Problem creating oblong sculpties

Chosen Few · December 13, 2011

Josh Susanto wrote:

What I'd like to be able to do is import some converted version of a sculpt product and subject it to some simple extrusion modification in order to make the geometric portions of the sculpt more of a benefit than a nuisance.

I have to ask, are you expecting the results to be re-uploadable as sculpties? If so, then extrusion is the last thing you'd want to do. Each time you extrude, you create new geometry and new UV's that did not previously exist. This changes the entire topological structure of the model, which means it will no longer be sculpty compatible. Extruding is not the same thing as just moving existing vertices around.

If you're planning on uploading it as a mesh model, there's no problem with that, of course. But if you need it to remain a sculpty, don't extrude anything, ever.

With that in mind, Sketchup is most likely not be the right tool for what you're looking to do.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I certainly make a few sculpt spheroids, which I should think would be higher demand items if people understood the advantages, such as less inconsistent physics and the whole seam pulled to one single pucker being easier to hide, plus the ease of getting 3 appreciably different round rock planes by flattening the ones that have the pucker at a diagonal orientation to the bounding box.

I'm really not sure what you're talking about here. What I can tell you is there need not be any "puckers" or seams in an arbitrary mesh model. Those things are inherent consequences of sculpty-specific topology. They won't exist in an arbirtary mesh unless you deliberately create them. If you don't want them, just don't make them in the first place.

If you're talking about taking an existing spheroidal sculpty, and making the poles less noticeable, by making the surrounding area completely flat, that'squite easy to do in any full feaured 3D modeling program, but I don't think you're going to be able to get Sketchup to do it. It's just not designed for that.

In the highly unlikely event that you were able to edit a sculpty in Sketchup, and have its toplogy and UV layout remain intact, you'd still have to contend with the fact that your only export option is .dae. This is fine if you want to upload it directly to SL as a mesh model, but obviously it won't do for sculpties. To generate a sculpt map, you'd have to import the .dae file into another program, like Blender, and export the sculpt map from there. Since you're going to have to do that anyway, you might as well just use Blender from start to finish, and avoid the extra step.

Josh Susanto wrote:

But people seem not to want spheroids for some reason. Most planes are stupidly easy to produce (some viable images do require a few tricks), but what, exactly, to do with the frame has been a continuing question for me. Since I can't just get rid of the frame, I might like to take slightly more control over it than Sculptypaint easily allows. I say "easily" because there's quite a bit more control to be had if I really want it. But if the idea is ultimately to produce an architectural component with an photo-irregular face, I should be using a more architectural tool for the more architectural portions.

If I understand you correctly, you're looking to create objects that are basically cubic, with one face being the kind of relief sculpture that we exampled earlier in the thread, and the other five faces being flat. Is that right?

If so, then I again have to say Sketchup is most likely not the tool you should be using. Really, all it knows how to do are simple extrusions. It doesn't offer any real control over the model's topological structure.

Chosen Few · December 13, 2011

Josh Susanto wrote:

I ask people directly if they should know the answer and the relationship is such that it won't be strained by me asking repeatedly why the help didn't help. If there are simple answers, people who have them should have them. If there aren't, there aren't, or at least not yet while I'm asking.

You make it sound as if you automatically assume the help won't help, before you even start. If that's the case, no wonder things so often don't work for you. Self-fulfilling prophesy is a powerful thing.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Music students who have access to a keyboard instrument can usually learn to sing significant portions of wind instrument parts within a week, and they can often benefit more from that at least once in a while than simply moving fingers around while they push carbond dioxoide through a wooden or metal tube, so I try to see repair time as more of an opportunity than a crisis, at least in the short term.

OK. No argument there. But this information is 100% irrelevant to comment to which you submitted it as a response. Finding an alternate way to practice the music does not in any way contribute to, or detract from, the repair of the instrument.

My comment stands. The condition of the instrument is entirely outside the student's control, once he's surrendered it to the repair shop. The condition of software on your computer, however, is under your control.

Josh Susanto wrote:

But doing it all with one button seems to be common among at least a lot of other people - that is; with one button or not at all. They've defined Step A as having software that does it with one button, and they've stuck to that.

People who have that "one button or not at all" mentality have no idea how much they're short-changing themselves. In reality, the one-button approach is Step Z, no Step A . I never promote the use of automation for anything, until well after the student has learned to do things manually.

When automation is employed as a conscious choice by an educated user, purely as a time saver, that's great. But whenever an ignoramus relies on any automated process as a crutch, he or she is well and truly up the creek without a paddle, the moment the technology changes in the slightest degree.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I shouldn't have said "button". If I don't know the proper term for such a thing, I tend to call it a button. When I completed the computer science portion of my music AA in 1990, everything was still being called a "button" for some reason, at least by my professors.

For future reference, the term you're looking for is "menu command". This isn't a computer science thing, just a simple common sense logic thing. If it physically looks like a button, it's a button. If it's a command to be selected from a menu, it's a menu command.

Josh Susanto wrote:

In any case, the thing that says "import" allows me to put in the name of the .obj to be imported, but after that, I haven't found anything esle to do that produces any indication that anything has been imported.

Let me make sure I'm understanding you. You press click File -> Import, you select your OBJ file, and then you click OK, but the model does not appear in the scene afterward. Is that right?

Remember I said it's important not to get ahead of yourself, and to have the patience to learn things in order, to make sure you get it all? And remember I said you presently lack enough experience to determine whether things are working or not? And finally, remember I said simply pushing buttons and seeing what happens isn't going to work? This would be a classic example of why, on all three counts.

I have a pretty good guess as to why you're not seeing your imported model, but first let's make sure the model is in fact actually in the scene. To do that, we'll examine the outliner. Every full featured 3D modeling has one of these. (Not every program calls it "outliner" specically, though. There are a few different names for it.)

In Blender, by default, the outliner window will be docked in the upper right hand corner of your screen. It looks like this:

Every object currently in your scene will be listed in the outliner, heirarchically. This includes models, rigs, lights, cameras, render layers, everything.

My example above shows what the outline of the default scene looks like. The first item you see is the scene itself, and inside of that are the render layers, the world node, the camera, a cube, and a light. If your imported model is present in your scene, it will be somewhere in that list.

Assuming your model is listed, the next thing to do is figure out why it's not visible. Here's my first guess at what's going on. It may just be a matter of a simple unit discrepancy between Blender and Sculptypaint. If so, the model could be too big or too small to see from your current frame of view.

To test that theory, let's check the model's size, via the Properties Editor Every full featured 3D modeling program has one of these as well. SL has one; we call it the object editor.

By default in Blender, the Properties Editor is docked on the right hand side of the screen, right below the outliner. It looks like this:

By default, the properties editor shows you the render settings for the scene, just as it does in my screenshot above. To see the properties of your model, we're going to need to switch it to show object properties instead of render properties. This is done very easily. Notice the row of buttons at the top of the Properties Editor window. Hover your mouse over each one, to see what they represent. The fourth one from the left, the one that looks like a little cube, says "Object". Click that, and the properties window will change to look like this:

Now, in the outliner, click on your model to select it, and then you'll see all its various attributes displayed in the Properties Editor. In the section labled "Transform", you'll see its location, rotation, and scale (size). In the screenshot above, you can see I happen to a cube selected. In the Transform section, you can see the cube is located at the center of the grid (0,0,0), that it has zero rotation, and that its current size is 1x1x1.

If your model has super high or super low numbers for scale, then that's likely the reason you can't see it yet. Change the numers to something more reasonable, and you'll be all set, assuming that's the only problem.

If the model is there, but scaling is not the problem, then I have some other ideas we can explore next. But let's go one step at at a time.

I'd like to take a moment to note that I have never actively used Blender before in my life, hadn't even so much as looked at it in years until just yesterday, yet I was able to discern the above almost instantly. The reason for that is not because I'm a super genius or because I snort magic software-absorbant fairy dust with my afternoon tea. It's simply because I have a good working knowledge of the principles of 3D modeling, principles which apply as much to Blender as to any other program in its class. I knew it had to have an outliner and a properties editor SOMEWHERE, and as luck would have it, they were right there to be found on the main screen, by default.

Since you're not yet schooled in these principles, you would have had no way of knowing what you were looking at. All you likely saw was a sea of buttons and menus on your screen. That's OK. That's how it looks to everyone at first. As long as you're willing to learn things step by step, just like the rest of us did, this will all make sense to you, just like it does to us, sooner than you probably expect.

As long as you keep trying to brute-force your way though it, you'll continue to experience nothing but frustration with it. It doesn't make any difference how smart or capable you may be. There's only one way to learn this stuff.

I've been doing this for a quite a long time now, and I have yet to encounter anyone who's taken it one step at a time, and failed to make it work. I've never seen anyone succesfully learn it by trying to bypass that. I have no doubt you'll do great if you can just exercise some patience, and let the learning process work the way it's supposed to, just as I have every confidence you'll fail if you keep trying to go about it bass ackward. I don't want you to fail, so I hope you'll take that to heart.

(By the way, if your outliner and properties editor are not currently open, that's OK. You can open them easily enough. Notice in the upper left or lower left corner of every window in Blender, there's a little button, with a symbol, and some up and down arrows. In all the screenshots above, it's in the upper left corner. Hover your mouse over that, and it will say "Displays current editor type. Click for menu of available types." Click that button to change any window into the outliner, or the properties editor, or whatever else you want it to be.)

Josh Susanto wrote:

From now on, if someone mentions a building challenge, I'll ask them to come here.

Please do. The more, the merrier.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Interesting. Why can't the Blender people,themselves, make such a video, if they make so many others?

I don't think they actually make any videos at all. Notice all those Getting Started videos are on CG Cookie, a training site for several 3D modeling applications, of which Blender happens to be one.

Josh Susanto wrote:

didn't see any reason not to install it. Especially since, when someone asks "did you remember to install Python?", I can just say "yes", instead of getting into some kind of discussion about whether or not it's even necessary.

Oh, there's no reason NOT to install it. You definitely should have it. Your question was about its necessity, and strictly speaking, it's not required.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Great. Where's the part that explains how to get data in or out? I'm still not seeing it? How many times will I have to click and where? If it's going to take all goddamned day, I might as well just ask someone, no?

As Kwak said, it works the same way in Blender, as in just about every other programs on Earth. The way to bring data in is to click File -> Import, and the way to spit data out is to click File -> Export.

As for what kinds of data will be useful, and what specifically to do with it, that's not something that can be answered in one video, or one forum post. It's learning process, and you're going to have to have the patience to go through the whole thing, or it won't work.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I owe them nothing, because their service hasn't produced any value for me yet. OTOH, it has cost me hours of my life I'll never get back. Whatever their intentions, at this point, they owe me.

Comments like that make it awfully hard to want to help you, Josh. I'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart, just as the makers of Blender continue to provide their software out of the goodness of theirs. If you don't want my help or their product, no one's forcing you to take either. No one owes you a thing.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Being a good music analyst should consist of making good cases for and against extramathematical value in mathematical relationships between music data. If this were an accepted position in the community, I might still be part of it.

I understand your point, and mostly agree with it. But still, I have to say that that kind of analysis has no practical merit. It's easy to analyze things after the fact, in any number of ways, and discover any number of apparent mathematical relationships. But that doesn't mean any of those relationships are causal to the compositional process.

Josh Susanto wrote:

OR the only way to learn is to get results.

If we want to delve back into the semantics game, I might point out that EVERYTHING is a result of some sort. We can chicken and egg this all day long. I stand by the spirit of my original statement. I'll make it more literal for you. The only way to get desired results is first to learn how to get them.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I know I'm supposed to put gas into it. Putting the gas receptacle apeture under rear passenger seat doesn't help me too much, though. And if the gas has to, instead, go into a completely different car, you can see why that might only be more confusing.

