intended audience:
- Creators of “sculpted prims” for Second Life and similar environments
- Blender noobs (no/low level skills)
prerequisites(*):
- download: jass-2 (binary distribution, contains blender-2.49b, python-2.6.4, primstar-1.0.0 and more)
related tutorials:
- Blender primer (First steps in blender)
- Sculpted prims Part II (recommended follow up tutorial)
Separate Downloads:
(*) If Jass-2 is not an option for you, you can download the prerequisites separately:
Transcription
Welcome to our blender tutorial series about sculpted prims. I assume that you are new to blender and maybe this is even your first attempt to make 3D-artwork. So i will guide you through the process of creating a sculpted prim in easy-to-follow steps. I have choosen to create a top-hat. This is not a very complex task, but i can show you many important details about modelling and texturing. At the end of this video you will know the most important concepts about blender, sculpted prims, and about the primstar tool which i will introduce now.
I assume that you have already downloaded and installed blender 2.49b (the current stable release).
And i assume that you have downloaded and installed the primstar tool from the Domino-designs website.
We have already covered these preliminary steps in our basic blender tutorials. And please take your time to watch our blender-primer-tutorial at least once. That will help you find your way through this video. You can find all mentioned tutorials on the machinimatrix-website.
We will use blenders plain and simple out of the box configuration here. I will modify the configuration later to optimize blender for the creation of sculpted prims. So let us first remove the default-cube by pressing ‘x’, and then click on: ‘erase selected objects’. Now we are ready to create a new object by pressing the space bar on the keyboard , and then,
add -> mesh -> sculpt mesh
A dialog opens where you can access a set of parameters for your sculptie. The most important parameter is the base shape to be used. You can choose among 6 base shapesand a couple of more complex pre-defined shapes. Since we want to create a top-hat we will select the most natural starting shape here, a cylinder. For now keep the other parameters with their default values. We will come back to them later.
But please note, that we are working with
- 8 faces in x
- 8 faces in y
- 2 subdivision levels.
We will see later, what that is about and why this is one of the coolest features of prim-star. Ok, it is time to Click on the build-button and create your first blender object.
You can use the middle mouse roll-button to zoom-in and out. This pink outline of the object tells you that it is currently selected. You can hold down the middle mouse button and drag the mouse to examine the object in the 3D-space.
As expected, it is a cylinder and we want to modify it now. So let us switch from Object-mode to edit-mode. You can do that in the mode-selection menu in the bottom line of the current screen. When in edit-mode, you notice a few more interesting things here:
- first, you see a mesh made out of 9 octagons stacked on top of each other. This corresponds to 8 faces in x, and 8 faces in y. If you selected another set of values in the add-sculptie-menu, you would now see a different mesh-configuration here.
- You also see the cylinder rendered as a smooth object. Indeed the mesh is used as a set of control-points for the cylinder. The number of vertices on the cylinder controlled by each mesh-point is determined by the subdivision level. Each level adds a factor of 4, hence with 2 subdivision levels, each mesh-point controls 16 cylinder vertices.
For now we just work with the control points. We will learn later, how to take more control, even full control over each individual vertex of the cylinder. For now we are happy with just modifying the controlpoints.
Ok, the first thing we need to do is closing the top of the cylinder. For this purpose we switch to front-view. You can do that in the view-selection menu in the bottom line of the current screen. Now i deselect all vertices of the mesh by pressing ‘a’ once.
Now i want to select the top vertices. Press ‘b’ to open the border-select-tool, then click the left mouse-key and while holding the mouse key down drag the rubber-band around the vertices which you want to select. When i now release the left mouse-key all enclosed vertices get selected.
Now i will scale all vertices down to 0. Press “s”, then drag the mouse towards the center of the selected octagon.
As a shortcut simply enter “0″ on the key-board and press the Enter button.
Now the cylinder-top is closed. But we want to make the top more flat. I go back to front view, and then i grab the selected vertices by pressing “g” followed by “z”. Now i can move the vertices along the z-axis until they align with the next lower octagon of vertices. By now we are almost finished. We only need to model the brim.
