Watch the video here: High quality download: PuristSculpties.wmv
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.
Hi Gaia
I am stuck at “remove doubles”. Not sure why but when I use it I get: “removed 0 vertices”.
Have tried by accessing the tool with shortcut w and thru menu: mesh>vertices>remove doubles.
I’m using 2.48(1).
Thanks,
Sca
@Lulu: You can always send me an IM in world. Then we can discuss about your issues there. IM “Gaia Clary”.
@Corvius: the Export option can only export into EXISTING directories. So create a folder on your operating system, then tell blender to export to that folder. Then you see 2 files in that directory: the .tga is the sculptmap. the .lsl is a script, which you can use to restore position and scaling of your sculptie after you have imported it into SL.
I hope that helps.
this prgoram is still saving *.Blend damn i got correctly installed the scripts to .blend folder n i can see options on import export selections but theres a problem on export selection it says Second Life LSL (to dir) im tryn to save it but i cant theres nothing happens plz help im gonno mad soon
Hi, I am a PHD student looking for some technical help to work on a fashion design project utilising SL and 3D modelling. I am no tech expert…infact i have very little idea of how to do things, but i know what i want to do and believe it can be done. I am looking for help with the project in terms of technical expertise. Your tutorials have been great and i thought it worth asking if you would be interested in helping or can recommend where i can go to look? thanks in advance
list of tutorials is here:
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials
the black output at the end is maybe, because you have forgotten to select all vertices in edit mode before baking ?
another bad pitfall is: If you have deselected your object in object mode, then go to edit mode, blender does still edit the object, but the sculptie-scripts don’t find any active object, so they do nothing.
workaround: go to object mode, select your object then bake from there. that should work.
There are tons of potential other things that can lead to black output. I never managed to make a full troubleshooting document for this and often it takes me some time to understand, what a customer has done wrong. well, that’s life…
If you keep stuck, IM me, i will be back tomorrow night. Good luck so far
Thank you Gaia! The s SHIFT is exactly what I needed.
I figured most of the stuff out already… Wish I could go back and edit my previous posts to reflect that. And the tutorial is only lax in the fact it isn’t for a n00b such as myself, but this tutorial is just the kind of stuff I was looking to do.
Is there a list of all of the tutorials here? I managed to figure everything else out but the saving. All of my outputs ended up being just a black .png.
Oh, you also should be aware of this: The method i show to create the sculpt map is also a little bit too complex. I learned a few days after i created this video, how the sculpt map can be created ion a very easy way by using the node editor (see the tutorial “from nurbs to sculptie” )
And finally you should realy use Domino’s scripts. they are the perfect tool for Sculpties with blender and you do not need to worry about how to make the sculpt map at all.
Gaia
@Lavey: scale only x and y:
“s SHIFT z” (scale everything but z)
you can also
“s SHIFT y”
“s SHIFT x”
which would scale x-z and y-z respecitvely.
I must admit, that this tutorial is a bit lax. I created it in a hurry, just wanting to show, how this can be done in principle. The focus lies on the “blender purist” so i thought, it is mostly interesting for the experienced blender user. Maybe you take another look at the blender primer (secnd tutorial in this series). We explained the basic scaling techniques there
From your explanation i do not understand exactly, what your problem is, but maybe i allready could help you ? If not, just call me, or send me an IM. i ususally do answer within 1 day.
Have fun
Gaia
After going back over the steps I listed above, I figure that all out. And that wasn’t what I thought it was… What I am trying to do is get the glass to scale the way you do. Mine starts scaling at the top of the cylinder and the base gets small, so it ends up looking like a martini glass with a really tiny base.
Are you just scaling x and y? How do I tell blender to leave Z out of the equation?
Thank you for the tutorials. I would have given up on blender a long time ago had it not been for this. I am following this sculptie tutorial and am stuck once we start skewing the glass. These steps are greek to me.
3. replace the material colors with vertex colors and then proceed to the texture panel
4. Create a new texture and use the texture type, blend.
5. Now go back to the material panel and focus on the texture tab.
Is there a tutorial that explains these steps? If so could you link them in the text of the tutorials wiki like? That way those of use that feel like we’re a little kid in a grown up world can follow a little closer.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
2.46 I meant
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
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!!!
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 ?
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.