Sure, but that's not what happened in this case. The only "car" was your computer, and the only "gas" was the requisite components for making a program like Blender work.

Simple, indisputable logic: If something didn't work in Case A, but did work in Cases B-ZZZZZZ, then clearly some variable was off the mark in Case A.

The only variable factor in this context was who did the installations. Everyone had the same files available, and the same instructions.

There appears to be fundamental difference between us, Josh. When I have trouble getting something to work, my first question is always, "What am I doing wrong?" It seems like your question is, "How come whoever made this thing made it so poorly?" My philosophy invites solutions to problems, whereas yours merely invites reasons to complain about them. I don't think it's hard to see which is more productive.

Josh Susanto wrote:

It's not a matter of intuition. It's a matter of things being labeled conspicuously according to function and being conspicuous about executing functions when applied.

As a trained musician, I'm well and truly shocked that you have that attitude. Is there anything on a violin or a trumpet or a pipe organ conspicuously labeled according to function, and would you immediately be able to play any of them even if there were?

Learning 3D modeling for the first time is almost entirely analogous to learning to play your first instrument. You have to learn to read an entirely new language, and to think in wholly different ways than you've ever thought before. And then you have to practice, practice, practice.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Sorry, no. Millions is an estimate, based on total global application exposure and the rate of complaints I've received from people who I know are absolutely capable of using programs of similar purpose.

More likely, you were just spouting one day about how "Blender doesn't work", and someone else happened to say, "I had some trouble with it too," and you were so relieved to hear you weren't the only one that all of a sudden in your mind it became everybody and their brother.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I did not miss something.

YES YOU DID!!!

Get it through your skull, man. It's the only explanation. I don't know why it's so hard for you to admit, and at this point I'm well beyond caring. I will not discuss the subject any further. It's working now.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Last year I had tried to find the help pages both from inside Sketchup, and from outside on a different browser. All I found was what you see in the first link. There are plenty of other really great URL's out there that I could use for all kinds of things, if I simply somehow pull them out of my a**. But until I somehow do that, or until someone else comes up with them for me, they may as well not exist.

As I recall, clicking Help -> Help Center in Sketchup always took you to that same main support page, and the links to what tutorials existed were always there. Remember when I said, "It's a no-frills extrusion modeler"? The only reason I knew that was because I'd previously downloaded it (back in 2005, I think), and I'd been through its tutorials then.

Somehow I doubt they removed all that stuff after the first time I looked at it, and then just so happened to put it all back right before I went looking for it again all these years later. I'm sorry you had trouble findiing it, but it's not because it wasn't accessible.

Josh Susanto wrote:

There is seriously no one getting paid anything? That's pretty weird. Even people at Wikipedia get paid.

I don't pretend to know how the Blender Foundation manages what limited funds it has. If you'd like to know, ask them.

Drongle McMahon · December 13, 2011

"one single pucker being easier to hide"

In fact you can make a sculpty with no puckers at all. Here is my sphere based on a dodecahedron. It was made by hand calculation, no 3D or sculpty software at all. If I wanted to distort it to make it a rock though, I would use Blender.

Josh Susanto · December 13, 2011

>You are complaining about a program without even opening it?! MY GOD! I haven't opened that program myself for years, but I am pretty sure the import and export functions are where they are in 95% or more of all programs. (File -> Export)

Interesting. I just haven't checked there (again) yet because I've been more focused on Blender, which I absolutely have now opened. The Sketchup disussion is just a footnote to the Blender discussion here. As I said before, I expect to find the export function when I again open Sketchup, although there's still no clear way to get data into Blender, which is my main concern.

>How do you try to learn a program? By watching all the tutorial videos without opening and trying out the program itself?

I've already explained how I learn to use programs. I open them and see if they work for me. If I can't get them to produce anything, I then look for tutorials if they happen to exist. After watching all the official tutorials, I go back to the program itself and compare what is desctibed in the tutorials to what happens when I try to use the program. I'm not there yet with Sketchup. The Sketchup tutorials, now that I can actually get at them, are VERY clear and well-ordered by general relevance as compared to the Blender tutorials, so I'm expecting import/export to be less confusing when I'm ready to look for it again.

Not every program has import/export on the file menu. Sculptypaint doesn't even have a file menu, so I guess I've been spoiled by that.

Whoever determines the click-thru rate for this other stuff must be invested in companies that make computer mouse buttons.

If a web page is not found, I'm not as surprised by that as you might be. A lot of web pages can't be viewed in the copuntry where I live now, so I've got used to the idea that Google and other companies don't particularly care whether competing companies have compromised the security arm of the government here in a way that blocks some of their services.

Josh Susanto · December 13, 2011

>In fact you can make a sculpty with no puckers at all.

I can essentially do that now, in principle.

But the texture still has to have an effective edge to it somewhere, even if it's seamless.

Since my relief technique uses the color data from the surface image, my choices are to roll off the relief effect near the edges of the sculpt, or to allow irregular centric pleating, which just means a shape pucker that maps to the surface texture pucker.

If course, if I didn't care about any special correspondence between shape and surface, I could just make the same crap seamless rocks I see everywhere with puckers on both ends, or produce surface textures that look like they don't care what kind of shape they're dropped onto.

I figure there are enough other people doing things that way, and that the demand for my own stuff, specifically, is probably related to the very different effects I'm getting with the surface/shape correspondence.

Josh Susanto · December 13, 2011

>Do I have a better conspiracy theory? Sure, aliens.

Better than no theory at all, and it could even be true.

But as a theory, it lacks parsimony and has yet to show any more predictive utility than my own theory.

>I don't need a theory, Josh, because I've already got the truth, mundane as it may be.

Much better. I would consider what you call the truth to be a theory comparable in viability to my own.

>If anything, you should be happy about it, because it makes sculpties seem more render-efficient than they actually are. Also, the land impacts are artificially in sculptys' favor, which you've already state is a selling point of which you take full advantag. All signs are that if any particular object type is getting one hell of a promotional deal from LL, it's the sculpty.

If you think I'd be happy about this, then you haven't understood me at all. Bugs are bugs (if they are bugs). I'm not happy about ANY bug, even if it means people keep asking me for more sculpts when they shouldn't. Users deserve an accurate picture of their use options. Period.

>No, it doesn't contradict what I said at all. Yes, people got paid to bring mesh to SL, but no, those people's checks didn't depend on anyone actually using it once it was here.

Not necessarily, no. But it wouldn't even have to be literally true for people whose career progress is invested in mesh to believe they have to keep people excited about mesh. If even one sculpt should turn out to be more efficient than some mesh equivalent, that doesn't look great for them.

>And here I thought I was kidding about selling people for medical experiments. I guess you know better.

Nothing malicious, but the practical results would be roughly analogous in at least some examples, yes.

>Way to deflect the point.

I'm guessing you meant clicking on a rendered version of the thing at some point where I would otherwise have to click on something else? I'm more concerned with the total number of clicks per same result than with where I'm placing my cursor. I appreciate cryptosynesthesis, but I prefer to focus on that in terms of products, more than in the production process itself. If I want to touch something, I can buy a can of Play-Doh.

>So there's a secret agenda behind everything, even measuring devices?

More precisely, if they're broken in some way, there might be an unstated criterion applied to the question of whether or how to fix them which could be biased one way or another.

Fact: The more triangles in an object, the longer it takes to render.
Fact: An arbitrary mesh allows you to directly control how many triangles are in your model, while sculpties have fixed amounts.
Fact: Many of the shapes commonly made from sculpties do not need to have as many triangles in them as sculpty geometry forces them to have.
Indisputable conclusion: Many shapes commonly made from sculpties could be made far more efficiently as arbitrary meshes.

For me, this is really the only compelling argument in favor of mesh, and it's the reason I'm still at all interested in mesh, really.

But I'm still baffled that somehow, there is being any advantage reported to sculpties, ever. It's very suspicious. But even if the suspicion should be on sculpts rather than meshes, you must understand my resistance to making any fundamental changes to my production process while it's still unclear what's really going on with the numbers. Failing clear answers, I don't really want to put in a bunch of extra work to get a result which I have no real way to evaluate as being a clear improvement.

What would be the total data impact of rezzing a 64-meter mesh tetrahedron with a blank surface?

>In the example that I posted in response to Drongle, the physics mesh was just a flat plane with two triangles in it. That's over 500 times more efficient than they physics lattice of any of your sculpties, and it's more accurate to the visual shape.

OK, now you've pretty well sold me on this.

What was with all that other nonsense I was hearing a year ago about things being flexible AND physical?

Chosen Few · December 13, 2011

Josh Susanto wrote:

Much better. I would consider what you call the truth to be a theory comparable in viability to my own.

I can see this is going nowhere.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Users deserve an accurate picture of their use options. Period.

Great. Then I trust you will no longer attempt to distort the picture when one of us suggests that for a stated use case, an option you don't happen to use might be superior to one you do use, especially when the case in question is not something you yourself are involved with.

Josh Susanto wrote:

If even one sculpt should turn out to be more efficient than some mesh equivalent, that doesn't look great for them..

With regard to mesh efficiency, nothing can "turn out" any other way than how everyone already knows it has to. Rendering polygons is rendering polygons is rendering polygons. It is a plain and simple fact that every sculpty has a fixed polygonal structure, which corresponds with a certain render render weight. It is also a plain and simple fact that some meshes will have less weight than that, while others will have more. That doesn't make anyone look bad, good, or otherwise. It simply is.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I'm guessing you meant clicking on a rendered version of the thing at some point where I would otherwise have to click on something else?

No, Josh, what I meant was precisely what I said. In a program like Blender, you have complete and total authority over every design aspect, and every production aspect, of your work. In a program like Sculptypaint, you simply don't.

That's neither a slight against Sculptypaint, nor flattering of Blender. It's simply the way it is. The two are very different animals.

I'll repeat that because you've never experienced that kind of control before, you likely haven't the slightest idea of what it means, as both of your replies on the subject so far have demonstrated. Sooner or later, you'll either learn it or you won't. I hope you do.

Josh Susanto wrote:

But I'm still baffled that somehow, there is being any advantage reported to sculpties, ever.

I'm not. Sculpties do have advantage in some situations, and there's no reason not to report that.

I do find it unfortunate that the land impact of sculpties will forever be kept artificially low. To do otherwise would be to break existing content, so there's no changing it. In all other respects, it's quite silly.

Josh Susanto wrote:

But even if the suspicion should be on sculpts rather than meshes, you must understand my resistance to making any fundamental changes to my production process while it's still unclear what's really going on with the numbers. Failing clear answers, I don't really want to put in a bunch of extra work to get a result which I have no real way to evaluate as being a clear improvement.

The evaluation is inherent to the technology itself. As I said, you don't need an in-world meter to tell you a plane made from two triangles is over a thousand times more efficient than one made from 2048 triangles, or that an object that utilizes the entire texture canvas space is more efficient than one that wastes 20% of it. If you think otherwise, I hope you've got a good supply of aspirin for all the headaches you must get from squeezing your eyes shut so incredibly tight.

Josh Susanto wrote:

What would be the total data impact of rezzing a 64-meter mesh tetrahedron with a blank surface?

How many triangles are in it? Is it just four, or is it subdivided? How is it UV'ed? Are the edge normals hard or soft? Are all four levels of detail the same, or do they differ? What are the answer to all those same questions with regard to the physics mesh?

Answer all that, and we can give you a number. Ignore all that, and you continue to demonstrate that you're well and truly out of your depth in even asking the question.

