A clever way to sculpt

well some may have already discovered this.
But i found a way to make very good looking sculpts using 4 of the best sculpty mkaing freebies for the windows PC.

using the sculpty wiki
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_3d_Software_Guide

you will need to download
these softwares
Wings3D
SculptyPaint

and going to the sculptyspace website
http://sculptyspace.com/

download sculptyspace so you can preview your sculpts before uploading.
i have personally found it very accurate.

my method is a very simple one but might get confusing
first off you download the Import/Export plugin for wings3D and follow its installation instructions found here

/8/20/183764/1.html

next you upload one of the many wings files that is given to you.
i suggest you ignore triangle files because triangles can be annoying when working with a basic form. so upload a quad for now.

start with the 16x15quad file and lets begin our work.

first off to those who have never used wings3D its not as hard as most people have said it is.
low in instruction manuals it maybe but it is a intuitive and easy to learn interface makes up for it.

first off i'll let you fiddle around with that sphere as you learn the basics of wings3D
be sure to read up the tur on the wiki here

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Wings_3D

it can give you good pointers on the proper uses of the program for sculpty making.

now after you have learned how to use wings be sure to save your file as a .obj or the wings personal file. next after saving export the shape into a secondlife sculpty .bmp
thats it and just name it as you want.

now using sculpty space look at the texture.
notice how its all blocky and yuk!! we don't want that!!
this is where sculptypaint comes in handy.

resave the .bmp as a .png and upload into sculptypaint.
as soon as the file is done loading go to the tab that says draw mode.
there a new option becomes noticeable.
its called smooth sculpty
its a very useful form of sculpting i used on my shyguy head that was all block and disgusting looking. after a couple passes with the smooth it became a much more desired smooth sculpt.

preview it with sculptyspace to be sure and then upload to sl and your done.


if you feel there should be something changed please let me know.
or tell me if this has already been pointed out.

Ohhh. I've always wanted to make my sculpty's smoother. I made a little puppy but he looks like a robot puppy because he's all blocky.

glad to be of help.
i discovered the amount of passes should be around 10 to 15 to make it perfectly smooth.
then just save it as a 64x64.png and your done.

You can also use Wings3d's "tighten" option to make sculpties look smoother. The beauty of this method is, that you got more control over the sculpty smoothing and which parts of it you want to smooth.
I made this frying pan here that way for example
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3233/2702957133_188fd60a77_o.jpg

-Asriazh

intriguing.
i'll check this ability out.
i've been in a mega tizzy with wings because of its ease of use and its fun interface.
EAT THAT BLENDER!!!

lol
thanks Asriazh Frye

Uhm. You can also open the sculpt map in any paint program and add just a little blur to smooth things.

lol
thanks.
jeese i'm learning to much to fast.
hahahaha
all hail wings3D

i might actually try to use wings 3d if someone out there can tell me how to make the damn window bigger

i hate having a 22" high def lcd and wings only using 640x480 of it, i got the window to expand once, but the view was still the same size, and of course once you close it, it resets to default (arg!)

if you look closely on the window for the object your making there is a tab or arrow. in the bottom right corner. try that first or use the wings tut i provided in the description of my clever way to sculpt tut.

I have a problem with Wings3d freezing on me now but I'll try out these tips.

Me too, or I'd comment on Wings usage. =/

i've noticed this to.
seems i've been freezing every time i import a sculpty.
I did hoever find a work around for this.
using sculpty space you can resave your sculpt maps as a .obj file which i find very successful.

Bree, Jeffrey, can you elaborate? You know -- OS, Wings version and whether it is random versus in response to a particular action.

I had trouble with Wings when I got a new Vista machine. But that machine had so many problems, I didn't even bother to investigate it. Now that the machine is more stable, maybe I'll go back and try it again.

blender can do much more than that. Just because blender is free it doesn't mean its bad. it's also easy to use once you figured out how it works (help in finding out how is free aswell Oo.). Took me a few hours.

considering the "smoothness" hmm. blender has it, too.

Wings loads for me but basically it is just frozen. I can mouse around but I can't rotate the view or click on the sculptey to select faces. I can click on the menus but they take a long time to drop down. I have WinXP with latest updates. I have an ATI radeon x1300. Wings ran fine on this machine but it just started freezing recently. Could it be an ATI driver issue? I had an issue with qavimator freezing after I updated the driver and then it got fixed with the next driver update.

I have an older computer with winxp and an old nvidia card. Wings works fine on it.

Seems like the most likely suspect. I see ATI released a bew driver last month. Have you installed it yet?

They're not saying it's bad because it's free (Wings 3D is free too). They're saying it's bad because it uses a non-intuitive interface that requires a lot of learning to use, whereas Wings 3D can be used almost instantly.

once you have figured it out blender is way faster than wings. I guess it depends on how productive you are, I like how I can control everything I want with keyboard shortcuts in blender, nothing beats that. Blender is intuitive in productive working, just not in learning, but logically that means its easier to use. Once you are advanced wings3d limits your abilities and work speed.
Blender also has sculptmode, which is just superb for organic shapes. and then there's blender's elite uv-unwrapping (eat that maya).
with the right tutorials learning blender takes a few hours. You dont need to use all its functions, just a few, and they are all covered by SL-specific tutorials and the basic blender tutorials. Nothing that requires days of studying.
It's ok if you're up for simple sculpties and want "quick" results, knowing you will never need something more complex. Blenders usability is superior to wings3d, so "eat that blender" is just wrong. Consider that you maybe want to make more than a few and easy sculpties in your 'SL-life', so learning the better program will pay out soon enough. This thread says "a clever way to sculpt"... my current project uses ~1200 different sculpties, I guess wings isn't really a clever option for me .
What I dont really get is why people by maya just for sl though. what a pity

Originally i started this thread to show people how to eliminate that god forbid blockyness of the sculpts that wings3D produces.

using sculptypaint in conjunction with wings3D can make the most professional looking sculpts you can imagine.

that and the reason i like wings over 3D is because of its tweak ability.

also to all others who are having trouble with uploading sculpts into the program remember that your sculpt must be 64x64 and you must also make sure you do not have any un-needed programs running in the background the more memory you have freed up the shorter it takes for the program to load the mesh.
seems there is a massive issue on the import feature nothing plugin related but actually related to the wings3D plugin itself i have found.

wings3D progessively consumes memory as you work but even on the most basic of sculpty i have never gone over more then 20-30 megs of ram but durring an upload CPU goes up to 82-93% and the ram costs go to 90 and 100 megs.

so keep that in mind when importing.