Friday, October 05, 2007

I have no idea how Siyu handles sculpted prims so well. I've been trying to make a chair back using them, and it's a total and utter disaster. It looks like a five year old got ahold of some modeling clay.

And that's before exporting it to SL.

Lest you assume I'm trying to make something ill suited for sculpted prims, what I'm trying to do is something like the green chair in this picture. With less ornamentation, of course. This should not be very hard!

5 Comments:

Blogger Casandra Shilova said...

FYI -
Linking to files in this forum is not allowed from outside the forum.

October 06, 2007 12:53 AM  
Blogger Ennui said...

I can't see the picture file either.

What software are you using for sculpties? Now that Siyu converted me to ZBrush, I can't imagine using anything else - the clay modelling approach works really well with sculpties. Also, are you using SLImageUploader? It has a no-compression upload mode which helps against the artifacts introduced by JPEG2000 compression in the SL upload. The SL RC client contains a no-comp upload mode too but it's been broken since LL released it so I just don't bother. But SLImageUploader goes a long way to making the sculptie in SL look more like the sculptie in whatever app you use. Of course it is a medium with many limitations, but I've found it works rather well for clothing / accessories where a certain elasticity of the material is to be expected, and it doesn't look weird when there's a bit of bunching here and there. I image it would be a lot more challenging with wooden furniture.

Another point to consider is the ground prim topology - sculptie textures can be applied not only to the sphere prim but also (with some script help) to a torus with a sculptie with hole, or plane (nice for translating height maps into mini sims). Chosing the right topology can go a long way to making the final sculptie viable, esp wrt to mesh distortion and texturing.

Ok, I hope I didn't bore you with lots of trival info here :)

October 09, 2007 6:58 AM  
Blogger Miriel Enfield said...

I'm using Blender. I've tried using SLImageUploader, and I actually found it worse than the regular image uploading. It did strange (and bad) things to the poles of one sculpted prim I uploaded.

My current problem with sculpted prims isn't getting the shape to look good once it's exported to SL. I mean, that's a problem, but my issue is just building the things in Blender in the first place. I know how to move the vertices around. I'm just really awful at it.

October 09, 2007 7:41 AM  
Blogger Ennui said...

Doesn't Blender have a sculpt mode by now? Well, at least there's a script for that: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/SculpMesh
I haven't tried using it .. but moving the vertexes one by one sounds painful.

October 10, 2007 11:22 PM  
Blogger Miriel Enfield said...

Blender does have a sculpt mode, but I'm bad with it. Things I make using the sculpt mode usually wind up looking worse than those I make by moving individual vertices. Think a particularly uncoordinated five year old with some modeling clay.

October 11, 2007 4:14 AM  

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