Josh Susanto wrote:

OK, now you've pretty well sold me on this.

Whew.

Josh Susanto wrote:

What was with all that other nonsense I was hearing a year ago about things being flexible AND physical?

No idea.

Josh Susanto · December 14, 2011

>I have to ask, are you expecting the results to be re-uploadable as sculpties?

No.

(I certainly make a few sculpt spheroids, which I should think would be higher demand items if people understood the advantages, such as less inconsistent physics and the whole seam pulled to one single pucker being easier to hide, plus the ease of getting 3 appreciably different round rock planes by flattening the ones that have the pucker at a diagonal orientation to the bounding box.

)

>I'm really not sure what you're talking about here. What I can tell you is there need not be any "puckers" or seams in an arbitrary mesh model. Those things are inherent consequences of sculpty-specific topology. They won't exist in an arbirtary mesh unless you deliberately create them. If you don't want them, just don't make them in the first place.

The puckering is an artifact of using a shape map that has a point-to-point correspondence to a surface image. No matter how you wrap a rectangular image onto a spheroid, something is inevitably going to be stretchier than something else, even if the rectangle is a square and it seamlessly tiles with itself. If meshes offer simple ways to avoid using pre-existing rectangular surfaces, that's great, but it would also pretty much kill most of the appeal of my work as reported to me by my customers. They like not only the photoderivative surfaces, but also the high degree of correspondence between shape detail and surface detail. If I completely abandon the pucker, I'll have to give up one of these two important characteristics.

>If you're talking about taking an existing spheroidal sculpty, and making the poles less noticeable, by making the surrounding area completely flat, that'squite easy to do in any full feaured 3D modeling program, but I don't think you're going to be able to get Sketchup to do it. It's just not designed for that.

The pucker question is more of a Blender question than a Sketchup question. The only reason I think I would find ways to load sculpt data to Sketchup would be to defeat Sketchup's intrinsic propensity to produce things that look 100% geometrically extruded.

As regards bipolar spheroids, which I do not produce, anyway, I know I can essentially flatten the poles by reloading the color layer from the template sphere which runs parallel to the seam (the seam possibly being invisible). But the surface texture will always pucker, even if the shape of the object, itself, does not. That's why a lot of rocks in SL look like diseased melons. A solution I prefer is to use a spheroid template in which the whole frame has been pulled to a single point. That means only one such pucker, and no seam at all, refardless of what surface image is used.

> Since you're going to have to do that anyway, you might as well just use Blender from start to finish, and avoid the extra step.

Understood.

I at least need to use Blender to do conversions, even if the result is just making my existing sculpties rezzable as mesh at 128x128.

(But people seem not to want spheroids for some reason. Most planes are stupidly easy to produce (some viable images do require a few tricks), but what, exactly, to do with the frame has been a continuing question for me. Since I can't just get rid of the frame, I might like to take slightly more control over it than Sculptypaint easily allows. I say "easily" because there's quite a bit more control to be had if I really want it. But if the idea is ultimately to produce an architectural component with an photo-irregular face, I should be using a more architectural tool for the more architectural portions. )

>If I understand you correctly, you're looking to create objects that are basically cubic, with one face being the kind of relief sculpture that we exampled earlier in the thread, and the other five faces being flat. Is that right?

In this case, the main idea would mostly just to make the non-feature parts of the object more cartesian, allowing more obvious architectural effects. If I could make them look like thick jigsaw puzzle pieces, though, they could be interlocked for a different effect. I have a few other ideas, but I think you probably get the picture.

>If so, then I again have to say Sketchup is most likely not the tool you should be using. Really, all it knows how to do are simple extrusions. It doesn't offer any real control over the model's topological structure.

I am glad you suggested it, though, and provided a working link to the tutorials. If it can be applied to what I'm already doing at all, it might be used to produce cleaner geometry to the portions of my work that is already somewhat geometric.

I wouldn't necessarily hope to hit Sketchup with spheroids in any useful way at all. But my existing lack of focus on spheroids has nothing to do with that kind of aspect of spheroids, if you care. What I find is that as much as users gripe about sculpt physics, they don't actually build much of anything with sculpts that are ready to function physically in ways that approach their visual limits. Ironically, the other main selling point of my spheroids, their lack of a second pole at the opposite end, seems to explain why people aren't interested in building with spheroids more generally, and also don't bother to consider building with mine, since they don't bother to consider that some sculpted spheres just might not have this problem. People who have bought and used my spheroids have become almost fanatical about them, but that's a pretty small part of the total market, apparently. If I could turn back the clock, I would have made a bunch more spheroids and put up a listing enhancement specifically emphasizing the difference between my own spheroids and the diseased melon sculpts I see selling for 10 times as much.

Josh Susanto · December 14, 2011

>You make it sound as if you automatically assume the help won't help, before you even start. If that's the case, no wonder things so often don't work for you. Self-fulfilling prophesy is a powerful thing.

Well, you're helping when I thought you would not, and others did not help when I thought they would.

What am I supposed to think?

>People who have that "one button or not at all" mentality have no idea how much they're short-changing themselves. In reality, the one-button approach is Step Z, no Step A . I never promote the use of automation for anything, until well after the student has learned to do things manually.

I think we think alike on this point. I just like having the option of doing something both the easier way, and in a more sophisticated way. The other plane relief engine didn't provide that anyway. My attraction to Sculptypaint has been that, as limited as it is, there are things it does that really won't ever need to be more complicated, and yet I can also easily import and export data to be edited with Lunapic, Irfanview, and a few other things if there's a function Sculptypaint lacks. To have it all in one package might be nice, but only if it actually reduces my total clicking and keying to get a specific end result. Looking at Blender tutorials so far, I'm not yet persuaded that the total click and key rate will be lower for the kind of results I'm already getting. The compelling aspect of the thing will likely have to be that is simply does more, altogether, if I actually want to do more.

>When automation is employed as a conscious choice by an educated user, purely as a time saver, that's great. But whenever an ignoramus relies on any automated process as a crutch, he or she is well and truly up the creek without a paddle, the moment the technology changes in the slightest degree.

Yeah. I didn't like the "press button to become 3D artist" thing. I immediately wanted to apply the color layers separately, at least, produce a more realistically coherent relief. Changing the number of verts rather than just moving them around also sounds attractive, I admit.

>For future reference, the term you're looking for is "menu command". This isn't a computer science thing, just a simple common sense logic thing. If it physically looks like a button, it's a button. If it's a command to be selected from a menu, it's a menu command.

That's the logic yes. But back then, video production classes were also teaching things like "window burn" as contrasted with "cigarette burn". It was the freaking stone age and I'm still part of it in a lot of ways.

(In any case, the thing that says "import" allows me to put in the name of the .obj to be imported, but after that, I haven't found anything esle to do that produces any indication that anything has been imported.)

>Let me make sure I'm understanding you. You press click File -> Import, you select your OBJ file, and then you click OK, but the model does not appear in the scene afterward. Is that right?

I guess whatever I was doing yesterday didn't import, but it's more than I was getting out of Blender 6 months ago.

The process I followed yesterday was File-> Import -> Select wavefront (.obj). After that, nothing special happened, so I just looked around for any place I could select anything to import. All I found that was responsive to any slection process was the Operator Presets do-hickey. There's a bunch of folders and other crap all over the screen, but none of them contains any indication of the .obj I'm trying to load. The import object button (yes, button) actually just takes me out of the screen I came to when I wen to File, Import. I'm pretty sure I've also clicked on practically everything else, too. If there's something else that's invisible, I don't really need that kind of aggrivation. Otherwise, I'd just spend all day playing SimTower.

I'm eager to select my OBJ file, but if you want to skip the step before that, I don't see how we're going to proceed.

>Remember I said it's important not to get ahead of yourself, and to have the patience to learn things in order, to make sure you get it all? And remember I said you presently lack enough experience to determine whether things are working or not? And finally, remember I said simply pushing buttons and seeing what happens isn't going to work? This would be a classic example of why, on all three counts.

Or I could use the tutorials? Do tell. Note also that have already been ridiculed on this very forum for going through tutorials before going back to applications. But nobody ridicules anybody, right?

>I have a pretty good guess as to why you're not seeing your imported model, but first let's make sure the model is in fact actually in the scene. To do that, we'll examine the outliner. Every full featured 3D modeling has one of these. (Not every program calls it "outliner" specically, though. There are a few different names for it.)

I'm more likely not seeing the model because it's not even imported. At this point I'm less concerned with seeing the model than with seeing whether it has even been imported.

>Every object currently in your scene will be listed in the outliner, heirarchically. This includes models, rigs, lights, cameras, render layers, everything.

My OBJ is not there.

>I'd like to take a moment to note that I have never actively used Blender before in my life, hadn't even so much as looked at it in years until just yesterday, yet I was able to discern the above almost instantly. The reason for that is not because I'm a super genius or because I snort magic software-absorbant fairy dust with my afternoon tea. It's simply because I have a good working knowledge of the principles of 3D modeling, principles which apply as much to Blender as to any other program in its class. I knew it had to have an outliner and a properties editor SOMEWHERE, and as luck would have it, they were right there to be found on the main screen, by default.

I spent $600 and all day to take a set of tests at the Johnson O'Connor Foundation. Most of my results were in the 95% to 99% range, which is actually a huge problem if there are too many such scores. One of my low scores was on a test that asks people to look at a geometric shape and list as many things as it could possibly represent within a set time limit. If I understand the test correctly, it is used to evaluate projected rate of career progress. But the most desirable result is not the largest number of responses (which is something my own answers approached, apparently), but a list of some shorter length, consisting of specific types of answers in specific orders. The implication in the somewhat incomplete explanation of this test as I was given seems to be that people who proceed easily in careers have a statistically similar way of seeing things, which I lack. Because of my other scores, I was told that I could potentially accomplish a lot more than most people, but that, because of this particular score, it was going to take me a lot longer to really get started. Most people come to any new challenge with a set of automatic assumptions about how something represents something else. In the sciences, for example, this can be a hindrance to real progress. But in any activity that relies on the reconstruction of other meanings already assigned to things by other people, it's absolutely essential.

Being familiar with other modelers is not on the agenda, sorry. If your advice is going to dilate to learning an app in order to learn another app, I might as well asume the instruction to learning that other app include first learning some 3rd app, etc., etc.

>Since you're not yet schooled in these principles, you would have had no way of knowing what you were looking at. All you likely saw was a sea of buttons and menus on your screen. That's OK. That's how it looks to everyone at first. As long as you're willing to learn things step by step, just like the rest of us did, this will all make sense to you, just like it does to us, sooner than you probably expect.

Sculptypaint never looked like a sea of buttons. Neither did the other stuff I've been using.

>As long as you keep trying to brute-force your way though it, you'll continue to experience nothing but frustration with it. It doesn't make any difference how smart or capable you may be. There's only one way to learn this stuff.

Brute force got me to "Select wavefront (.obj)". Was that right or wrong?

>I've been doing this for a quite a long time now, and I have yet to encounter anyone who's taken it one step at a time, and failed to make it work.

Then why are you skipping a step with me?

>I don't think they actually make any videos at all. Notice all those Getting Started videos are on CG Cookie, a training site for several 3D modeling applications, of which Blender happens to be one.

That does explain it, thanks.

>As Kwak said, it works the same way in Blender, as in just about every other programs on Earth. The way to bring data in is to click File -> Import, and the way to spit data out is to click File -> Export.

That's not really an accurate description in this case, is it?

>Comments like that make it awfully hard to want to help you, Josh. I'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart, just as the makers of Blender continue to provide their software out of the goodness of theirs. If you don't want my help or their product, no one's forcing you to take either. No one owes you a thing.