I select the bottom row of vertices and scale them up a bit. Again i use the border-select tool by pressing “b”, left click, drag, and release the left mouse button. Then i scale by pressing “s”, then drag the mouse and left click again. Finally i move the whole-set of selected vertices a bit upwards to align them with the next-higher row of vertices. finished. Now we need to know how this object can be transported to the target system namely second life.
The answer is: We must create a sculpt-map. A sculptmap is a 2D-mapping of the vertices in your object. This mapping is calculated by primstar, and automatically translated into an image. And this image can be accessed by use of the UV-image editor. All we have to do now, is to configure a split-screen and open the UV-image editor. This will become very handy in the course of this tutorial.
Move your mouse-button to the upper-part of the screen until you see a double-headed arrow-key. After pressing the right mouse-button a small window appears. Select “split area”. A vertical line appears and follows your mouse-movement.
Move the line around until you have found your preferred split-point then click the left mouse-button.
Now you see two windows showing the same content. In the right window go to the “window-type-selector” and choose the UV-image editor. If the display is too small You can use the middle mouse roll-button to scale it up a bit
And now comes the magic part:
- First, go to object-mode. This is important to see the sculptie-map immediately.
- Then , Go to render , “bake sculpt meshes”.
- There just klick on the bake-button, leaving the default settings untouched for the moment.
- your sculptie-map appears in the window on the right-side.
- And now finally open the image-sub-menu and save your sculpt-map to your hard-drive.
This map is what we have to import to our virtual world now. Note, that this image will by default be stored in TGA-format. Now go to your second-life viewer and import the just created image into your inventory. When you transmit the image, be sure, that you use loss-less compression, Otherwise your sculpted prim might look a bit broken.
For our first attempt to create a sculpted prim this result is not too bad, don’t you think ?
But hold on! Look what happens when i take a closer look under the hat. not good! The object is transparent from the inner side. The brim disappears. Now how can we explain this ?
Well, the reason is simple: sculpted prims have only one side. Look here. These are 4 basic shapes for sculpted prims. The plane, Nicely visible from one side. But fully transparent from the other side. The cylinder, The outside is ok, but the whole in-side is invisible. The sphere and the Torus. These two are ok. But this is only so because they do have only one side. The inner side simply does not exist, hence we see no problem here.
So what can we do to make this cylinder work better in our 3D-world ? Lets go back to the moment where i create the brim. Now we select the secnd lowest row of vertices and scale them up as we did before. And then we take the lowest row of vertices but now we scale them down a bit. Finally we scale down the three bottom-most rows in “z”. The effect is, that now we have modelled the brim with 2 sides instead of only one side. And now the hat also looks good from below.
Please note that i have not fully closed the hat. As long as the hat is placed on a head there is no problem here.
Only if you intend to hold the hat in your hands it may become necessary to model the full in-side part.
We are now at the end of this tutorial. I have shown you
- how to create a basic shape with primstar
- how to examine the objects
- how to select vertices with the border select tool
- how to scale parts of your model.
- You know how to bake a sculptmap
- and how to export it to Secnd-life.
- And now you also know why sometimes parts of a sculptie unexpectedly disappear and what you can do in order to avoid that.
In the next tutorial We will proceed with a few more-advanced modelling-tools,
and make this cylinder look more appealing.
Until then have fun.
See you later!
Dear Gaia, thanks for a great tutorial! I have an off-topic question: how did you manage to lip-synch your avatar in the video with that electronic voice? It’s a very desirable feature for any machinima! Did you feed the audio into voice-chat? (You can answer me to my mail address) Thanks in advance!
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOUUUU SO MUCH! I was having such a hard time and you made it so simple, thank you once more gaia!
I installed the Mac version of jass-2.
Blender crashes when I choose to add a “Sculpt Mesh”. I’m running a Mac with OSX 10.6.4, and the python version is Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Feb 11 2010, 00:51:29)
But I tried again, and this time, blender didn’t crash.
