Possible to create Sculpted Prims using Blender 2.8?

[QueenKellee Kuu]

Hi, everybody 🤩

I know Blender decently well and SL pretty well. I create mesh in Blender and in the far far past even created a few sculpties in my time in some of the older sculpt programs, and one or two with the blender plugin many many versions and eons ago.

I have a project with a need for some big soft mushy decorative objects and I'm trying to keep things low prim and so I thought: perfect use for a sculptie. 

But how to make one now? I tried searching marketplace for a full perm sculpt map to suit my needs, no luck so far. And I'm having no luck in google or forum searches for how to go about it for modern versions of Blender without plugins.

I use Blender 2.8+ (actually 2.9 now) and I'm on a newer Mac laptop running Catalina. So, many of the older sculpt creation programs won't run. 

Ideally, I'd like to use blender and am aiming to understand how to bake the proper map and creating a workflow even if it's cumbersome without a dedicated plugin.

Starting on a basic sphere based sculpt. 

Any pointers? 😬

 

[KjartanEno]

I have Primstar, which works with Blender 2.70, I think. However, I've hardly used it. You say you checked marketplace. Did you also check https://www.outworldz.com/ ?

Edited November 28, 2020 by KjartanEno

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 11/27/2020 at 3:39 AM, QueenKellee Kuu said:

I have a project with a need for some big soft mushy decorative objects and I'm trying to keep things low prim and so I thought: perfect use for a sculptie.

Is there a reason why you couldn't do the same thing with mesh?

That said, I've tried getting Blender to export sculpts or at least dae that are compatible with older sculpt programs, but no success.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

3 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Is there a reason why you couldn't do the same thing with mesh?

There are times when you want a complex shape that:

doesn't need detailed texturing, 

doesn't decompose into triangles at 5 metres,

is 1 LI,

doesn't flip the linkset it's attached to from prim-accounting into greater figures

Sculpts do this without any need to fiddle with upload parameters, and they cost just L$10. It's the simplest solution for a certain class of problem.

Edited November 28, 2020 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[QueenKellee Kuu]

Primstar might be a good option, thanks. Also thanks for the tip to check Outworldz, but they didn't have what I needed either. 

I could make it in mesh, but I don't think it wouldn't be worth it LI wise for what I want it for. It's a large background decorative element that won't be interacted with closely or need physics but with a round lumpy shape. Doesn't need materials. Im probably going to try it in mesh to see if I can get anything worth it at a low LI but also Im a glutton for punishment and so I might still try to find a method to make a sculpt. 😁

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

7 hours ago, QueenKellee Kuu said:

Primstar might be a good option, thanks. Also thanks for the tip to check Outworldz, but they didn't have what I needed either. 

I could make it in mesh, but I don't think it wouldn't be worth it LI wise for what I want it for. It's a large background decorative element that won't be interacted with closely or need physics but with a round lumpy shape. Doesn't need materials. Im probably going to try it in mesh to see if I can get anything worth it at a low LI but also Im a glutton for punishment and so I might still try to find a method to make a sculpt. 😁

 

If you get to a point where you have a "finished" model to give us an idea of its size/complexity, I'm open to helping with advice to get the LI down. I find it to be generally easy to keep LI very low even with custom LODs (so things don't degenerate into loose triangles), as long as it isn't a very large (10-20m+) object.

Edited November 30, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Aquila Kytori]

On 11/29/2020 at 7:08 PM, QueenKellee Kuu said:

I could make it in mesh, but I don't think it wouldn't be worth it LI wise for what I want it for. It's a large background decorative element that won't be interacted with closely or need physics but with a round lumpy shape. Doesn't need materials. Im probably going to try it in mesh to see if I can get anything worth it at a low LI but also Im a glutton for punishment and so I might still try to find a method to make a sculpt. 😁

 

@QueenKellee Kuu

If you don't want perfect sculpties then the following may be of interest to you.

Using Blender Cycles 2.91, (I guess it would work with any earlier versions of Blender which has Cycles), create a new material using these three nodes: Texture Coordinate, Gamma and Material Output.

Connect as in the Image below:

Without the Gamma node  the resulting "sculpty" was very deformed, (see image below).

With the Gamma node, set to a value of 2.1 the cylinder and sphere "sculpties" had noticable flattened surfaces but I am guessing for your purposes this would not be a problem.

Examples:

 

 

 

and finally a landscape type "sculpty" using the Plane :

and all for the price of 1LI  

You can download the .blend file with the Sphere, Cylinder and Plane from here : https://pasteall.org/blend/62e563ba83fc42ab97b05c28b82e82da

[QueenKellee Kuu]

@Aquila Kytori wow amazing thank you for this!! 

I was going down this road in cycles, but I didn't think to use the texture coordinate node! I was driving myself a little crazy myself trying to figure out how to do it in cycles. I was messing with the Geometry node position output which was getting me ... something but with the colors mapped not quite right. Tried remapping them but nothing was turning out quite right ( tho I do feel my method might eventually work with some fixes) but this is so very close enough for my needs it's great!!! thank you!!!

@Wulfie Reanimatorthank you for the very kind offer. Unfortunately this one is indeed "large". Part of me also was stubborn about knowing how to make a sculptie again if I wanted to

[LittleMe Jewell]

I thought that sculpties were the evil of SL, to be avoided at all costs -- or at least that's what I've heard.  If that is true, why would you want to create any new sculpties?  If it was true in the past but maybe not true if the sculptie is made correctly/differently these days, then how would a buyer know the difference (though that part doesn't matter if you aren't going to be selling the items)?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

19 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I thought that sculpties were the evil of SL, to be avoided at all costs -- or at least that's what I've heard.  If that is true, why would you want to create any new sculpties?  If it was true in the past but maybe not true if the sculptie is made correctly/differently these days, then how would a buyer know the difference (though that part doesn't matter if you aren't going to be selling the items)?

I recall that reason being that sculpts were always using the same amount of verts/triangles based on the resolution of the sculpt map (texture), which can be seen as wasteful.

But the resolution of a sculpt map is way below the amount you'll see in basically any user-created mesh object, so I would discard that as a valid reason to dislike sculpts.

Sculpts do have their upsides, especially more coherent auto-LODs, I just don't(/didn't) know of a good way to make them.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

2 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I thought that sculpties were the evil of SL, to be avoided at all costs -- or at least that's what I've heard.  If that is true, why would you want to create any new sculpties?  If it was true in the past but maybe not true if the sculptie is made correctly/differently these days, then how would a buyer know the difference (though that part doesn't matter if you aren't going to be selling the items)?

Because they remain the only "sort of mesh format" that can be serialized to text and back (uuids are text), after that feature was canned during the mesh beta.

I know some people still use them to cheat on LI with large objects too, such as off sim landscapes.

Edited December 2, 2020 by Kyrah Abattoir

[ChinRey]

12 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I thought that sculpties were the evil of SL, to be avoided at all costs -- or at least that's what I've heard.

That's not quite true. Sculpts have some serious flaws (because of dodgy programming, not because the idea in tiself is bad) but there are also a few advantages. I wrote an article in my Builders' Manual blog discussing how laggy the three main asset classes are a while ago. It may be helpful but keep in midn that there are no real textbook answers.

 

12 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

If it was true in the past but maybe not true if the sculptie is made correctly/differently these days, then how would a buyer know the difference

That's a good point but it applies even more to mesh than to sculpt.

[Christhiana]

On 12/3/2020 at 10:38 AM, ChinRey said:

 I wrote an article in my Builders' Manual blog

That was an interesting read. lol@Mole Mesh