Sorry, I was being facetious. The question of whether they owe me only comes up in answer to the question of whether I owe them anything. I don't. They haven't done anything for me yet. If you want something for your trouble, though, please ask.

>I understand your point, and mostly agree with it. But still, I have to say that that kind of analysis has no practical merit. It's easy to analyze things after the fact, in any number of ways, and discover any number of apparent mathematical relationships. But that doesn't mean any of those relationships are causal to the compositional process.

I use it compositionally as a way of elaborating simple, transparent mathematical relationships into slightly more complex ones which are potentially somewhat intelligible, but which are not strictly necessary to understand in order to hear something I think might be worth hearing for other reasons. I'm not interested in writing music that is intended to function as some kind of coded message about other music, or about math, itself.

The way other kinds of musicians should probably be using such analyses is to provide them ideas about how they might want to make phrasing or grouping decisions in performance, in order to conform to some principle of grammar they believe might as well apply as not apply.

But PC set theory is at least good math and requires no specific assertion about human perception or cognition. Schenkerism eschews any real math and relies on visual pattern recognition as a model for acoustic pattern recognition. I have a little problem with that.

>If we want to delve back into the semantics game, I might point out that EVERYTHING is a result of some sort. We can chicken and egg this all day long. I stand by the spirit of my original statement. I'll make it more literal for you. The only way to get desired results is first to learn how to get them.

I'm with Dawkins. The egg is the whole point of the chicken.

>Sure, but that's not what happened in this case. The only "car" was your computer, and the only "gas" was the requisite components for making a program like Blender work.

We're not going to come to agreement about what part corresponds to what part. Please, let's not make a point of it.

>The only variable factor in this context was who did the installations. Everyone had the same files available, and the same instructions.

Yes. The instructions seemed to work for some people and not for others. Those for whom the instructions did not work will mostly never say anything about it unless asked. It's embarassing when something that's supposed to be obvious isn't obvious. I'm used to being in that position, though. I'm confrontational about such things because I have other mental aptitudes that allow me to be confrontational in ways that are sometimes reasonably productive. Not everyone else is so fortunate.

>There appears to be fundamental difference between us, Josh. When I have trouble getting something to work, my first question is always, "What am I doing wrong?" It seems like your question is, "How come whoever made this thing made it so poorly?" My philosophy invites solutions to problems, whereas yours merely invites reasons to complain about them. I don't think it's hard to see which is more productive.

I think the process is not really different. I just give up more easily than you do when I see that there's some kind of social aspect to the problem which is not in my aptitude sweet spot. The instruction "think like I think" assumes we can all think like each other. We can't. Not really.

(It's not a matter of intuition. It's a matter of things being labeled conspicuously according to function and being conspicuous about executing functions when applied.)

>As a trained musician, I'm well and truly shocked that you have that attitude. Is there anything on a violin or a trumpet or a pipe organ conspicuously labeled according to function, and would you immediately be able to play any of them even if there were?

I don't expect people to be able to play instruments without a lot of explicit instruction. Especially fingerings. One of my great guilty sources of schadenfreude is watching a smugly competent keyboardist try to keep his fingers on the correct strings of a harp, remember which gamelan key is the root of the scale or produce an alternate slide position for an F on a trombone. Once they've recognized that the diffculties other people have with keyboards probably do not mean that those people are idiots after all, they are ready to proceed.

>Learning 3D modeling for the first time is almost entirely analogous to learning to play your first instrument. You have to learn to read an entirely new language, and to think in wholly different ways than you've ever thought before. And then you have to practice, practice, practice.

Agreed. That's why manuals assume that readers are idiots.

I would read every word anyway. That is; every word that is there.

>More likely, you were just spouting one day about how "Blender doesn't work", and someone else happened to say, "I had some trouble with it too," and you were so relieved to hear you weren't the only one that all of a sudden in your mind it became everybody and their brother.

That's what I thought at first. But that was a long time ago.

(I did not miss something.)

>YES YOU DID!!!

>Get it through your skull, man. It's the only explanation. I don't know why it's so hard for you to admit, and at this point I'm well beyond caring. I will not discuss the subject any further.

OK. I missed what was not there.

>It's working now.

It's open AND running. I assume it's also working, but I really have no way of seeing that yet.

(

Last year I had tried to find the help pages both from inside Sketchup, and from outside on a different browser. All I found was what you see in the first link. There are plenty of other really great URL's out there that I could use for all kinds of things, if I simply somehow pull them out of my a**. But until I somehow do that, or until someone else comes up with them for me, they may as well not exist.

>As I recall, clicking Help -> Help Center in Sketchup always took you to that same main support page, and the links to what tutorials existed were always there.

Actually, it didn't. It took me to the same place as your first link.

>Somehow I doubt they removed all that stuff after the first time I looked at it, and then just so happened to put it all back right before I went looking for it again all these years later. I'm sorry you had trouble findiing it, but it's not because it wasn't accessible.

I don't know what they did and what they didn't do. All I know is that I didn't use their Help Center because, as far as I could tell, it didn't actually even exist yet. It looked like your first link.

>I don't pretend to know how the Blender Foundation manages what limited funds it has. If you'd like to know, ask them.

When I'm finally able to use it, I shall ask them. I have already told the people at Irfanview and Lunapic that I'll both donate and try to get others to donate in-world if they will just set up some way for us to do that.

Josh Susanto · December 14, 2011

>I can see this is going nowhere.

It has gone where it's going. We are have now discussed 2 theories, which, really should always be the minimum.

I think yours is at least about as good as mine.

(Users deserve an accurate picture of their use options. Period.)

>Great. Then I trust you will no longer attempt to distort the picture when one of us suggests that for a stated use case, an option you don't happen to use might be superior to one you do use, especially when the case in question is not something you yourself are involved with.

I'm not really in the kind of authoritative position that would allow me to provide effective counter-distortions to the official distortions that already exist, regardless of what those official distortions should happen to be. But I certainly should not choose to further compound them if I can avoid doing that, no. Thanks for pointing this out as a possibility.

>With regard to mesh efficiency, nothing can "turn out" any other way than how everyone already knows it has to. Rendering polygons is rendering polygons is rendering polygons. It is a plain and simple fact that every sculpty has a fixed polygonal structure, which corresponds with a certain render render weight. It is also a plain and simple fact that some meshes will have less weight than that, while others will have more. That doesn't make anyone look bad, good, or otherwise. It simply is.

I'm becoming much more inlcined to see it that way, but LL should really get its sh## together in terms of the real demands of whatever it's using, whatever those demands actually happen to be. No?

>No, Josh, what I meant was precisely what I said. In a program like Blender, you have complete and total authority over every design aspect, and every production aspect, of your work. In a program like Sculptypaint, you simply don't.

I think we should be able to distinguish between the merits of greater control and the merits of more direct control. They are not actually the same thing.

>I'm not. Sculpties do have advantage in some situations, and there's no reason not to report that.

But the advantages that have been explained to me previously seem to be all getting explained away by this thread. If the LI advantage is done-away-with, then, really what else is left? Just that they're easier for me to make and for others to see without installing viewers that repeatedly ruthie them?

>I do find it unfortunate that the land impact of sculpties will forever be kept artificially low. To do otherwise would be to break existing content, so there's no changing it. In all other respects, it's quite silly.

If that's what's literally happening, I have to oppose it on principle. I'll even be happy to give up my 10000L bet with Medhue if really means eliminating unfair competetition between prim types. But not without Medhue's total agreement.

(But even if the suspicion should be on sculpts rather than meshes, you must understand my resistance to making any fundamental changes to my production process while it's still unclear what's really going on with the numbers. Failing clear answers, I don't really want to put in a bunch of extra work to get a result which I have no real way to evaluate as being a clear improvement.)

>The evaluation is inherent to the technology itself. As I said, you don't need an in-world meter to tell you a plane made from two triangles is over a thousand times more efficient than one made from 2048 triangles, or that an object that utilizes the entire texture canvas space is more efficient than one that wastes 20% of it. If you think otherwise, I hope you've got a good supply of aspirin for all the headaches you must get from squeezing your eyes shut so incredibly tight.

This makes good intuitive sense, yes. But a lot of other things in SL do not conform to good intuitive sense, so it's not that much of a stretch for me to believe that there may be layers of data, or at least data processing, that could somehow offset the obvious advantage of using fewer triangles where they should not be necessary.

(What would be the total data impact of rezzing a 64-meter mesh tetrahedron with a blank surface?)

>How many triangles are in it? Is it just four, or is it subdivided? How is it UV'ed? Are the edge normals hard or soft? Are all four levels of detail the same, or do they differ? What are the answer to all those same questions with regard to the physics mesh?

Thanks for asking. The idea is to produce the maximum solid with the minimum data. Something that looks like it could be real, which can function as an aerial platform while producing something approaching zero land impact.

Really, if I do finally get into mesh architecture, I'll probably start by building everything with tetrahedrons. You know why.

(OK, now you've pretty well sold me on this.)

>Whew.

Yeah, and all it seems to take is to answer questions which others have chosen to pretend can't even be asked.

Chosen Few · December 14, 2011

Josh Susanto wrote:

The puckering is an artifact of using a shape map that has a point-to-point correspondence to a surface image.

Every model has a point-to-point correspondence with its surface texturing. It's called a UV map. Not every model, however, has unsightly artifacts caused by lack of user control over said UV map, and/or over the model's topological structure. Those limitations, and their consequences, are unique to sculpties.

Josh Susanto wrote:

No matter how you wrap a rectangular image onto a spheroid, something is inevitably going to be stretchier than something else, even if the rectangle is a square and it seamlessly tiles with itself.

Not if you adjust your UV mapping to compensate. With the right UV layout, you can have uniform pixel density across all the polygons, and there will be no stretch at all. You can also adjust the texture itself, of course, but that doesn't seem to be the route you want to go.

You seem to be biased by sculpty limitations, you just assume they apply to everything. I've tried to warn so many people so many times about exactly this danger, ever since the first "How do you make sculpties in ______ program?" question appeared. In each and every case I've encountered, I've advised people to learn to model in general first, and then apply that knowledge to sculpties afterward, as just one type of model among thousands. Trying to go the other way around, focusing any one type in particular as your whole basis for learning, colors your perceptions in such a way as to make it much harder to "unlearn" later.

Those who heeded that advice are doing just fine. Those who did not are now in a somewhat uncomfortable position, just as you seem to be.

Josh Susanto wrote:

If meshes offer simple ways to avoid using pre-existing rectangular surfaces, that's great, but it would also pretty much kill most of the appeal of my work as reported to me by my customers. They like not only the photoderivative surfaces, but also the high degree of correspondence between shape detail and surface detail. If I completely abandon the pucker, I'll have to give up one of these two important characteristics.

You can use the exact same textures you've been using, if that's what you prefer, and you can create the same reliefs from them, just as you have been. But you can also take steps to eliminate distortion, steps you've previously been entirely unaware of, because they're not applicable to sculpties. You won't have to give up a thing (except maybe a little land impact).

Josh Susanto wrote:

But the surface texture will always pucker, even if the shape of the object, itself, does not.

Again, not if your UV map corrects for it, or your texture itself corrects for it. Anyone who knows how can products a bipolar or monopolar sphere with no texture puckering at all. For exmaple, here's a bipolar sphere I just made in about thrity seconds just now:

It's a rock texture. It's on a sphere. It's got a pole right smack in the middle of it. There's no pucker. Need I say more?

Josh Susanto wrote:

That's why a lot of rocks in SL look like diseased melons.

Well, in fairness a whole lots of things in SL look like they got beat to death with the ugly stick. But that's got nothing to do with the technology. It's entirely an issue of user ability. Most people just suck at this, which is fine. That's what you get in any user-created environment.

