(Sculpt question) Moving things from Sculptris, to Blender, then to Secondlife

[Sasori Mills]

Hello!

I'm pretty new to creating sculpted prims in Secondlife, so naturally I have a few questions.

I would like to apologize in advance if this subject has already been covered somewhere - I'm new to these forums as well and have yet to stumble across any Thread regarding the questions I have.

 

First, here are the sculpts I've created in a program called Sculptris:

 

Now, I know people are able to make sculpts in a program called Blender and then somehow bring it into Secondlife, so would I be able to bring an object from Sculptris, into Blender, and then take it from there and pull it into Secondlife? The ears shown in the images above would be separate sculpts from the head and are just there to give you an idea of what the finished product would look like, untextured.

[Monti Messmer]

Hi, blender can import alot file-formats. So if sculptris can export OBJ, DAE .... you can import your project into blender.

Sculptys are not uploaded as objects. You upload a texture that defines the look of an standard SL prim.

To do that you have to start with a few pre-shaped objects blah blah, i never figured really because thats way to complicated for most things.

Why not export your project to DAE and upload it into SL as mesh ? Maybe you need to try settings in your software or export then import into blender and export to DAE from there.

To get meshes into SL you only need a software with a SL-compatible DAE exporter, give it a try maybe you lucky with sculptries.

Monti

[Chosen Few]

Sculpted primitives in SL are not the same thing as the kinds of arbitrarily sculpted 3D models commonly produced in Sculptris, Zbrush, Mudbox, etc.  They happen to have the word "sculpt" in common in their names, but that's generally as far as the similarity goes.  Sculpted primitives (sculpties) are oddities unique to SL, and can only be created under a very stringent set of restrictions.

The best way to think of sculpties is like origami.  Everything is ultimately unfoldable into a flat rectangle.  No matter how you twist it, bend it, fold it, or otherwise distort it in 3D space to produce the three-dimensional shape you're going for, every sculpty is still just a 2D rectangle, just as every origami model is just a rectangular piece of paper.

Further, every sculpty has to have a perfectly uniform UV layout.  It must be a perfect grid, occupying the entire UV canvas.  

That is not at all how things normally go when making models in Sculptris and the like.  Working in these programs is more analogous to the traditional definiton of "sculpting", akin to making things out of clay.  As opposed to what's required for sculpties, there are no set restrictions on the topology or UV layout of a model when you're just arbitrarily sculpting it.  You can mess up the topology and splinter the UV map all you like, and the sculpting program itself won't care.  It doesn't know what a sculpty is, afeter all, or that you're trying to make one. 

Thus it's unlikely that any model you've made in this way will be sculpty-compatible, unless you've already gone to pains to make it so.  To make a sculpty-compatible model in Sculptris, here's what you'll need to do, for starters:

1.  You must begin with sculpty-compatible geometry.  The default Zsphere won't do.  The default plane might work, but its triangulation is just weird enough that it's a bit risky.  You'll need to import a standard bipolar sphere, a capless cylinder, a regular torus, or regular plane.  Each must have the requisite number of quads in it for the type of sculpty you're trying to make.  (32x32 is most common.)

2.  The only way to keep the geometry sculpty-compatible is to work with the detail slider all the way down on every tool.  This prevents new geometry from being added as the surface shape changes.  This is extremely important, because if so much as a single extra vertex is added (or subtracted), the model will no longer be able to become a sculpty.

3.  The model must be properly UV'ed.  Sculptris's automatic UV mapping wont' work for this.  You're going to need to UV it in another program.  This is going to be a tremendous PITA, since Sculptris will only allow you to do it after the fact.  You can't do it in advance on the base model, because Sculptris dumps the UV data as soon as you import the model in sculpt mode.  (In my opinion, this makes Sculptris 100% useless as a viable option for professional or even semi-professional work.  That's probably the point, though, since obviously the company wants you to buy Zbrush.  Sculptris is meant to whet your appetite, nothing more.)

