Sculpted, some tricks

The first stage in sculpties is to get to work with BLENDER.
Then you have to struggle with the UV pictures coming out of BLENDER, hey, they do not immediately and always have the right rotation for Second Life. This is boring, sometimes you have to retry several times, mirroring and rotating the picture.
Sometimes looking at other pictures which worked helps, but apparently a picture of a shape has no single UV picture in sculpty land.
Then there is the problem of definition. Sometimes you loose all the rigidity. This is very obvious with sharp exact shapes. 5 of course experimented with the pentagon, this five sides shape is hard to get!
The first tries were really terrible.

Then 5 made a shape and selected out the colors. In Photoshop the UV image was made in a very abstract painting, with 10 colors. 10? Yes, five layers on top of each other, so adding the colors gives 10.
This resulted in a very exact shape, but indeed the corners are not really on top of each other, showing how complex this UV mapping is, how to get these point-colors right. This still has to be found out. Well 5 spend at least 300 L$ on uploading pentagon UV images... :-( Really there should be working viewers outside Second Life! How to make one???

( a PS: this small preview prog (free) can see the problem with the rotation, not the being flipped horizontally ogf the image, but no zooming is possible, only some rotation with the arrow keys....
http://www.jhurliman.org/download/sculptedpreview-1.0.0.zip
)

( ok this is a PPS: Wings 3D, with this plugin installed:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=183764
can also import and preview the UV map, it also shows the rotation mistake, but not the mirror problem (?), Wings #D is also free, and here you can zoom and rotate the shape....but you have to give the UV image another format, from the BLENDER comes .tga, and WIngs asks for .bmp, ooh it will all be so simple in the future.....)


Then 5 saw that to get a better resolution you have to get (in BLENDER) a lot of lines round the corners an as few as possible on flat surfaces. If you know this trick, you can nicely define for instance handles, as shown here.
The old hanging telephone, no soooo obsolete, lol, everyone having his own telephone-computer-digital camera in her pocket is of course not too simple to construct. The casing having between 6 and 12 primitives in normal building had to be reduced. Well it is a bit of work, but it really was worthwhile. Everything has to be done by the cylinder shape of course. You have to take care, and to deliberate where to put your two holes. And don’t forget to add your seams right in the beginning, because afterwards the points to join to the seam might be hard to select!
Of course the horn has to be made in one primitive, then this phone will be 7 prims in total, included the small horn for listening in on a conversation....
So, this stratagem of constructing sculpties is slowly getting 5 to the point where a lot of classical primbuilding can be replaced by the sculpties. Of course to get definition, for instance the human body has to be split up in face, torso, arms, legs, and hands. SO a human body, for the moment consists of 7 prims…..dressing it can demand extra prims. You must not become too sculpty, sometimes the classis prims are a lot easier, and if you have prims to spare…..
But you see, a handle in classic prim building is at least 4 prims, in sculpty it is just one.
Super, but one problem still remains, this is the texturing. How to get your image around the sculpty?
Indeed, when you organize the shape according to the principle of defining corners you can sort of keep the planes in the shape “logical”, so that the image projection becomes somewhat easier. But with the hanging phone, of course the plate with the numbers is still a classic cylinder prim.

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.

Sculpty - mania

After a couple of days, and the very tedious process of learning all shortcuts in Blender, the UV mappings started working. You have to read the few pages about making sculpties with Blender with extreme care. Simply overlooking one small button (Five forgot to put the texture on ADD, instead of MIX) makes your sculpty picture unusable.
Also you have to learn to work with the special but beautiful tool in Blender called ….very appropriate “Sculpt Mode”. In this mode, you can work on a model as if it is clay, adding and deleting material. Smoothing it again makes the shape beautifully organic. Then you have to get used to the way Blender throws this grids on the UV mapping which is without doubt very logical, but can be a bit strange too.


After saving the image, it is often inside out, and you have to deal with a negative texture color. Lately the UV image was saved at an angle of 90 degrees, so Five had to turn it back in Photoshop. You have to learn looking at the UV maps produced by Blender and know, if it is about right.


But well who cares, if the results are really fun!
First of all, Five March made the human shape, the torso. Then Five tried to pull out the arms as far as possible (discovering the in between tool for the grid steered by the mouse wheel – oh boy!), but the long arms were only partially represented in the shape of the torso inworld. Maybe the 3D centre can be arranged in a better way?
Then a mouse shape was sculpted, you can sculpt in a symmetrical way, so both sides are done at once, for two sided animals and humans a quick way to get a basic shape.
And how about these shapes, what a difference now with the ingenious but primitive shapes of many, many prims….what will all be possible? Indeed a lot! Not possible are shapes with holes, but then simple use two sculpties…
Five’s first try-outs look stupid now…..
All these try-outs can be found in the DevShed, on Virgin Island2.
The most beautiful sculpty, indeed it has got the first prize in the sculpty contest of a few months ago is of course the horse of Nomasha Syaka.
Below an image, which shows the sculpty-textures on the shapes. This is of course not necessary.
This horse even can be seen galloping around, but the sculpties take a long time to render so, sometimes balloons are seen instead of legs…..

Five guesses that the possibilities of the sculpties will really change the whole look of SL, an end of an era!