Josh Susanto wrote:

A solution I prefer is to use a spheroid template in which the whole frame has been pulled to a single point. That means only one such pucker, and no seam at all, refardless of what surface image is used.

The solution I prefer is just not to have puckers in the first place.

Josh Susanto wrote:

What I find is that as much as users gripe about sculpt physics, they don't actually build much of anything with sculpts that are ready to function physically in ways that approach their visual limits.

If people tend not to make such things out of sculpties, it's simply because they know sculpties can't do that. It's not because they don't want them to.

If sculpties were so capable, people absolutely would use them as such. Plenty of builders, myself included, have been creating physics lattices for our sculpty builds out of transparent prims, since the very first day sculpties hit the beta grid. Clearly, there's always been a demand for proper physics behavior with sculpties.

Needless to say, now that we can do it the right way, with proper mesh models, there's little if any point in taking the former approach anymore.

Josh Susanto wrote:

If I could turn back the clock, I would have made a bunch more spheroids and put up a listing enhancement specifically emphasizing the difference between my own spheroids and the diseased melon sculpts I see selling for 10 times as much.

It's never too late.

Plus, should you wish to pursue it, there's a golden opportunity right now to advertise the benefits of any mesh objects you might make that overcome so many common sculpty pitfalls, polar distortions being just one example.

Drongle McMahon · December 14, 2011

Maenwhile, here's my much slower example about a spheroid avoiding puckering and still having a texture-derived relief effect. The left panel shows a "sphere" I often use, in Blender. It's actually a cube, subdivided and then made spherical ("to sphere" transformation effecivelt projects it onto a surrounding sphere). It doesn't have poles. This version has 1014 quad faces, to be as near as possible to a sculpty. The middle shows the same thing with a displacement map (thanks, Chosen) made from the texture by blurring and changing the intensity curve (Gimp). On the right is the resulting mesh on Aditi.

Drongle McMahon · December 14, 2011

Just for fun, here is a version with the cube left as a cube.

Josh Susanto · December 14, 2011

>Every model has a point-to-point correspondence with its surface texturing. It's called a UV map. Not every model, however, has unsightly artifacts caused by lack of user control over said UV map, and/or over the model's topological structure. Those limitations, and their consequences, are unique to sculpties.

This actually makes a good deal of sense to me, but it raises a lot of other questions.

(No matter how you wrap a rectangular image onto a spheroid, something is inevitably going to be stretchier than something else, even if the rectangle is a square and it seamlessly tiles with itself.)

>Not if you adjust your UV mapping to compensate. With the right UV layout, you can have uniform pixel density across all the polygons, and there will be no stretch at all. You can also adjust the texture itself, of course, but that doesn't seem to be the route you want to go.

I'm pretty sure that the pixel mapping of sculpts is an equal distance in pixels between each vert. No? I'm not seeing your verts in the example below being redistributed to make the pixel distribution more uniform than it might otherwise be, so I'm forced to infer that the surface image distribution has been decoupled from the vert distribution. If that's a compensation, that's fine, but it should seem to stand to disrupt my current quality of effect. Also, from your graphic, it would appear that you've replaced the pucker, itself, with a circular region of some kind. I suppose that's also fine, but if it's part of what you're trying to explain here, it's a pretty substantial detail to have left out of the explanation.

>You seem to be biased by sculpty limitations, you just assume they apply to everything. I've tried to warn so many people so many times about exactly this danger, ever since the first "How do you make sculpties in ______ program?" question appeared. In each and every case I've encountered, I've advised people to learn to model in general first, and then apply that knowledge to sculpties afterward, as just one type of model among thousands. Trying to go the other way around, focusing any one type in particular as your whole basis for learning, colors your perceptions in such a way as to make it much harder to "unlearn" later.

Although converting and modifying existing sculpt products in order to make mesh versions is interesting to me, I wouldn't bother learning Blender or Sketchup merely to make more sculpties. That would be like learning how to drive a tank just to shoot at a fly, when I already own what may well be one of the world's best flyswatters.

>Those who heeded that advice are doing just fine. Those who did not are now in a somewhat uncomfortable position, just as you seem to be.

If the advice is to abandon the pucker by also abandoning the relief effects that incidentally also result in the pucker, I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. I understand that anyone who knows how to use Blender can dent up a sphere and then paint something on it. I don't need to be duplicating that process.

(If meshes offer simple ways to avoid using pre-existing rectangular surfaces, that's great, but it would also pretty much kill most of the appeal of my work as reported to me by my customers. They like not only the photoderivative surfaces, but also the high degree of correspondence between shape detail and surface detail. If I completely abandon the pucker, I'll have to give up one of these two important characteristics.)

>You can use the exact same textures you've been using, if that's what you prefer, and you can create the same reliefs from them, just as you have been. But you can also take steps to eliminate distortion, steps you've previously been entirely unaware of, because they're not applicable to sculpties. You won't have to give up a thing (except maybe a little land impact).

This sounds plausible, but your visual example doesn't really explain the texture, itself, and it doesn't include any relief. Your own products are better than painted marbles, I know.

(But the surface texture will always pucker, even if the shape of the object, itself, does not.)

>Again, not if your UV map corrects for it, or your texture itself corrects for it. Anyone who knows how can products a bipolar or monopolar sphere with no texture puckering at all. For exmaple, here's a bipolar sphere I just made in about thrity seconds just now:

Which is the case here? That the UV map corrects for it or that the texture corrects for it?

I can only assume it's the second. Am I right?

>It's a rock texture. It's on a sphere. It's got a pole right smack in the middle of it. There's no pucker. Need I say more?

I have got some similar effects on unipolar spheres, experimentally, by imploding circular texture cutouts offset 180 degrees so that the circle comes to approximate the frame of the texture when the 180 degree offset is resolved. But I don't have that little circular bit in the center. What is that thing?

(That's why a lot of rocks in SL look like diseased melons.)

>Well, in fairness a whole lots of things in SL look like they got beat to death with the ugly stick. But that's got nothing to do with the technology. It's entirely an issue of user ability. Most people just suck at this, which is fine. That's what you get in any user-created environment.

Another GOOD argument in favor of mesh. If it so far fails to very well demonstrate its own advantages, that's at least partly because its users are not yet very well allowing it to do that.

(A solution I prefer is to use a spheroid template in which the whole frame has been pulled to a single point. That means only one such pucker, and no seam at all, refardless of what surface image is used.)

>The solution I prefer is just not to have puckers in the first place.

In principle, I can also make them disappear from sculpts, but it's a lot of extra work just to provide a more round, uniform surface that warrants being hidden just about as well as the pucker does. Pointing the pucker straight down is an easy solution, but some people prefer (as I do) to place it just below the horizon because they like some of the relief asymmetry between the pucker side and the other side.

(What I find is that as much as users gripe about sculpt physics, they don't actually build much of anything with sculpts that are ready to function physically in ways that approach their visual limits.)

>If people tend not to make such things out of sculpties, it's simply because they know sculpties can't do that. It's not because they don't want them to.

But sculpties DO do that. A stone spheroid with its pole at a diagonal will partially flatten 3 different ways and produce a 3-tiered stone platform that performs very similarly to 3 flattened spheres, but which looks appreciably like 3 different sculpts. Why people still want rectangular slabs of rock is a bit of a puzzle to me, given the huge disparity between physical and visual limits. Not knowing how to hide two poles has been repeatedly offered to me as one of the reasons, even if it does not actually apply to my own spheroids.

>If sculpties were so capable, people absolutely would use them as such. Plenty of builders, myself included, have been creating physics lattices for our sculpty builds out of transparent prims, since the very first day sculpties hit the beta grid. Clearly, there's always been a demand for proper physics behavior with sculpties.

I still don't know why sculpty physics can't be enabled if mesh physics can be enabled. The mind-numbing physical latticing of everything around me is one of the very things that provoked me to make sculpts in the first place. I wanted people to have at least a handful of spheroids they could use to avoid putting in an extra prim.

>Needless to say, now that we can do it the right way, with proper mesh models, there's little if any point in taking the former approach anymore.

Yes, now that LL spent a couple of years not bothering to make sculpties flexible or enable them physically, or to allow them to be rezzed with a different number of verts, or any of maybe a dozen other things they might have been able to do that would have made the mesh deployment any less exciting.

(If I could turn back the clock, I would have made a bunch more spheroids and put up a listing enhancement specifically emphasizing the difference between my own spheroids and the diseased melon sculpts I see selling for 10 times as much.)

>It's never too late.

It's too late for sculpt spheroids, because I already missed the opportunity to beat people over the head with how much better and how much more useful they could be than what else they were already using.

Maybe I can do something similar with mesh tetrahedrons?

>Plus, should you wish to pursue it, there's a golden opportunity right now to advertise the benefits of any mesh objects you might make that overcome so many common sculpty pitfalls, polar distortions being just one example.

I expect you're correct about this. Now that some of the pointless excitement around mesh has started to die down, I might be able to get people to focus a little bit on products that offer some real compelling advantage.

Would you be able to tell me if you see any immediate downside to the minimalistic tetrahedrons angle?

Josh Susanto · December 14, 2011

Can you show me something similar in a non-duplicative surface?

Chosen Few · December 14, 2011

Josh Susanto wrote:

Well, you're helping when I thought you would not, and others did not help when I thought they would.

What am I supposed to think?

What you're supposed to think is that help is out there to be found. The fact that you might not always find it the first place you look doesn't mean it's not there at all.

Josh Susanto wrote:

My attraction to Sculptypaint has been that, as limited as it is, there are things it does that really won't ever need to be more complicated,

Sure, that's pretty much the point of it. Any one-trick-pony can be made to do its one trick well. The trouble comes when that particular trick is no longer quite sufficient, whether it be due to environmental changes or simply because the user wishes to do more.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Looking at Blender tutorials so far, I'm not yet persuaded that the total click and key rate will be lower for the kind of results I'm already getting. The compelling aspect of the thing will likely have to be that is simply does more, altogether, if I actually want to do more.

I'd say that's an accurate assessment. There's nothing Sculptypaint can do that Blender can't, but there's plenty Blender can do that Sculptypaint can't.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Changing the number of verts rather than just moving them around also sounds attractive, I admit.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. You'll be amazed as you begin to understand what else is possible.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Note also that have already been ridiculed on this very forum for going through tutorials before going back to applications. But nobody ridicules anybody, right?

Without condemning or condoning what was said, I think the comment was more a matter of shock over your highly unusual approach, mixed in with probably a bit of frustration over much of the resistance you've shown toward accepting very basic and long established facts as truth, than any deliberate attempt to insult you. Most people, when watching tutorial videos, will follow along in the program, actually performing each demonstrated step, to see first hand how it works. Without exception, tutorial videos are designed to be a hands-on learning experience. You're the first person I've ever seen report merely watching them without the intent to follow along. I found that to be every bit as puzzling as did the person who made the comment.

In any case, again without condemning or condoning, I didn't say no one ridicules anyone, ever. What I did say is I've never seen anyone get ridiculed simply for asking how to do something.

I still haven't, by the way. Whether what was directed at you can be defined as ridicule or not, it wasn't in response to your asking a how-to question. Quite the opposite, it was in response to your resisetence to asking.

Josh Susanto wrote:

My OBJ is not there.

If it's not listed in the outliner, then you're correct; it's not there. But before I'm comfortable accepting that that's actually the case, I'd like to know what IS there. In your reply, please list every item that actually is displayed in your outliner. Don't forget to scroll all the way down through the entire list. If you dont' want to type it all, a screenshot will suffice.