 

Unless you did the above three things, it's virtually impossible that any model you've made in Sculptris this far will be sculpty-compatible.  Even if the geometry is right, the UV's won't be, unless you've mapped them in something other than Sculptris itself.  Since you're gonna have do that anyway, it would be considerably easier just to do the work from start to finish in something like Blender, and not bother with Sculptris at all.

So, the direct answer to your specific question is yes, technically you could shape a model in Sculptris, export it to Blender, and from there turn it into a sculpty.  It's just that it would entail a bunch of extra work (mainly in the UV'ing) that you wouldn't have to bother with, had you just made the whole thing in Blender in the first place.

For more information on what sculpties are, how to make them, how to export them in a format SL can use (sculpt maps), see the sculpty wiki:  http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims

 

 

Now that you have your answer (or at least the beginning of it), I'll add that the models you've made will work just fine as imported meshes in SL.  With the advent of arbitrary mesh support in SL, sculpties are pretty much obsolete.  They still have a few compelling uses here and there, but on the whole, there's nothing a sculpty can do that an arbitrary mesh can't do a hundred times better.

To bring the mesh models into SL, you'll just need to convert them to COLLADA format first.  That will take all of two clicks in any program with COLLADA support (like Blender, Maya, Max, etc.)  For more information on mesh support in SL, see the mesh wiki:  http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh

[Nerxual Oh]

I'm using sculptris too and like to know how to transfer them to SL. I'm not new to SL but new to sculptris. 

[Chosen Few]

Most simply put, the process is this:

1.  Export your model from Sculptris to OBJ format

2.  In any other program that is capable of doing so, import the OBJ, and export it to COLLADA (.dae) format.

3.  Upload the .dae file to SL.

 

That said, I don't think you'll be very pleased with the results, if Sculptris is going to be your only modeling tool.  For best results in any realtime environment, SL included, you need to keep your models as low-poly as possible.  Brush sculpting programs like Sculptris aren't really meant for that.

The best way to use any brush sculpt program is in conjunction a modeling program.  The way it's intended to work is you create a base model in your modeling program, and then you bring it into your sculpting program to create a much higher LOD version. 

The high LOD version almost certainly won't be useful for realtime purposes, so you won't want to bring it into SL or any game.  What it will be useful for is texture baking, normal mapping, etc..  You can apply those baked textures and maps to the low poly base model, to make it look much better than it ordinarily would, without stressing the realtime renderer. 

SL can't use normal maps (yet), but it can use baked textures, of course.

[djjenny Feila]

the point is not to make it as a dae file...because we supose that we want all the people to be able to see the model tht we made..and as we all know most if not all viewers dont suport mesh (yet)..so  i gues we all need something ..a proggie..that when we import the obj,3ds,max(or w/e format) in it it will scan it and make for us a sculp map and boom  voualla done..

but i know.....noone said it was going to be easy.bahaha..oh well..............

we r in the sentury of technoly..i bet there is something out there tht does such a thing,.

btw i wonder...i heard for an inworld thing that converts a spesific format (either xml or dae) to sculpt..someone selling it for 500l i think...

am i corect for what it does?if i find link il add it unles u know alredy wht im talking about

cheers:matte-motes-nerdy:

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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djjenny Feila wrote:

..and as we all know most if not all viewers dont suport mesh (yet)..

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Where did you get that idea?

According to this chart, posted in februari by Firestorm developer Kadah Coba, pretty much all residents can see mesh. A few people with very old computers, not supporting SSE2, can't see mesh, that's about it.

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btw i wonder...i heard for an inworld thing that converts a spesific format (either xml or dae) to sculpt..someone selling it for 500l i think...

am i corect for what it does?if i find link il add it unles u know alredy wht im talking about

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I don't see how such a thing would work, but even if it exists, the results won't be very good in most cases. Not only is the sculpt format itself very limited, the tool would be limited as well. Computers can't do a human's job or at least not as good as a person can. Every shape is built a different way: different amount of geometry, different amount of texturable faces, different topology, different UV layout. For sculpt maps all these are set.