Sculpty mania 2

In need of some fine sculpties Five continued practicing BLENDER. Somehow everything went wrong. The basics have become familiar after quite a bit of exercise. Then by some reasons explained later the shapes were always coming out wrong. Well every time this painful proces of slowing down progress happens something can be learned.
:-( ?oh no -> :-)
This is true for real and virtual life. It is the same fun every time.
You want to finish a job, something goes wrong and won't be mastered fast. First you get mad, calling yourself names, (who else is to blame), then you start realizing that the failure points at something interesting, slowly the energy is rebuilding and the mind gets intrigued.
This process of wanting to finish something quickly, getting frustrated, wanting to throw everything away, starting to understand that the real thing doesn’t want to reveal itself too easy, getting interested again, and understanding some important details of the process, is repeating itself again and again. Lots of things to learn in Second Life, even more than in real life, if you ask Five.
What was going on?
After a day of making bodies, torsos really, and the textures on them, images of dresses, old dresses from the 1920ties, the results were … well not quite good, but ok, for the moment…..
The next day Five tried a teapot. The teapot could be made with ROKURO, being a simple shape of rotation. (The handle being another prim of course.) But to practice Five choose BLENDER. Everything went fine, melding spheres together, making the UV mapping, but then uploading the image brought disaster. The image was a total mess and inside out. What was happening? Too much to be true.
First of all, the UV image was rotated by 90 degrees, because the shape was kind of lying on its side. BLENDER doen't mind, but Second Life does!!!
When Five realized this, Five turned the image in Photoshop. But then the shape still was inside out! Ok it had to be mirrored over in the vertical axis, and then the UV image was producing the right sculpty.
Well, Five had to understand more of the sculpties and maybe a previewer would be nice? Because Five spent quite a lot of money on uploading the wrong UV images…..
So another quest on the web brought these interesting links:
First of all, how does it function, this UV mapping: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_Technical_Explanation
And then some interesting software:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_Resident-made_Tools
Five tried:
Cel_Sculptpreview
TOKOROTEN(extruder)Sculpted Prim Maker, of Yuzuru Jewell
(The same person who made ROKURO)
(easy for cut-out shapes, like stamps)
And then Math Sculptor 1.0, for a few special shapes. You are invited to write your own addinns, but well.......
These progs are all helping, but also displaying the problems of sculpties: the definition of the shapes is poor. Some exceptions are the very sharp definitions of geometric shapes, which seem to be possible, but Five hasn’t yet found out how (pentagons, dodecahedrons etc).
Getting on with the teapot, very annoyed, Five used the smooth tool in the sculpt mode of BLENDER on the teapot. Very nice this sculpt mode by the way, unbelievably easy and great fun! And Five got the shape of an arm within seconds, a bit of refinement and finished! (The thumb becoming an extra prim.) Strange! Only this is the right arm, the left has to be made all over again, or is there a function in BLENDER to mirror a 3D shape in its “other” mirror shape, a kind of 4D transformation…..LOL?

The wrong images of the arms, with the resulting sculpties can be found in the DevShed, a developers hang-out in Second Life.