Assuming it's absolutely positively not there, then there are three possible reasons why. One would be you haven't yet actually performed the steps, but rather have just been reading all this without following along, as you described you had done with the videos. Another would be you did something wrong in the import process. The last would be your OBJ file is somehow misconfigured, and so cannot be imported.

Assuming you did in fact attempt the import, then in as much detail is as reasonably possible to type out, I'd like to know exactly what you did, step by step. Please don't say anything as simplistic as "I pressed the import button," and just leave it at that. And please don't say, "I clicked everything I could, but nothing worked." Use the same level of descriptive detail I did in explaining to you how to use the outliner and the properties editor. If you gloss over anything at all, it will be that much harder to figure out where the problem is.

So you know, here's how the import process is supposed to work. Please follow along in Blender as you read these steps:

1. Assuming you have not altered the default layout of the UI, then at the very top of the screen, you should see a menu bar. Blender calls this the Info bar. Almost all the way to the left side of the info bar, is the word "File". Click on that to expose the File menu.

2. With the File menu open, you'll see the word "Import" as the fourth item from the bottom. Hover your mouse over that, to expose a sub-menu, showing various types of items you can import. Second from the bottom in this sub-menu will be the words "Wavefront (.obj)". Click on that now.

3. You should now be looking at a fairly standard file explorer dialog (although with the Blender UI's own aesthetic spin on its appearance). In the upper left you'll see listed the various hard drives on your computer. Click whichever drive you want to explore, and then in the right hand window, navigate through your various folders, to find whatever OBJ file you wish to import.

4. When you've found your desired OBJ file, click on it, and then click the Import OBJ file in the upper right corner. (Or, just double-click on the file, the same you would to open any other file or program on your computer, and you'll bypass the need to press the button.)

5. The model described in your OBJ file will now be present in your scene.

If you did all that, and the model did not appear, then something is wrong with the OBJ file. Try a different one.

If you try a whole bunch of different files, but none of them import, then either there's something wrong with the way Sculptypaint is generating them, or you're just not understanding my instructions for how to do the import.

I'd be happy to take a look at one of your OBJ's to see if they are indeed being generated incorrectly. Upload one of them to a website of your choice, and post the link here.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I spent $600 and all day to take a set of tests at the Johnson O'Connor Foundation...

I'm sorry to hear you wasted your money on such a thing.

My own IQ, is ranked in the 98th percentile, as high as any score gets. But aside from a pointless bragging right, and the occasional ability to impress a date with that statistic, it's pretty meaningless. The IQ test itself, which was an all day affair, administered by "THE leading expert in New York City" (my parents would have nothing less) while I was in my late teens, was highly suspect, as I recall.

For example, one of the exercises was to draw a collection of symbols from memory, after having been shown each one individually for just a second or two. There were about a dozen of them, and I was able to redraw the entire collection from memory, no problem. Easy, peasy. But I found out afterward I had been marked down a few points for "poor organizational skills" because I didn't place them in a neat little row across the top of the page, as the administrator had been expecting. Instead, I had placed them where I felt they looked best in relation to each other, utilizing the entire page as a canvas.

That I had chosen to approach it that particular way was in fact indicative of high proficiency with a very crucial organizational skill, just a slightly different one than the designer of the test had happened to think was important. Needless to say, I was mildly offended at the assertion to the contrary.

I immediately realized that if I had been marked down for that, I must also have been marked up for other things, just as unfairly. Therefore, the entire test was meaningless.

So, yeah, I'm "smarter" than at least 98% of the people on this planet. But only by some theorist's incredibly incomplete definition of what intelligence means. That kind of analysis can no more define a person than that BS we were discussing earlier can define music. It's patently ridiculous.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Being familiar with other modelers is not on the agenda, sorry. If your advice is going to dilate to learning an app in order to learn another app, I might as well asume the instruction to learning that other app include first learning some 3rd app, etc., etc.

You totally missed the point, Josh. OF COURSE I wasn't suggesting you should go learn some other app instead of Blender, if learning to use Blender is the subject we're discussing.

I was simply pointing out that the reason Blender does not make immediate sense to you is because you do not yet know enough about the principles of 3D modeling in order for it to be able to make immediate sense. That's not in any way suggestive of any problem with you, or with Blender. It was meant for no other purpose than to inspire you to learn those principles. Or do you not want to have that same ability that I have, and that just about every 3D artist I know has, to understand the basics of most programs we're presented with, almost immediately?

I would have expected your musical mind would jump at the chance to be able to pick up the 'instruments' of 3D modeling, by taking a theory-based approach to the whole thing. Musicians do this all the time when learning new instruments, after all.

For example, my main musical instrument is the guitar. Because I have an excellent command of music theory, in addition to the dexterity and coordination that comes from practicing the instrument itself, I can also play the violin, the viola, the cell, the double bass, the bass guitar, the tenor guitar, the banjo, the mandolin, the ukelele, and the balalaika (and presumably just about any other string instrument you'd care to throw at me). I don't claim to be a master of any of these except the guitar, since that's the only one on which I've put in the requisite practice to play with mastery. But I am at least a competent player of all.

Applying music theory to the understanding of instruments is the exact same thing as applying 3D modeling theory to the understanding of 3D applications. In both cases, the principles are the principles, and the only difference from instrument to instrument, or from program to program, is the specific manner in which the theory is applied.

So, how does this apply to your situation as a new user who has no experience to speak yet wither either the theory or the application of choice? The answer is the same as it is for any new music student. You learn the theory as you learn that first instrument, and you take off from there.

Now, is it possible to learn the instrument without learning the theory? Sure. That's arguably what you've done with Sculptypaint. Clearly, when it comes to that program, you can "play it like a fiddle". But the skill without the knowledge cannot take you beyond the limits of that particular instrument. If you want to be able to grow indefinitely, you have to learn the theory.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Sculptypaint never looked like a sea of buttons. Neither did the other stuff I've been using.

Was I talking about Sculptyaint in this context? Once again there can be NO comparison whatsoever between Sculptypaint and Blender. As I said, apples and oranges.

Anything that just does one thing, and one thing only, will be simpler at first glance than something that does thousands of different things. Should we also discuss how a kazoo looks simpler than a pipe organ, or how a tricycle looks simpler than an aircraft carrier?

When it comes to actually using those things, though, the more complex tool is quite often the more efficient. Try playing a chord on a kazoo, for example. Not so simple.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Brute force got me to "Select wavefront (.obj)". Was that right or wrong?

Neither, and both. You found one (entirely obvious) function among thousands, and then you couldn't get it to work. I don't know how you expect to draw any meaningful conclusion from that.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Then why are you skipping a step with me?

Are you f@cking serious?! I've spent more time trying to walk you through this than anyone realistically should. The fact that you're now trying to state otherwise is beyond insulting. Precisely what step did I skip, Josh?

Josh Susanto wrote:

That's not really an accurate description in this case, is it?

Of course it is.

Josh Susanto wrote:

If you want something for your trouble, though, please ask.

The only thing I want is for you, and others reading, to benefit from the free flow of information. Part of that means for you to stop being so stubbornly and insistently in denial about established facts of how this stuff works.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I'm with Dawkins. The egg is the whole point of the chicken.

Once again, you're deflecting the point.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I'm confrontational about such things because I have other mental aptitudes that allow me to be confrontational in ways that are sometimes reasonably productive.

I really don't care WHY you're confrontational, but I do have to say the fact that you ARE confrontational doesn't always make the process of trying to help you particularly enjoyable, not to mention that it just plain makes it take longer. If you had asked all the same questions without the antagonism, you'd have gotten answers far more quickly and easily. Take it from someone who answers a lot of questions.

Josh Susanto wrote:

It has gone where it's going. We are have now discussed 2 theories, which, really should always be the minimum.

I think yours is at least about as good as mine.

No, we've discussed one theory, and one historically accurate depiction of a sequence of facts. The former was a product imagination, and the latter a consequence of witness. Do you understand the difference?

Josh Susanto wrote:

I'm becoming much more inlcined to see it that way, but LL should really get its sh## together in terms of the real demands of whatever it's using, whatever those demands actually happen to be. No?

If I understand your meaning, then that's exactly what they've done, by providing an in-world measurement system. The fact that you've opted not to trust it, for reasons you've invented entirely out of your own imagination, doesn't change that, nor does the fact that said system has to make exceptions in favor of sculpties, in order to avoid breaking existing content.

The problem is not in the present implementation of the measurement system (bugs notwithstanding), but in the fact that it did not exist previously. It should have been there all along. Due to its absence all this time, we now have an entire population of SL users who have virtually no understanding of the real implications of the decisions they make.

LL's original concern, way back in the beginning, was almost exclusively for the management of server resources, which is why the otherwise meaningless concept of prim count was invented. Management of what resources directly impact client-side performance, was considered a footnote at best. That's why a torus and a cube have the same prim count, even though a torus has more than ten times as many polygons in it.

That's the stuff they never had their sh## together about, and that's why we're experiencing friction over the new measurement system now. The old ways prompted people to value all the wrong things. It will be some time before that damage to the communal psyche is undone.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I think we should be able to distinguish between the merits of greater control and the merits of more direct control. They are not actually the same thing.

You don't yet know what I'm talking about. That's OK. You'll either find out, or you won't.

Josh Susanto wrote:

But the advantages that have been explained to me previously seem to be all getting explained away by this thread. If the LI advantage is done-away-with, then, really what else is left? Just that they're easier for me to make and for others to see without installing viewers that repeatedly ruthie them?

That's about the size of it, yes. As I stated way back at the beginning of this thread, sculpties are obsolete, with the exception of certain use cases, those being any in which artificially low land impact is more important than any other factor. Beyond that, there's just no advantage to them at all.

Josh Susanto wrote:

If that's what's literally happening, I have to oppose it on principle. I'll even be happy to give up my 10000L bet with Medhue if really means eliminating unfair competetition between prim types. But not without Medhue's total agreement.

I'm very glad to know you're open to accepting the reality of the situation.

Josh Susanto wrote:

The idea is to produce the maximum solid with the minimum data. Something that looks like it could be real, which can function as an aerial platform while producing something approaching zero land impact.

So you understand fully, the lowest impact that any object can have 0.5, since that's the minimum server weight, just for an object to exist. That 0.5 gets rounded to 1, if the object is to stand alone. If you link two such objects together, the land impact would remain at 1, even though it's technically twice as much as it was before.

Increasing the size of the object will increase the land impact, because the object's details will be visible from further away, thus increasing the amount it taxes the system overall.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Yeah, and all it seems to take is to answer questions which others have chosen to pretend can't even be asked.

I'm not sure who might have made such pretense, it's their loss. The important thing is you now have the right information.

Drongle McMahon · December 14, 2011

"Can you show me something similar in a non-duplicative surface?"

Kwakkelde Kwak · December 14, 2011

You can name me by name:)

And indeed it was not ment as mocking or to ridicule...just complete surprise. If my comment was insulting in any way, I apologize Josh.

btw being stubborn like you are can be good Josh, it allows one to really dig into something once convinced it's the right way. I know, I might be just as stubborn as you, if not worse. But on this thread you finally seem to be at least slighty convinced about the benefits of mesh/blender. Credits to you Chosen, I wouldn't have had the patience!

Chosen Few · December 14, 2011

Josh Susanto wrote:

This actually makes a good deal of sense to me, but it raises a lot of other questions.

Great. Shoot.

Josh Susanto wrote:

TI'm pretty sure that the pixel mapping of sculpts is an equal distance in pixels between each vert. No?

Yes, and that's precisely the problem. Regardless of the size of each face, they all get the same number of pixels. Hence, you see stretching on the larger faces, and squishing on the smaller ones. By adjusting your UV layout to offset that, you can have uniform pixel distribution across the entire model. Make sense?

