes once you are good at it. Until then, consider it excellent practice.

I've been following this tutorial to bake a sculpted map in blender. I've also used the Blender Sculptie Import & Export Scripts.

After reading up and playing around more, it could be the currently faulty lossless handling (fixed internally)?
I'm very new to 3D modeling, started to play with it a month ago, so It's safe to say I don't know everything that can be done, much less how to do something such as "implement 3D texturing (not 2D texturing) into your shader". I may have done it without knowing.


I attempted to make as flat and perfect circle of the vertices as possible around the pole.


You mean the lossless handling which seem to be the cause of getting lopsided and slightly off center?


(Take the SL avatars for example. Their UV maps have stitching in the middle of it. Such stitching is impossible using sculpted maps as it's working now.)
I think I understand it now, thanks guys. I just missed the basic rules of sculpted maps I beileve.
Correct me if I'm wrong:
*The model can look anyway you want, as long as it can be nicely unwrapped onto a square plane (or rectangular which hopefully will get supported in phase 2).
*The vertices on the UV map should be placed next to each other has it's on the model, otherwise there'll be something similar to vertex vomit.
*Having more than 1024 vertices will result in loss of vertices as it's made into a sculpted prim.

Omei Turnbull's "cube" would in SL appear to have the top of it stitched, correct?

Did I get it right and understand what you mean?


I just moved the vertices randomly along the X and Y axises. I had generally no idea what I was doing other than wanting to know how it would look like in the result.
Does pictures suffice?
http://delu.mine.nu/secondlife/pole_wireframe/



So much to write and check, I hope I didn't miss anything.