Archipelis

I could have sworn there was a thread on this already, my apologies if this is a duplicate.

I've been working with the Archipelis program for a day now, and it's fun and makes nice round shapes. But the SL importer is a bit peculiar: essentially, it breaks the merged shape into its component shapes, and those shapes import into SL separately. In other words, you cannot simply import the obj file into Wings or whatever and work on it there, as the obj file is the whole merged shape and would therefore have too many vertices.

I was wondering if anyone else was familiar with this program, and if so, knew of a work around for this.

Yeah, it's odd. I noticed earlier that the thread had vanished from the forums completely.


Anyway, back to your question!:

The .obj file format supports the grouping of objects into a single object. The structure of the objects aren't altered in any way. It basically works the same way as SL's linking of prims.

I think the Wings command for ungrouping is 'Seperate'.

Thank you 2K! I'm on the road on my laptop (which explodes when I try to run Wings), so I can't try this out right now, but let's see if I've got the essence of how to do this.

-Create a textured object in Archipelis
-Export the object to Wings 3D. It appears as a merged object (this is how far I got before. It won't import to SL)
-Save object in Wings
-Use the "separate" command. Right click on the page to get the object menu, select separate.
-Now, delete all objects save one, then save it.
-Repeat this for all the other component shapes (is there a faster way to do this?)
-Finally, cross fingers and export to SL

Now, I'm not sure this is going to work. I have a sneaky suspicion that the SL exporter is tranforming the object before export into an SL compatible object. I've been reading the rather sketchy Archipelis manuals and tutorials, and haven't found a way to import anything other than textures into Archipelis proper; if one could import an obj file, all the above fooferal wouldn't be necessary, one could simply reimport the object into Archipelis then export from there.

Or...excuse my sculpty naivity, but is there a way to upload a sculpty texture from SL into an obj file in another program?

Damn. That's a good point. I think you may be right. I don't think Archipelis's native objects/meshes are suitable for sculpties.



Yes, this is how the Blender sculpty importer/exporter works.


But still, if your Archipelis object is in such a bad state that you're wanting to tweak all of its parts then you may be better off just building the thing yourself and manually applying the texture later.

Oh, it's not that it's in a bad state, it's simply that it would make things more powerful. I've made some very nice organic shapes in Archepelis, but fine detail or flat bits are better done in other applications.

The makers wrote back to me about how to load obj files, but, testing it this morning, it's an unsupported mesh. I'll write back and see if they could enable the SL Exporter to create object files as well--then it would create obj files with meshes that are supported by SL.

I tried to be sneaky and upload the BMP sculpty textures to Wings, but it froze up (after 30 minutes, the loading bar was about 90% there, then my computer locked up. I've a dual core processor with 2Gig of RAM and the CPU was ~50% in use)