Josh Susanto wrote:

I'm not seeing your verts in the example below being redistributed to make the pixel distribution more uniform than it might otherwise be

Moving the vertices won't change the pixel distribution between them. If that's how you think it works, you're even more confused on all this, than I'd thought.

Josh Susanto wrote:

I'm forced to infer that the surface image distribution has been decoupled from the vert distribution.

Right. That's the whole point. The distance between vertices should be irrivant to the physical size of each pixel. As I said, uniform pixel distribution across the entire surface is the goal. If two vertices are further apart than another two, the former should have more pixels between them than the latter. When you don't do that, that's how you end up with stretching and squishing and puckering.

If you want to concentrate more pixels in one area than another, you certainly can. My example was simply to show you that you don't have to.

Josh Susanto wrote:

If that's a compensation, that's fine, but it should seem to stand to disrupt my current quality of effect.

Why? There's aboslutely no reason it should.

Josh Susanto wrote:

Also, from your graphic, it would appear that you've replaced the pucker, itself, with a circular region of some kind. I suppose that's also fine, but if it's part of what you're trying to explain here, it's a pretty substantial detail to have left out of the explanation.

No, I haven't done anything of the sort. Here's the texture:

Josh Susanto wrote:

Although converting and modifying existing sculpt products in order to make mesh versions is interesting to me, I wouldn't bother learning Blender or Sketchup merely to make more sculpties. That would be like learning how to drive a tank just to shoot at a fly, when I already own what may well be one of the world's best flyswatters.

Understood, and I agree with you, to a degree. If all you want to do is what you've already been doing, clearly your existing tool set and existing techniques, work just fine. No need to change a thing.

But so you know, you could do more in Blender even with just sculpties than you can in Sculptypaint.

Josh Susanto wrote:

If the advice is to abandon the pucker by also abandoning the relief effects that incidentally also result in the pucker, I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. I understand that anyone who knows how to use Blender can dent up a sphere and then paint something on it. I don't need to be duplicating that process.

You're jumbling the topics. Of course, the advice was never "Give up puckers, give up relief! Give up puckers, give up relief!" I'm talking about universally applicable principles, and you just keep circling back to your one little corner of the pond, as if someone's gonna steal your eggs if you dare look at the water as a whole instead just at the one or two drops worth of it you're comfortable patrolling.

As I said, you don't have to give up a thing. You can texture-source the shape of the model all you like, and you can eliminate puckers at the same time.

Josh Susanto wrote:

This sounds plausible, but your visual example doesn't really explain the texture, itself, and it doesn't include any relief. Your own products are better than painted marbles, I know.

The example was a direct response to your direct assertion that puckers are unavoidable. You shouldn't need every posible shape demonstrated, just to accept the fact that your assumption was incorrect.

You've already seen a displacement example from me, and now you've seen a puckerless texturing example. It's no great mental leap to put two and two together. Quite obviously, if I were to apply the same displacement technique this time as last time, the model would reshape, in exactly the same manner.

Had I saved the scene, I'd be more than happy to do that now. But I did not. Right now it's the end of a long day, and I don't feel like redoing it.

And on that note, I should call it a night. I'll finish up this response at some point tomorrow, when my head is feeling more cooperative. Right now, my eyeballs are about to fall out onto my keyboard.

Josh Susanto · December 15, 2011

I want to say thanks to all who have contributed to this thread, and to all who continue to contribute.

Even if I do come off as an a-hole, I imagine that this is a conversation that would also be helpful for some other people to read.

Please consider that before dropping out.

>What you're supposed to think is that help is out there to be found. The fact that you might not always find it the first place you look doesn't mean it's not there at all.

This is as much help as I've been able to get, and this is a easily as I've been able to get it. If you're as frustrated with me as you seem to be, just imagine how frustrated I've been for a couple of years. A normal response at some point is to focus on something less counterproductive than bothering people who don't owe one any favors.

>The trouble comes when that particular trick is no longer quite sufficient, whether it be due to environmental changes or simply because the user wishes to do more.

If it continues to exceed my operating costs, it's sufficient. I came to build. Making money is something I decided I could do if it didn't turn creative play into tedious drudgery. For the number of hours I put into trying to get Blender and other things to work, it was a better use of my time to look for more work in RL. I have finally been asked to apply for another job teaching Chinese to South Americans. I suppose if they want me, I could tell them "sorry, I have to stay at home and try to figure out how to get data into Blender, in case that eventually enables me to create something someone wants to buy".

>There's nothing Sculptypaint can do that Blender can't,

Except receive any data from me without a week-long discussion with you, apparently.

But that might actually matter. No?

>Without condemning or condoning what was said, I think the comment was more a matter of shock over your highly unusual approach, mixed in with probably a bit of frustration over much of the resistance you've shown toward accepting very basic and long established facts as truth, than any deliberate attempt to insult you.

I'm actually quite tolerant of even more extreme forms of mockery. My more recent criticism was not about the mockery, itself, but about the fact that you'd discouraged me from expecting it here. My earlier response directed to the person in question was related to the fact that what I had already described as a learning process had not be correctly acknowledged. I did not name that person in responding to you because these are separate issues, and I didn't want them getting mixed up.

My method is that if I hit some kind of a snag, I go through tutorials until I find a solution. If I don't find the solution immediately, I will keep going to the end of the tutorials in good faith. Dealing with the tutorial content with the app itself makes more sense to me only after I solve any problem that prevents me from using them at all. Going back to the app in between tutorials to click again on the same button that didn't work before just seems to me like an even bigger waste of time than watching all of them first. No? Again, I hadn't had the same set of issues with Sketchup as I had had with Blender, but since importing had been an issue with one, I at least wanted to see if there was any better treatment of the subject in an equal number if tutorials.

>Most people, when watching tutorial videos, will follow along in the program, actually performing each demonstrated step, to see first hand how it works.

That's the preferred process, yes. If I can't do that for some reason, though, I may try to watch all of them for hidden clues and then go back to try to apply them each after that.

>Without exception, tutorial videos are designed to be a hands-on learning experience. You're the first person I've ever seen report merely watching them without the intent to follow along. I found that to be every bit as puzzling as did the person who made the comment.

It's puzzling that I want to be sure I can eventually get data in and out before figuring out what else can be done with it?

>In any case, again without condemning or condoning, I didn't say no one ridicules anyone, ever. What I did say is I've never seen anyone get ridiculed simply for asking how to do something.

And this was a point that you made in response to my own point about people being ridiculed should they come forward; not to a point I made about people being ridiculed merely for asking how to do something, which may or may not be what happens when a person comes forward, and quite often is not. In any case, the fear of being riduculed for coming forward is not something that people hold strictly on the point of asking how to do something, but is a more generalized kind of anxiety about being exposed as ignorant about anything, by any means.

>I still haven't, by the way. Whether what was directed at you can be defined as ridicule or not, it wasn't in response to your asking a how-to question. Quite the opposite, it was in response to your resisetence to asking.

I considered it to be riducule on the basis that it seemed to ignore what I had said earlier on the matter. But I don't particularly care about ridicule as ridicule. In fact, ridicule, properly used, can be highly productive at times. If such a person were purely intent on discouragement, they should have done a lot worse. I've given everyone plenty else to play with here in that regard.

>I'd like to know what IS there.

Good idea. Thanks.

1) Scene

2) RenderLayers

3) World

4) Camera

5) Cube

6) Lamp

7) nothing more

>One would be you haven't yet actually performed the steps, but rather have just been reading all this without following along

What part do you think I didn't follow?

>Assuming you did in fact attempt the import, then in as much detail is as reasonably possible to type out, I'd like to know exactly what you did, step by step. Please don't say anything as simplistic as "I pressed the import button," and just leave it at that. And please don't say, "I clicked everything I could, but nothing worked." Use the same level of descriptive detail I did in explaining to you how to use the outliner and the properties editor. If you gloss over anything at all, it will be that much harder to figure out where the problem is.

I think it would make better sense just to follow the more complete instructions, so there is less question about whether you can believe what I may say about what I did previously.

>1. Assuming you have not altered the default layout of the UI, then at the very top of the screen, you should see a menu bar. Blender calls this the Info bar. Almost all the way to the left side of the info bar, is the word "File". Click on that to expose the File menu.

Check.

>2. With the File menu open, you'll see the word "Import" as the fourth item from the bottom. Hover your mouse over that, to expose a sub-menu, showing various types of items you can import. Second from the bottom in this sub-menu will be the words "Wavefront (.obj)". Click on that now.

Check

>3. You should now be looking at a fairly standard file explorer dialog (although with the Blender UI's own aesthetic spin on its appearance). In the upper left you'll see listed the various hard drives on your computer. Click whichever drive you want to explore, and then in the right hand window, navigate through your various folders, to find whatever OBJ file you wish to import.

Doing that, I'm able to get the desktop folder up on the right, which is where I would expect to find the .obj, but it's not showing. In fact, according to Blender, the whole desktop folder appears to be empty. If it only shows compatible file types, that might make some sense. But it also does not show any of the folders I know are definitely there on my desktop.

I'm also not finding any way to post a .obj file on this forum. If there's a way to do that, I'm eager to do it.

(I spent $600 and all day to take a set of tests at the Johnson O'Connor Foundation...)

>I'm sorry to hear you wasted your money on such a thing.

Actually, I think it was easily the best use of any $600 in my whole life. The tests let me know what was always going to be easy for me and what was always going to be hard. If you take these tests at 20, 40, and 60, your results will tend to vary by no more than 1 percentile each. They are very well developed.

>My own IQ, is ranked in the 98th percentile, as high as any score gets.

I would guess that, and I don't consider such information to be bragging, in and of itself. In fact, it's the opposite of bragging in my case to point out that most people with IQ's 20 or 30 points lower than mine have tended to accomplish a lot more than I have by my age. Getting a high IQ score is not an accomplishment; it's supposed to be an indicator of some kind of potential. But not being very specific, it can create all kinds of unwarranted expectations on a young person.

>But aside from a pointless bragging right, and the occasional ability to impress a date with that statistic, it's pretty meaningless. The IQ test itself, which was an all day affair, administered by "THE leading expert in New York City" (my parents would have nothing less) while I was in my late teens, was highly suspect, as I recall.

Precisely why I went to JOCF when I had been long disgusted with the whole idea of IQ tests. JOCF don't test IQ. They test things that vary between people, but do not much vary per person over time. I now know that I'll never learn to speed-read or design lipstick, among plenty of other things.

>For example, one of the exercises was to draw a collection of symbols from memory, after having been shown each one individually for just a second or two. There were about a dozen of them, and I was able to redraw the entire collection from memory, no problem. Easy, peasy. But I found out afterward I had been marked down a few points for "poor organizational skills" because I didn't place them in a neat little row across the top of the page, as the administrator had been expecting. Instead, I had placed them where I felt they looked best in relation to each other, utilizing the entire page as a canvas.

Like a lot of such tests, what they gave you depended on skill rather than natural ability. JOCF tests are different. VERY different.

>That I had chosen to approach it that particular way was in fact indicative of high proficiency with a very crucial organizational skill, just a slightly different one than the designer of the test had happened to think was important. Needless to say, I was mildly offended at the assertion to the contrary.

My only such issue with JOCF is that they test rhythm as something that doesn't continue to exist between examples, so I would hear the examples in a continuing metric context rather than in static isolation as intended. Realizing how this affected my answers only halfway through the test may explain why I got only a pretty normal score.

>I immediately realized that if I had been marked down for that, I must also have been marked up for other things, just as unfairly. Therefore, the entire test was meaningless.

