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Sculpties... Designing in SolidWorks/Alibre... Importing to Blender... Now what?
Imnotgoing Sideways
Can't outlaw cute! =^-^=
Join date: 17 Nov 2007
Posts: 4,694
09-11-2008 08:28
Okay, I'm soooo wanting this to work, but Blender is so frigg'n confusing! (>_<;)

A lot of the references to scripts and stuff I'm finding here on the forums are ancient and most of the links are broken. I wanna get into making sculpties from my offline work, I'm well practiced in SolidWorks and Alibre and I use Alibre daily for all kinds of projects. I just need to find that 'missing link' to make my solid objects into UV mapped sculpties. (=_=)

Here's what I'm able to get to so far... A fairly descent import of an example shape I want to try out... Now, where do I go from here? (o.o)

_____________________
Somewhere in this world; there is someone having some good clean fun doing the one thing you hate the most. (^_^)y


http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ferguson/54/237/94
Gaia Clary
mesh weaver
Join date: 30 May 2007
Posts: 884
09-11-2008 11:57
From: Imnotgoing Sideways
Okay, I'm soooo wanting this to work, but Blender is so frigg'n confusing! (>_<;)

A lot of the references to scripts and stuff I'm finding here on the forums are ancient and most of the links are broken.
These threads are neither broken nor ancient ;-) :

/8/60/203571/1.html
/8/75/257428/1.html

From: Imnotgoing Sideways
I wanna get into making sculpties from my offline work, I'm well practiced in SolidWorks and Alibre and I use Alibre daily for all kinds of projects. I just need to find that 'missing link' to make my solid objects into UV mapped sculpties. (=_=)
From what i learned so far due to many restrictions on the sculptie side you will only get sufficient accurate sculpties when you do significant manual work especially regarding LOD. And remember the fact, that sculpties have only an 8 bit resolution in space, which makes them sometimes look a bit crunched...

Creating UV-maps for arbitrary objects works in principle, but as Domino has stated a million times now, it is hard (very hard!) to make the uv-unwrapping by hand. And it looks much more efficient to start with the ready made sculpt meshes from Domino, then bend them according to the rules (namely LOD) and bake/transfer to SL.

From: Imnotgoing Sideways
Here's what I'm able to get to so far... A fairly descent import of an example shape I want to try out... Now, where do I go from here? (o.o)


I recently played with one exciting option of an enhanced blender-2.47 build, namely the shrinkwrap modifier:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Jaguarandi/SummerOfCode2008

You can get the newest build from here:

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

In principle i was able to load an arbitrary object, then shrinkwrap a sculptmesh around it and get something out of it, that looked at least a bit like the original. But i am not realy satisfied with the results yet. At least it is a beginning...

If someone would come out with a good generic method to unwrap arbitrary models to SL-compliant UV-maps, i'd be interested to see it and make another tutorial of course ;-)