Blender Help

Ok so I decided to use Blender as the program to create my first sculpties and I am running into some problems. I began with the Blender Nation tutorials (as suggested by someone here in the forums) and they are great. Using those I spent a few days creating several sculpties that i am very proud of. Last night I went to UV map them and wanted to pull my hair out. I used the wonderful martini glass tutorial for instructions on mapping and am running into some serious problems. What I realized is that the blender nation tutorials have you start out with polygons...not nurbs. So now I have some great sculpties...that aren't sculpted out of nurbs...and I can't figure out how to map them.

So here are my questions:

1. Is there a different way to map a polygon than a nurb and if so what is it?

2. Is there a way to turn my polygon into a nurb and if so how? I found something that stated it can be done in Maya and while I have maya it confuses me like crazy. I can't even get my .obj files to load in it.

I am an absolute newblet at sculpties so please please please give me detailed answers. I get confused easily. Also if anyone knows any tutorials that might show me how to tackle this situation please post them.

Thanks so much!

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That's where I try to convince people not to do it this way. Basically you are trying to do the hardest way to make sculpties first. For arbitrary models, you can either get my eac unwrap script as mentioned in the post above, or learn about edge seams and Blender's unwrapping features. You need to unwrap to a perfect square as well as keeping seams aligned.

Depending on the models, this can be tough to do. I'd need to see pictures of the model to give specific advice on using edge seams (which is the way to get the best results). But be prepared to spend longer tweaking the UV map than you did modeling.

http://www.dominodesigns.info/downloads/blender/uvcalc_eac.py

Thanks so much Domino! I've decided to just scrap those and go with the tutorials that were just recently posted by Gaia Clary. I'm still having a few issues there actually as some of the instructions tell me to do things i can't do but I posted about that in that particular thread.

Ok new issue. lol. I succesffully made a sculpty. It looked fantastic in Blender. Mapped it using your FABULOUS scripts. But when I went to upload it in SL it had weird bumpy lumpy crap at the top and bottom of the sculpty. Why is this? And what can I do to avoid it?

The sculpties tend to get scrappy near the poles. And they tend to get incorrect, where the surface gradient changes quickly. I believe, this is due to "mathematical singularities" near the poles. (something, that happens when you need to divide by very small numbers near zero, which leads to precision loss)

For the first problem i just try to place the poles at places, which get hidden in "normal" usage. for a shoe i put one pole under the lowest part, and i hide the upper pole inside the shoe. it needs some 3D tweeking to get it right

For the surface gradients... well, it is in general a good idea to shift the mesh around, so that you get more points where you want your mesh to be more detailed and place less points where you have bigger smooth (plane) surfaces. But you still should take care about the LOD (level of detail) You can suffer from unexpected distortions, when looking at your sculptie from far away. With Domino's scripts and blender 2.46 you have some control over this LOD tweek too. So since i use blender 2.46 + Domino's scripts, things work better for me

Poles are one area where you need to be careful. Sculpties have 4 different mesh sizes that they are displayed at. 6x6, 8x8, 16x16 and 32x32 faces. I tend to ignore the 6x6 level because there's no easy way to work with it in a modeling program. So we are just going to consider the other 3 levels. At 8x8 each face covers 4x4 faces from the highest level. So to ensure smooth poles, you need to model them in at the 8x8 level, then go 16 x 16 where each face from 8x8 is now split into 4. Make sure the poles are still smooth. Now do the same at 32 x 32.

By keeping the largest details on the 8x8 level (multires 1) then adding progressively smaller details on the next two levels, you get a sculptie that handles the different level of details nicely and you will avoid the bumpyness that can occur.

edge loop number (0 pole)
0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

so at 8 x 8 the face edge is from 0 to 4
at 16 x 16 it's two edges from 0 to 2 and 2 to 4
at 32 x 32 it's 4 edges from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3 and 3 to 4

So you need to allow for the different ways faces can be built from the sculptie to keep bumpyness under control. This is true for the entire mesh. but the poles in particular stand out when there are issues.

For most shapes I prefer to avoid the sphere type and use the cylinder instead. You can flatten the top and bottom to give a long seam rather than a single pole. You just have to make sure that you do this so that the different LOD points are matched. You do this by scaling on X or Y to 0 for the two outermost loops. This gives an I shape for the edges, this is also the shape I aim for when adding edges to an arbitrary model for unwrapping.