Meaningless by some degree, yes. If a person with my more normal IQ scores can get scores like I've got on Mensa sample tests, that suggests to me that a retarded person who understands how to take tests can join Mensa. That explains a few things about Mensa, I guess.

>So, yeah, I'm "smarter" than at least 98% of the people on this planet. But only by some theorist's incredibly incomplete definition of what intelligence means. That kind of analysis can no more define a person than that BS we were discussing earlier can define music. It's patently ridiculous.

The JOCF tests are geared more to warn you about things that will eventually bite you in the ass if you're unaware of them. In my case, the fact that if I don't find ways to apply a high propensity to 3-dimensional visualization along with my compulsory but unprofitable composing and such, I'll always have some kind of mental itch that remains unscratched and interferes while I'm trying to push fries for The Clown and whatnot. Making sculpties for SL somewhat scratches that itch. Reading technical specifications of 3D modeling systems absoluetly does not, so it's something I can just barely do in order to do something else.

>I was simply pointing out that the reason Blender does not make immediate sense to you is because you do not yet know enough about the principles of 3D modeling in order for it to be able to make immediate sense.

Nothing I'm seeing in the tutorials so far looks particularly mysterious. It's the stuff other than the actual 3D tools that is keeping me from using them; THAT stuff, I find to be mysterious.

>You learn the theory as you learn that first instrument, and you take off from there.

Sure. Any time now. But this is so far like being pretty confident that I can learn to play an electronic instrument is there is just any way to plug it in. If I can't even get it plugged in, the rest isn't going to matter much either way. I'd like you to try to understand that I'm not frustrated with Blender's building tools, themselves, nor do I expect to be once they have all been made available to me rather than dangled in front of my face. I've just been resistant to Blender because getting it to do anything AT ALL has been like nailing jello to the ceiling. I've been resitant to mesh, itself, for not entirely the same reasons. But the stultifyingly cryptic behavior of the Blender interface sure hasn't helped, either.

>When it comes to actually using those things, though, the more complex tool is quite often the more efficient.

Understood. That's why I have been eager to start using it any time it's willing to start letting me use it. I just haven't been eager to keep jumping through hoops just to jump through more hoops. My discouragement with Blender itself is not due to it's wider array of functions. I just tend to dismiss them as not possibly being worth the trouble of logging on every day just to see whether the barriers to use have magically evaporated.

>Neither, and both. You found one (entirely obvious) function among thousands, and then you couldn't get it to work. I don't know how you expect to draw any meaningful conclusion from that.

The point was that even that was more than you had explained to me by skipping ahead to the next part.

Yes. I really am that dense that I'm unable to read your mind over the internet from thousand of miles away.

Poo-pooing my brute force when you still hadn't offered me a better result than what it had provided seemed a bit unfair.

>Precisely what step did I skip, Josh?

"Select wavefront (.obj)".

>If you had asked all the same questions without the antagonism, you'd have gotten answers far more quickly and easily.

I didn't get it from others. So far the only clear difference I can see in this case is that you respond better to antagonism than others have responded to asking more politely. I hate to seem to punish you for the way others have responded, but I'm just sticking to what has worked here so far. You've got me to "Select wavefront (.obj)". I suspect that's about half way to an actual import - no?

>If I understand your meaning, then that's exactly what they've done, by providing an in-world measurement system. The fact that you've opted not to trust it, for reasons you've invented entirely out of your own imagination, doesn't change that, nor does the fact that said system has to make exceptions in favor of sculpties, in order to avoid breaking existing content.

If this part of the system truly is as you say it is, you can pretty much count on me to become some kind of reborn mesh fanatic as soon as I see the real comparative data on my own products. I have a real distaste for misrepresentations, regardless of who or what they may favor. If you believe your own explantions, then help me get my mesh production working, and it's pretty inevitable that you'll win the whole damn earlier argument with me, utterly and unequivocably.

>You don't yet know what I'm talking about. That's OK. You'll either find out, or you won't.

True enough, I suppose. I can't possibly have any real way of agreeing or disagreeing with a such a statement.

>That's about the size of it, yes. As I stated way back at the beginning of this thread, sculpties are obsolete, with the exception of certain use cases, those being any in which artificially low land impact is more important than any other factor. Beyond that, there's just no advantage to them at all.

If that's really the only advantage, I don't see any way I could really consider that to be a legitimate advantage. Thanks for being very clear on this point, because, if you're completely correct, it's doozy.

>I'm very glad to know you're open to accepting the reality of the situation.

I'm open to ultimately accepting whatever reality the preponderance of evidence evtually compels me to accept. I just don't yet see a everything I will need to see in order to come to agree with you without reservation.

>So you understand fully, the lowest impact that any object can have 0.5, since that's the minimum server weight, just for an object to exist. That 0.5 gets rounded to 1, if the object is to stand alone. If you link two such objects together, the land impact would remain at 1, even though it's technically twice as much as it was before.

So, ceteris paribus, I should be able to get two tetrahedrons for less than the cost of a cube?

If a cube has twice as many verts as a tetrahedron and three times as many triangles, then why are mesh builders not using more tetrahedrons? Or are they and I'm just not seeing it yet?

>Increasing the size of the object will increase the land impact, because the object's details will be visible from further away, thus increasing the amount it taxes the system overall.

But, even if there is, there really shouldn't be any way around that with sculpts either... correct?

Kwakkelde Kwak · December 15, 2011

I won't get in the way of your general discussion, but do like to comment on your last two questions....

There's more to the rendercost than vertices and faces, but two tetrahedons should be more or less as "expensive" as a single cube yes. Why aren't they used more often then? I'm quite interested why they would be used, I can imagine something like poseballs or invisible scriptcarriers or anything where shape doesn't matter. But usually shape does matter. Boxes will build you walls, floors etc. A tetrahedron will build you ..eh..a tetrahedon. If shape really doesn't matter, you are better off with a single triangle than 3D geometry anyway.

And sculpts shouldn't have the extra benefits no, but there are so many around, it would be very unfair to builders like yourself who made and make good use of them, to apply the new rules. Too much existing content would virtually become useless because of the primcost. A good example are the landscaping sculpts which are either 512x512x something or even 1024x1024x something meters. I'm sure it's possible to calculate how much they would have cost as mesh (which have ofcourse a 64 m limit), but I'm very sure they would cost so much nobody would ever use them again.

Josh Susanto · December 15, 2011

>Moving the vertices won't change the pixel distribution between them.

But if we move the verts but keep the total pixel distribution uniform, then the pixel distribution between verts will change, won't it? This isn't even an applications question. This is a simple logic question.

>If you want to concentrate more pixels in one area than another, you certainly can. My example was simply to show you that you don't have to.

Yes, that's precisely what matters. Do you make spheroids which are nonpolar in regard to verts or merely nonpolar in regard to the surface texture?

>Why? There's aboslutely no reason it should.

Because for a nonpolar texturing to map to a nonpolar spheroid, the spheroid has to be nonpolar, too. For one of these things to be polar and the other not, the verts will have to come loose from the texture unless I start with the shape before creating the texture. If I do that, I'll not only not be getting a pucker, I'll not be getting other more desireable qualities that presently my my work distinguishable to my niche of consumers.

>No, I haven't done anything of the sort.

Yes, I see that now. The apparent circular region was a monitor artifact. Zooming in broke up the green lines from the grayish texture.

>As I said, you don't have to give up a thing. You can texture-source the shape of the model all you like, and you can eliminate puckers at the same time.

Very clear, thanks.

>The example was a direct response to your direct assertion that puckers are unavoidable. You shouldn't need every posible shape demonstrated, just to accept the fact that your assumption was incorrect.

But the pucker does still exist somewhere if you're wrapping a square onto a sphere. You may just not be able to spot it because of the compensation you describe. If the real point is that that's always going to be good enough, I will probably have to agree with that once I've tested it personally.

Meanwhile, could you reproduce the shown mapping with the below alternate texture and show me the opposite pole?

Thanks for staying up as long as you did.

Josh Susanto · December 15, 2011

Better, thanks.

But it honestly looks a lot crunchier than my sculpt speheroids, generally.

If I'm understanding this correctly, 2 ways of solving that would be a) concentrating more verts on the intended viewing side of the object, which is essentially the effect I'm getting now, and b) just adding more verts.

If mesh offers both solutions, that's great, but I'm not sure how many such spheroids anyone is going to need at a higher vert count if they're mostly going to be viewed against some kind of solid background anyway. I suppose the next step would be duplicating the object mirrored on itself inside out so that it isn't invisible from the inside. (That, I can already do without mesh).

Josh Susanto · December 15, 2011

>I won't get in the way of your general discussion,

Please do.

>There's more to the rendercost than vertices and faces, but two tetrahedons should be more or less as "expensive" as a single cube yes.

Thank you.

>But usually shape does matter. Boxes will build you walls, floors etc.

It will build you architectures consistent with current RL engineering constraints. But if you can push walls and floors partway through each other arbitrarily, a mostly flattened tetrahedron would seem to have plenty of uses. If RL construction materials behaved more like prims, I'd expect to see tetras used more already in RL. They're strucurally stronger than boxes. Bucky Fuller just couldn't make more use of them mostly because of the production processes for building materials. But, in addition to his domes, he did also have those homes converted from huge recycled metal cylinders, which is not a totally dissimilar concept from using a huge tetrhedron should it also have happened to already exist. Floors need to be flat, sure. But ceilings don't. And exterior walls on a lot of buildings in RL are not as flat as interior walls anyway. What you'll give up by using more tetras is a bit of snugness and familiarity. What you'll gain is more data to apply to intentional contrast elements such as rock, plants, furniture and appliances. Moreover, the tetras may allow even more compelling types of contrasts.

>If shape really doesn't matter, you are better off with a single triangle than 3D geometry anyway.

I consider that shape does matter, mostly. That's why suggested tetras, not triangles.

OTOH, we can save even more data by making one-sided, strictly flat avatars and having them interact on a completely planar sim space. Maybe some kind of all-female shopping mall... in ancient Egypt....

>And sculpts shouldn't have the extra benefits no, but there are so many around, it would be very unfair to builders like yourself who made and make good use of them, to apply the new rules.

I think that depends on how and when the new rules are implemented. Advanced notices and long adjustment periods are just good customer relations policies in almost any business. But things do have to change sometimes. Most consumers understand that. The other approach I expect will eventually be applied by LL is to make the pertinent changes abruptly without announcing them, but to prepare some kind of semi-plausible contingency explanation about finally having given in to an unstoppable groundswell of customer demand for such changes. They will, again, increase my chocolate ration.

>Too much existing content would virtually become useless because of the primcost.

Unless gradually converted. Especially in-world, for free. Almost everything I've made should be pretty easy to convert already.

>A good example are the landscaping sculpts which are either 512x512x something or even 1024x1024x something meters. I'm sure it's possible to calculate how much they would have cost as mesh (which have ofcourse a 64 m limit), but I'm very sure they would cost so much nobody would ever use them again.

And how hard would it be for LL to provide sim owners with a "remove land" function that frees up that data?

Drongle McMahon · December 15, 2011

"...a lot crunchier than my sculpt speheroids..."

Well, that's very veasy to change by messing with the displacement map in Gimp. It's easy, for example, to flatten the mountain tops. Or you can just use a different map to start with. These were actuall a procedural texture, baked out onto the uv map and then edited to make the cololurs etc. That's a bit easier than starting with an external texture which has to be mapped to the sphere first.

"...if they're mostly going to be viewed against some kind of solid background."

If it's going to be against a background, you can just as well leave the back off altogether, like for a planar sculpty.

Problem creating oblong sculpties

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