Was wondering why when I take the sculpty into SL my top hat has points and doesn`t look round I used cylinder for blender and SL build. I uploaded it as a sculpty as well. Is there any other settings that I haven’t done or did that would make the brim have points to it. It looks like the mesh in edit mode.
Thanks
Wolfgang
Hi all. How can i make holes in wheels like this Cog Wheels??? https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=557203 Do i need a Transparenttexture or can i make with the Sculptie itself?
Hi all. Thanks for that great Tutorial. But i have a problem what is not in the Videos. How can i make a hole in a Object like a wheel or so?
You can use the technique i have shown in the “Two in One” video: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/08/14/2-in-1-multiple-objects-with-one-single-sculpty/ You have no other chance to create holes than using the described trick. You just need to figure out how you can “simulate” one or more holes by creating “visibly unconnected parts” and rejoin them such that they build the desired holes.
Creating spokes wheels out of one sculptie is possible with this technique.
this tutorial is just awesome, u must spend a lot of hours, thanks!!!!!!!!
Hello Gaia, I am having a serious problem here. When I try uploading a sculpt mesh. (Add->Mesh->Sculpt Mesh) I get an error message saying : Error Python script error: check console
I am using Python version 2.6.2
Blender 2.49b
The error is as follows:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in
File “C:\Users\MY USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts\primstar\add_mesh_sculpt_mesh.py”, line 50, in
from Tkinter import*
File “C:\Python26\Lib\lib-tk\Tkinter.py”, line 38, in
File “C:\Python26\Lib\lib-tk\FixTk.py”, line 63, in
ImportError: DLL load failed: %1 is not a valid Win32 application
PLEASE HELP A.S.A.P!
P.S.- Awesome Tutorial, Creative and easy to follow =D
Hi, Vanny;
Sorry to tell you, that i am not able to help you. The cause of your problem can be anything starting from mixing up blender versions, different versions of the sculptie scripts and possibly even jass-2. This melange may give you troubles without end.
i would however try this:
remove all blender instalations. Be carefull to get rid of every trace including the files created in your roaming folder or wherever your personal data has been dropped by blender. Then try jass-2. Be sure to also install the embedded python interpreter!
But if you are easy with installing blender/primstar/python by yourself, use this mix:
blender-2.49b, python-2.6.4, primstar-1.0.0
In the case you have already installed Jass-2 then check the environment for PYTHON_PATH after removing jass-2. i am afraid that this variable will not be removed by the deinstaller.
Sorry, but i cant give you more precise help. However if you had installed jass-2 and nothing else, that is another situation which can and will be handled by us.
honestly good luck!
Hi Gaia,
Thanks very much for your tutorials – I’ve found them quite clear to follow so far, but I seem to have gone wrong somewhere. When I Add – Mesh – Sculpt Mesh I see an error message which reads: “Python Script Error: check console”. I have downloaded the current version of Blender, and also Primstar and Python, and I’ve set the file path as instructed (I hope). I’m running on Linux Ubuntu. If you can help at all it would be greatly appreciated.
All the best,
Ford.
I have a little problem at the end of the tutorial: i follow all steps, bake the mesh, import it to SL, but then the sculpitie is not smouth, but wrinkled. Any idea about why it does that ? i installed the Jass2 distribution, so all python and primstar should be here…
Thanks
Thx Gaia!!!! Fantastic & very clear tutorial. I’m french and could understand everything you said though. Your diction is perfect
The transription idea is very good and helpful when something is not totaly clear. I made mu first sculpted hat which i uploaded into SL without any troubles. I couls kiss you 
You certainly made my day! Thanks 
)
Hi, thanks for the awesome tutorial! I have one problem, though. I tried making a katana blade in Blender, but when I upload the sculpt map into SL, the top curve of my katana is jagged like a serrated knife. It looks smooth in Blender, though. Any ideas what I could do to fix it?
Hi Gaia! great tut.
I’m having problems with baking my sculpt map, i keep getting this error
debug gui 000 – bake failed after 0.0978 sec.
what am i doing wrong?
