3d sculpty letters/logos with Blender?

I am currently trying to import a scultpy 'S' shaped logo that I have created in Blender. I used the logo as a background image and then used a bezier curve to trace the S. Once I had the trace looking correct, I connected the endpoints to create a solid letter and extruded it out a little bit. My problem begins after converting the letter to a mesh, and I begin the UV unwrap process. For some reason, I cannot get my letter to unwrap into a square map.

I am very new to Blender(about one week), but I have been through the Blender video tutorials that Gaia Clary has put up on these forums and I've tried out the multiple methods of UV unwrapping that I found in those.

I'm not looking for someone to give me a step-by-step instruction manual on how to accomplish this little project, just a pointer in the right direction. Am I just going about this completely wrong from the start? Is there a better, free program for this specific task? Are there perhaps some other tutorials that are focused around sculpty letters and logo work that I just haven't found yet? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Doing the unwrap to create the sculpty can be tricky. Be sure you are using the 2.47 release candidate of Blender. It fixes some unwrap bugs in Blender.

Plus there are a number of vertices limitations one must consider to have the sculpty work in SL. Also there are the LOD considerations... These little things wiggle horribly and it is a challenge to make them hold still.

However, there are some tutorials and scripts that make it much easier in Blender. Look here: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/

Also, there is a long and tedious thread (Blender Sculptie Importer) in this section of the forum that follows the development of the scripts and tutorials. It is a great source of information and tips on how to handle various scuplty problems. Here: /8/60/203571/1.html

There are changes coming to sculpties. There is a move on to have a flexi attribute added to them. I've lost the JIRA number. Grendel's is pushing for that. Don't know if we will get that any time soon. However, the size and shape of objects made with sculpties (well the map size and shape, which affects the in-world shaped we can build - think long ropes with stable texture) is changing now. See: (new sculpty mesh sizes?) /8/9a/278017/1.html
Hope this helps,

Thanks for the reply, Nalates. I will look through everything you said and post again once I get a chance to go through the information.

I think there are 3 simple approaches available for you resulting in different
quality sculpties:

1.) Grab a blender version with the shrink-wrap modifier in it.
You find it in this version of blender:

http://graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=782

That is currently my preferred one ( it has a nice dark GUI and i love it ,-)
Then proceed as follows:

- Create a Sculpt cylinder or sphere(with Domino Marama's scripts).
- Bend the cylinder around your s-shaped object, so that the whole S is
fully wrapped by the cylinder.
- Use the shrink-wrap modifier...
- Take the resulting sculptie and optimise it to your needs.

That should give you an easy going way to approach your goal.
But as Nalates already said, you probably will suffer from LOD and
details of sculptie meshes, which you will need to tweek to your needs.
So it would be doable, but not easy.

Maybe there is some enhancements possible with the new sculptie mesh-sizes...
i did not yet check that out. Anyways our tutorial about precise sculptie making
"the arch example" should give you some further insights to tweeking
sculptie mesh points:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/16/the-arch-example/


2.) Reviewing the just mentioned tutorial, i think you also can get further by simply using a 4 sides "cylinder" with 33 vertices in the "long" axis and bend it to your S-shape form manually...


3.) There is still another approach... You could start with an object, that is easy to unwrap. then bend it to your needs. the UV-map will be preserved. I have shown this in my tutorial about "sculpties for the blender purist" ...

Might as well throw another suggestion in there.. I suspect the clue you are looking for is marking edge seams. It's a rare mesh that will unwrap straight to a square map. Usually you'll at least need to adjust the edges on the initial unwrap, pin them, then unwrap again.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Unwrapping_a_Mesh