Making a sculpty

Hi. I am very new to this 3D modelling, so excuse me if this is a silly question. Is there anyway I could say import an object of a chair into blender, in any format, and make it usable in second life?

I have downloaded the scripts from dominos, and I am going through the machinimatrix tutorials. This is all good for creating sculpties from nothing, but what if I want to make one from an already existing object?

So to make things simpler, heres what I want to do. I want to get a google sketchup object of a chair and import it into blender. I then want to export this to second life. What should I be doing in the middle of all this? With it open in blender, can I just click on a magical button which turns it into a sculpty?

Thanks for any help.

No, you can't just import any 3D model into Blender and export it as a sculpted prim for Second Life. Sculpted prims have some limitations, e.g. the number of faces is limited to 1024, the topology of the mesh must be either a sphere, a torus, a cylinder or a plane. The UV map of a sculpted prim is always a grid of 32x32, 64x16, 128x8 or 256x4 squares (wide or tall). Any complex 3D model you want to import as a set of sculpted prims needs to be remodelled according to these restrictions. This is possible, but you won't be able to do it without basic 3D modelling skills.

It's a common question.
There should be a sculpt forum with these FAQ's in it.

Simple answer: No. You can't magically convert any mesh to sculpt. You have to start each sculpt from scratch.

Complicated answer: Import the object and use it as a template to build sculpts around. i.e. copy it, piece by piece. There are tools to help with that.

I'll just leave it there. Gaia will come along soon.

eta: beaten by seconds!

If you're new to 3D modeling, I'll give you the same recommendation I give everyone in your situation. Put any notion of sculpties on hold for at least a few weeks. Learn the basics of traditional 3D modeling first, and then you'll know almost everything you need to know in order to make sculpties. But try to start with just sculpties, and you'll be in for some frustration.

In other words, as I've said probably at least a thousand times on this forum, don't put the cart before the horse. Learning to create sculpties won't help you become a 3D modeler. But learning to become a 3D modeler will help you create sculpties. Make sense?

The fact is the sculpty is a very atypical thing in 3D modeling. It bends certain rules, ignores some others, and invents a few of its own. Outside of SL, if I were to make models the way sculpties are made, I'd quickly find myself out of work. Sculpties are odd, they're often inefficient and wasteful, and they're singularly purposed.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to say sculpties are bad. For what they were intended to be, within the context of SL, they're really quite brilliant. Qarl Linden, their inventor, should be given a medal for having introduced the single most significant improvement to SL content since we stopped using hand grenades to terraform. (No kidding, that really is how it used to work.)

My point is simply that NO ONE should begin their 3D modeling education by starting with sculpties. They just confuse the issue too much. Start at the beginning, just like every other 3D artist has, and you'll do fine.

Forget all about sculpties for now. Just have fun learning Blender, if that's your tool of choice. Make things the traditional way for now. Don't worry about whether you'll be able to bring your creations into SL or not. Just learn, learn, learn. After you've got a firm handle on the basics, I guarantee you, sculpties will make perfect sense to you. You'll almost instinctively just know what to do in order to create them. Plus, you'll already be prepared for when SL adopts mesh support, which is right around the corner.


Now, to answer your specific question, I'll say two things:

First, even if you could somehow just grab that Sketchup chair model, and magically convert it to sculpties for use in SL, consider whether or not you should. Who owns that model? Do you have any right to copy it without the creator's permission?

Second, here's the technical answer. As others have stated already, you can't just automatically convert an arbitrary mesh into sculpties. As I said, sculpties are highly unusual in the way they're constructed. There's no easy conversion to them from more typical model types. The best thing to do is what the previous two posters already said. Just use the existing model as reference material. Put it in your scene, and use it just as a scaffold. Build your sculpties right on top of it.

What Chosen says about how to learn 3d and sculpties is exactly the major challenge (for me) in making tutorials. So during our ongoing learning how to make tutorials we flipped forward and backward a few times before we finally decided to give upt the "learn everything at once by doing" approach and split the task:

- learn about technical modelling
- learn about sculpted prim issues

Hence we produced the "blender primer" video which serves as a sort of "reference tutorial for the technical basics". And fr0m that time on we took less care about explaining each technical detail of which button has to be pressed to achieve an effect. It is simply too frustrating to constantly have to tell how scaling works, or how you would switch the view or how to split the screen and what so ever... If you watch 10 videos and always get to know how to select all vertices over and over again, thats not good...

On the other hand we feel like you can NOT just start a 3D modelling course and learn your tool in first place. So (for me) the "flipping forward/backward approach" is still a very good way to learn and i tend to advice newbies to follow this approach:

Make your first sculpty in 5 minutes using a "guided tour" to see that it works
do (until happy)
{
# start over and learn a bit of your tool
# ask questions, discuss with others...
# proof your knowledge by making another sculpty
}
done

And if it is your way to learn then somewhere on your way fr0m "newbie to pro" grab a book about 3d modelling AND grab another book about how to work with the tool of your choice

Thanks for these excellent replies. I will definately become more familiar with blender before I start doing some sculpties. The reason I asked this question is because I knew sculpties had limitations, but then in second life, you see all these amazing buildings which look so complicated, and I couldnt work out how these could be made out of 1 shape. Are these created from many shapes, and then just stiched together in sl?

You can find out how objects were made by right-clicking them and choosing "inspect" from the pie menu. This will open a window with a list of the prims that the object consists of. Clicking on entries in that list will highlight the prims, so you can see their shapes more clearly. There are some tricks to make a sculpted prim look like several separate prims, but this works only for rather simple shapes.