Sculpted Prims for the blender purist
abstract: The tutorial is a 6 minutes life demonstration, how to create a whine glass sculptie with blender, from scratch and without any(!) help of scripts. I only use the blender internal functions and show a very easy going way. This tutorial is dedicated to Amanda Levitzki and Domino Marama, who have given me all the hints i needed to eventually find the demonstrated workflow. I hope, you like it. And , please, please send me feedback 
Watch the video here: If you prefer to get a better quality .wmv-version, you can download it from blip.tv
Or read the text:
Hi! I found a way to make sculpted prims with very little effort,
and without any scripting help. You are interested ? Here we go.
Start your virgin blender. No scripts here.
No nothing. This is pure blender 2.46 .
ok, as allways, delete the default object first. Then split the view, and open the UV-image editor. Are you afraid of UV-unwrapping? Don’t worry, there is nothing to do there. Just watch, while we are stepping through the process.
After you prepared your view, create a plane mesh object, and then go to edit mode,
Call the UV-unwrapper now, and just unwrapp this single face object. This is trivial, isn’t it?
Believe it or not, but the UV-map is already finished. So, lets blow up the mesh-count to a reasonable size. Use subdivide, and apply it 5 times. We end up with 32 times 32 faces. Now you have already prepared your sculptie mesh. But it is a simple plane. So what comes now?
let us start with a cylinder object. switch to the front view, and use the warp-tool to bend the mesh. Place the 3D cursor right under the plane. Then warp to 360 degrees.
Now we got a cylinder. But hold on. we need to check something: Zoom to the lowest part of the circle. Then smooth the object once. oh! What is this? You guessed it already, didn’t you?
All vertices from the left side and the right side of the plane fall on top of each other. We have to stitch the plane here. We do this by removing the double vertices now.
But before, press control-z once, to revert the smoothing, and to get the vertices back in place.
Now select the stitching-area and remove doubles.
As expected, the 33 vertices along the side of the mesh have been removed now.
our cylinder is now finished and the UV-map ist still correct.
You can start sculpting the cylinder right now.
I create a simple glass for demonstration. So, after this is finished, now lets make the sculpt map.
- Go to the material editor
- create a new material
- replace the material colors with vertex colors
- and then proceed to the texture panel
- Create a new texture and use the texture type, blend.
- Now go back to the material panel and focus on the texture tab.
go to the Map-Input, tab.
in the x-y-z matrix, select x only
advance to the map-to, tab. Set the color to red, and set the blending-mode to: add
Go back to the texture tab and add 2 copies of the texture.
Go to the map input tab of the secnd texture, and choose, y only, in the x-y-z matrix.
advance to the Map-to: tab, and set the color to green. Dont forget to set blend type to: add.
advance to the third texture, in the map input tab,
select z in the x-y-z tab.
In the map-to tab, set the color to blue, and again set blend type to: add.
in the UV-image editor, create a new image. Select width and height to 64 each.
Now select, render, bake render meshes, texture only.
Your sculpted prim is done.
Now save the image, import it to second-life, and verify that your sculptie works as expected.
July 14, 2008 at 3:01 am
Thanks to your nice article.
When I make object from plane like this tutorial, the object’s back side face will gone in sL.
In this case, the inside of glass will gone.
In blender, back side is visible. But in SL, the inside od glass will not be rendered.
How can I aboide this trouble?
Thank you so much.
July 14, 2008 at 3:30 am
hi, saltycandy
planes do have only one surface in SL.
and if you look close at any sculpty
cylinder, you will also see, that its inner side is invisible, hence transparent.
you have 2 options to get rid of this problem
option1: fold the mesh once, like you would fold a piece of paper, so that you cant look at the transparent side of the mesh. of course you will loose half of the resolution then.
option2: instead of one sculptie, make 2 and place them so that only the “outside” can be seen.
concerning the glass, i have been playing around with simple vertex movements. for instance i took the top most row of vertices, scaled it down to 0 and placed the “pole” deep inside the glass. Then i took the
next to top row, scaled it down a bit and placed it a bit over the pole.
so the inner side of the glass is now covered with visible faces. i did the
same with the bottom most row and thus got a nice glas at the end, which cna be viewed from any angle without problems. maybe i should make these steps also into the movie… hmm.
i hope, that helps a bit ?
July 14, 2008 at 11:04 am
Dear Gaia,
Thank you so much for your fast reply.
And thank you for your nice contents again!
I see.
The first way that you proposed in your comment may be better wayat present.
I think, when we want to make some complicated objects like collars, plane is better mesh to mold, but objects made from plane will have invisible faces…
To tell the truth, I had already made some collars in almost same way that you explane in this article.
But I could not make my object with all-visible faces…
Some objects has invisible face on side surface.
I tried to fix them. But the collar is little complicated model. So side face was no good…
So, I expected if I can make easily…(^^;
Anyway, thank you so much.
And I am waiting for your next contents!!!
July 23, 2008 at 6:10 am
This is my SL name
I followed this tutorial to a T, but when I import the sculpt the ends look like they have a polygon on them that is warp and doesn’t light correctly, also the scult appears horizontally scewed and vertically flatted and doesn’t keep the original proportions.
Using blender 1.46
July 23, 2008 at 6:27 am
2.46 I meant
July 23, 2008 at 11:13 am
Hi, Draco;
Did you import the sculpt with “lossless” checked ?
You can double check, that your sculpt is broken, by installing the
So if you look inside the glass, it appears “see through”. I am preparing an upgrade of this tutorial that also covers this problem.
import/export scripts from Domino Marama. Just follow the tutorial about
“Creating sculpties with blender”. Dominos scripts include a sculptie importer.
So you can check directly in blender, whether your sculpties are broken, or the upload to SL is broken. Maybe that helps to find out, whats going wrong with your installation. In general the approach shown in the video here works as expected. There is only this ugly detail, that plains have only one surface
August 11, 2008 at 1:51 am
Ah! Help! I can’t seem to find the warp tool! When I press “W’ as the tutorial says I get a menu with “Specials’ up at the top and none of the listed options are ‘warp.’ Is there an alternate way to ‘warp’ the object?
August 11, 2008 at 1:58 am
Oh got it figured out, hold shift and then hit W, you will then be able to warp it as much or as little as you want.
December 1, 2008 at 9:22 am
Hey Gaia
Gr8 video tutorial, easy to follow, unlike a lot of them!!!
But…theres always a but! Using Blender 2.46 & Dominos’ xclnt script when i import back into Blender (after your tutorial) a simple cube it is still affected by LOD.
And when i zero alternate vertices’s to create movable blocks for, say, a chair the results are terrible!
Am i missing something???
Thx for your help :O)
ROMSEY
January 5, 2009 at 6:03 am
If you find your scupltie looks strange- like it’s inside out, or perhaps when you orbit your camera around it it seems like it rotates a bit to point at the camera from some angles- it IS inside out.
Click the ‘inside out’ checkbox below the sculpt image selection area.
Maybe everybody else had that figured out, but it was throwing me for a bit. Note- flipping the normals in blender had no evident effect on the texture bake.