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Multi-face sculpties


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To make things clear, if you feel the need to talk about meshes, do it in another thread, I can do multi-face meshes already, I want to talk about sculpties, this feature unique to SL and compatible grids.

So... Multi-face sculpties, i.e. sculpties to which you can apply more than one texture are possible in SL.They are not tricks with a special texture composed of several smaller ones. They are real. So far, I've only seen (and bought) 2-face sculpties and, as well the building tools as a script recognize the 2 faces which can be colored and textured separately so you can have, for example, one part shiny and another part semi-transparent.

The big question is: How is it made? And more important: Is there somebody who is willing to share that knowledge?

The creator of the multi-face sculpties I bought is willing to auction this info. Bids start at 1 million of L$... Google led me to a drama thread on SLU forums in the middle of which one person said he will share this info but I gave up digging in the mud of this thread very soon. And that's pretty much all I found.

My attempts in-world led to nothing and, since, I learned that it is apparently not the way to do it. So I am asking: Is there somebody who wants to enlighten me?

To make things clear again, this knowledge will be used to do something, not to brag in the forums (The number of my posts speaks for itself.) and it would not even be necessary to ask me not to spread this info.

Of course, since there is such a high level of mystery and secret around this, you can contact me directly in-world.

 

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Sounds extremely interesting and I'd like to undertand the trick to improve my own sculpties.

So can I ask - having apparently been pushed in the right direction are you now willing to share the details of how to do this or are you going to continue the mystery and secrecy you mentioned or charge an arm and a leg like the other person you mentioned?

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What Qwalyphi said was enough for me. You don't want me to ruin the fun of the discovery for everybody, do you?

Export, look and you'll find. It's really damn easy. The modification of the file to import requires no more than 2 keyboard shortcuts. Seriously!

But be prepared to be a bit desappointed... It just adds new constraints in the straightjacket of the sculpties.

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Kaluura Boa wrote:

You don't want me to ruin the fun of the discovery for everybody, do you?


Yes, actually.  That's precisely what the forum is for.  Frankly, it was pretty rude of you to come here asking for help, only to deliberately decide not return the favor afterward, when others asked for a full explanation.  Really, it's an abuse of the forums, and a slap in the face to everyone here.

 


Kaluura Boa wrote:

 

Export, look and you'll find.

Export how, exactly?  Look for what, precisely?  Not everyone knows the same things you know.  How about showing the rest of the community the same spirit of generosity you asked all of us for when you first posted the question in the first place?

I've been in SL for almost as long as SL itself has existed, and this is the first I've heard of importiing/exporting sculpties via XML files.  Is this a third party viewer thing?  If so, are you certain the results will be viewable by everyone?

 


Kaluura Boa wrote:

 

It's really damn easy. The modification of the file to import requires no more than 2 keyboard shortcuts. Seriously!

Great, then it shouldn't take much effort on your part to write out the steps.  If the technique is really as easy as you say, then it would have taken you no longer to explain it than it did for you to say you weren't going to explain, so you would have lost nothing by being a little nicer.  It's not too late now.  How about stepping up?

 


Kaluura Boa wrote:

 

But be prepared to be a bit desappointed... It just adds new constraints in the straightjacket of the sculpties.

How so?  Again, would a sentence or two to clarify really kill you?

 

 

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Thank you Chosen for so nicely voicing my own and am sure others thoughts.

 

Re export - you can right click on a rezzed sculpt go thru the pie menu till you find Export,  with say Imprudence or other tpv's and export the build. I did just that, stared at acres of xml stuff I was clueless about and made random changes. So far my result on reimporting is a three tier topiary with a deep hole right down the middle- but still only one face.

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EDIT: What I wrote about the need of a TPV was a bit misleading. Corrections will follow.

@Chosen: I kinda agree with you. I look like a leech... Which I am not.

My partner will kill me but, so be it!

First thing to do: Ditch any recent or old official viewer from LL for a moment, since none of them have import/export features. You need a multi-grid TPV, like Imprudence, for example, to import once. However, all viewers AFAIK can correctly see multi-faces sculpties.

1 Export a scuptie (Anything!)
2 Export a hollow torus
3 Open both XML files in a text editor
4 From the sculptie XML file, copy the block:

<key>sculpt</key>	<map>	<key>texture</key>		<uuid>SOME_KEY_HERE</uuid>	<key>type</key>		<integer>3</integer>	</map>

 5 Paste it into the torus XML file, just after the block:

<key>scale</key>	<array>		<real>NUMBER</real>		<real>NUMBER</real>		<real>NUMBER</real>	</array>

(In other words, on the same line than where you copied from.)

