How do I take full perm sculpts that I bought in SL and put them into blender?

[Fantome Starlight]

So I have this sculpt that I want to rig to my body. I've watched videos on how to rig and I have tried rezzing the item, then going more> more> save as> collada - but it doesn't register that there are any prims! I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

[Chic Aeon]

You need to apply the sculpt MAP to a prim you have rezzed yourself. You cannot export other people's work. 

So if you don't have the sculpt map, you cannot do what you want to do.

 

HOWEVER --- it matters not as trying to turn sculpted prims into mesh files is the most foolhardy of endeavors. OH SO BAD.  It makes purchased heavy mesh look like a good choice LOL.   So forget the process. At least that is "MY" advice. 

[Fantome Starlight]

Actually, I think that helps! Thanks!

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

HOWEVER --- it matters not as trying to turn sculpted prims into mesh files is the most foolhardy of endeavors. OH SO BAD.  It makes purchased heavy mesh look like a good choice LOL.

You're exaggerating a little bit there, Chic. A single sculpt can never have more than 2048 tris. That's a lot of course but not compared to typical wearable mesh thingies that can easily have 30 times as manyt ris or more.

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

You're exaggerating a little bit there, Chic. A single sculpt can never have more than 2048 tris. That's a lot of course but not compared to typical wearable mesh thingies that can easily have 30 times as manyt ris or more.

But OFTEN (not always) the sculpts exported are not just ONE object but a collection of objects that have been linked.  The OP "could" have a single sculpted prim. They could also have sculpted object with many pieces. Most of what I have seen in the past of people trying this were the latter :D.   

[ChinRey]

8 hours ago, Fantome Starlight said:

but it doesn't register that there are any prims! I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

It's a security feature. Firestorm's export function will only allow you to export prims you are the creator of and for sculpts you also need to be the creator of the sculpt map. There are ways around it of course but remember intellectual proeprty applies to sculpts as well as other builds so don't do it unless it is a public domain sculpt or you have the creator's permission.

Also, be prepared for some serious cleaning up in Blender. Sculpts tend to make very "dirty" meshes.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

But OFTEN (not always) the sculpts exported are not just ONE object but a collection of objects that have been linked.  The OP "could" have a single sculpted prim. They could also have sculpted object with many pieces. Most of what I have seen in the past of people trying this were the latter :D.   

You have a good point there but you still need a lot of sculpts to get the tri and vertice counts of regular unoptimized SL mesh and that is even if you don't bother cleaning the covnersion up before you upload.

Sculpts are always a bit slow to load because of the bodged job LL did with the viewer's  preprocessing code but once the object is laoded into the gpu, a triangle is a triangle, a vertice is a vertice and a pixel is a pixel no matter whether it originally came from a prim, a sculpt or a mesh.

[Cyrule Adder]

If you have the sculpt map, AND permissions from the original creator.

Sculpt maps are textures with per-vertex positional data, where each vertex is represented by a single pixel. That being said, you can convert the sculpties back to a mesh in blender via vector displacement maps. However, you will need to find the exact Second Life geometry object as that is not native to blender. You can probably find some blend files with that out in the ether or something. And I am not sure if it can... as I remember the sculpty days mostly from when Blender was in 1.x

I should note that it might not be worth the time. As the sculpties are not like normal geometry. They are products of pushing and pulling vertecies into non-manifold patterns. Which would mean that the rigging process would be utterly painful, and the results could be just bad all around.

Edited September 12, 2020 by Cyrule Adder