First of all: I LOVE these tuts… To be honest, they´re the first ones I ws able to follow and understand *gg*
I only got one problem. In the middle of the Blender-Screen is a cube I can´t seem to get rid of. It´s not the object I created and it´s not moveable (or even editable at all). How can I remove this? I´m sure there´s a way and I am just too much of a noob to find it =)
Here is a screenshot
http://s17.photobucket.com/albums/b63/meril_OAL/blender%20sl%20sculpts/?action=view¤t=help.jpg
- go to object mode
- right click the cube
- press either the delete key, the x-key, or press SPACE then navigate to: edit -> delete
- right click your sculptie
- go to edit mode
- done
take20 minutes of your time and watch:
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/08/24/the-blender-primer/
Your tutorial has helped me a bit.. I don’t Know what im doing wrong.. I’m not trying to make the hat.. but I have sculpted a skull from a sphere… when I go to bring up the sculptimap it does not show me a black box that it shows in the video.. rather it shows me a small empty grid. also.. I do not see the same options on my screen under UV-image editor I only get view, and image. Please help me.
I don’t see the same menu for the sculpt mesh – my menu only has 5 types of mesh available for me. I have uploaded a screen shot…
Is there advanced options I am supposed to activate?
You use an old version of the Domino Scripts. If you are on Windows, your best bet would be to just install Jass-2. That contains all you need. If you are on another oprating system, then you will ghave to install blender, python, primstar separately. You find the links above right under the video screen (“prerequisites” resp. “separate downloads”)
Yeay – i finally found it – i do think you ought to havementioned it in the tutorial video
Thank you for this suggestion. I must admit that the information was there, but it was not very obvious. I have updated the video around 08:44 I think, now it is explicit
I also have added a remark about your other problem with not seeing the sculptmap after baking. I now state that you must ensure to be in edit mode. You can however jump to object mode afterwards. BUt you MUST at least have visited edit-mode now…
i hope this helps other to better understand what’s up.
i am really tired now, i do not understand why when I upload the sculpt map to SL that my sculpt mesh > cylinder object appears as solid – that is even if i do not close the top – it is not transparent on the inside (there is no visible inside). in addition the default texture is stretched to a point on each top and bottom face of the prim object in SL creating a point or peak. Damned if i can find what is happening!
BTW @7:48 after split screen and selecting window type UV/image editor and left screen selecting render > bake sculpt mesh > bake… no sculpt map image appears. In the tutorial vid the image shows the pull down has IM:cylinder selected – this is not selected by default. You must have the object selected in the image pull down menu of the UV/image window task bar for the UV sculpt image to appear!
If you follow the course of the tutorial you should see the image as you can see in the video. You might have added a secnd object (unintentionally or intentionally). In that case you will get to see your sculptmap only after you selected your object, and entered edit mode. Then going back to object mode will keep your image open and visible…
However you can do it as you propose, but this only works if you have allread baked once. Otherwise no image would be available for vieweing.
Gaia, do you have an unmarried sister?
You guys are definatly the bests o.o
I love your tutorial style! This is the first time I watched one that didn’t put me to sleep
Brava!
This tutorial is amazing!!! It is just what i have been looking for and has been more effective then any other blender sculptie tutorial. Thank you so much for posting this and i will be checking back every day for the continuation of these tutorials
PS. I would love to see how i would make a sculptie shoe with high heel. If there could be a tutorial for it in the future that would be amazing.
Keep up the awesome work!
this is AWESOME! now that I know how to import effectively OMG! thank you, and feel safe in the knowledge that when it goes well, I will credit you, Gaia; when it goes horribly, horribly wrong, I will blame lag. \o/ thanks, again.
[...] Ich empfehle dir, da nur mit Jass 2 arbeitest, dieses Tutorial von ganz vorne mal durchzuarbeiten. Sculpted prims Part I Denn das ist auf Jass 2 zugeschneidert weil es eben mit Jass 2 und deren Entwickler gemacht wurde [...]