6 Save, import the modified torus...

After that, it's up to you to sculpt in order to take advantage of this new object which is just a regular sculptie... but with 2 faces.

You will be disappointed because the 2 textures are not set to cover exactly the 2 halves of the sculptie, there is a little hole in between, some loss of definition occurs in the sculptie, and stitching does not always give the expected result.

It works with other prims too. You can cut them, twist them, whatever. It changes the number of faces but also introduces varying losses of definition in the sculptie and changes in the layout of the textures.

And that is pretty much all that I know for the moment.

 

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Thanks, Kaluura, for doing the right thing.  Your answer was very informative.  No doubt it will be extremely helpful to anyone looking to do this.

Sounds like it doesn't pertain to those of us who don't use third party viewers, as I'd guessed.  Still, it's quite interesting.

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Hmmm... I wasn't very clear in my post. You need to use a TPV only once to import *one* multi-face sculptie. After that, you can re-use the imported object as many times as desired... as long as you do not modify its prim type. On the other hand, all viewers can see the multi-face sculpties.

Since there is pretty much only one useful multi-face sculptie, if your religious beliefs do not forbid you from using a TPV, anybody can import their own and live happy together... until "real" meshes take over.

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  • 1 month later...

sorry, I missed this thread... a student of mine alerted me to it...

 

ok Multiface sculpts... yes it is an xml hack... and i will give credit to the guy who found the hack, just not here.. I dont want him inundated with IM's.. he just kinda found it, released it, and said 'there it is, explore it'... and a few have...

actually Builders Brewery teach a class on this (yeah ok, I am the teacher) and always, classes are free... if you wanna donate half a million linden dollars, I wont complain! but the point is, the guy who discovered this hack released it to everyone, and some have explored it.. and thats the point.. it is free. certainly not worth a million L$

 

i am no expert on xml.. just explored this hack and willing to pass my knowledge on :)

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My one prim piano with shadows, one prim hot tub, and 1 prim kitchen all use this hack. If you take Graham's class on this, it's still not going to be easy to make something useful unless you have a good technical understanding of sculpties and know your sculpting program well...vertices tend to shoot off in random places which forces you to to move vertices in strange places (or bury vertices alltogether) to look normal inworld. Expect a lot of trial and error  (temp uploads) to get it right. But it's totally worth it in the end!

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...
  • 1 year later...

It is now late 2013 and I am finally finding this information. It is still valid? Hopefully : ) I'll have to try it in the morning. I am really glad I couldn't sleep and decided to do some random searching.  Well, anyway, I am glad I finally found some info on it. Darn that google search. I swear it never presented this post as an option.


Better late then never.  *snickers*  Another useful object I can finally make for myself....YIppee!!!!

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  • 4 years later...

You can't export as xml on Firestorm, you need to use an old V1 based TPV.
Possibly Singularity & the CoolVL viewer still allow xml export & import.

I presume this hack will still work, but not sure.
I just found some of my old multiface sculpts & they still render correctly in world.

Remember this is a hack though & it's unsupported & objects created in this way could break at any time.

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1 hour ago, Fionalein said:

I would not be suprised if the future LI revision highly adds to the sculpie LI price and renders them useless...

Hopefully the announced LI revision will result in realistic numbers for all kinds of objects. But I have to say that sculpts aren't necessarily nearly as laggy as rumours have it. Sculpts with oversampled sculpt maps, such as the ones created with Prim Generator, Tatara or the Wings3D sculpt plugin, are bad. Really, really REALLY bad. And of course, if you use a 1024 vetice, 200+ tris sculpt map for an item that only needs a few of them, you're wasting a lot of resources.

But if you use an optimized sculpt map, like the ones Sculpt Studio generates, for a build that really needs a large number of those vetices and triangles, the difference between a sculpt and the same shape as mesh is marginal and it can go both ways even: an optimized sculpt is slightly heavier for the client to process but it requires much less bandwidth than a mesh.

That's for single face sculpts though. Multiface sculpts still work and you can still make them but as Whirly said, it's a hack and not officially supported in any way. There are so many problems with them, you really don't want to sue them now that we have mesh.

Edited by ChinRey
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