Import sculpts into SL?

[Naiman Broome]

Hello , I wanted to export some sculpts from 3dsmax and import them into SL , I used primcomposer to generate the tga , but I would like to import them with the exact sizes and dimensions defined in my 3dsmax viewer and not having to stretch them , because its a mess when I have several sculpts that need to alighn ... I tried to use maxport but doesn't work or not sure how to make work right ... I can export the hpa files, but dunno how to import , any idea? Is there may be a feature in the viewer to upload?

[Drongle McMahon]

Unfortuanately, the sculpt map image is the only input you have for a sculpty. It only defines the xyz positions of vertices (as rgb colour) within the bounding box of the object. There is no way of changing the size other than stretching/squeezing  the object. This is one of the inherent limitations of the sculpty format. You would have to use mesh to achive control over the size within the upload. If you can get the bounding box dimensions from 3Ds. then you could just type those into the edit dialog, rather than having to match things by eye.

[Jasmin Helstein]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

... If you can get the bounding box dimensions from 3Ds ...

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Another way of doing the same thing I suppose would be to center the sculpt when it's finished and then give it the same X, Y, and Z dimensions (make it fit in a cube). This cube will be the bounding box. I've used this trick a few times in Wings3D, it may also work in 3dsmax.

[Jasmin Helstein]

Re-reading what I just wrote but it's not the same thing. I do have the bounding box "caught in numbers"  but you'd probably still have to do some math to come to the right dimensions in SL.

[Gaia Clary]

there is one nasty trick that you could use, however it also has a downside (see below):

Basically the relative locations of the sculpty vertices is encoded into an RGB color map (the sculptmap), where each axis can have a color value between 0 and 255:

 

• R (0-255)
• G (0-255)
• B (0-255)

Normally the entire color range is used for sculptmaps. And because of this a sculpty always rezzes with a bounding box of <1,1,1> (a 1 meter cube)

But nothing keeps you from reducing the color range in your maps. So, when you reduce the range of used numbers on an axis, then you can manipulate the object scaling in that range.

For example:

When your sculptmap for example is restricted to color values in this range:

 

• R (0-255)
• G (0-255)
• B (64-192)

Then your object will get the visual dimension of (1.0, 1.0, 0,5)

However by reducing the color range you also reduce the already bad spatial resolution for the possible vertex locations. Remind that you have only 255 possible vertex location on each axis when you use the full color range...

However you have to calculate the range by taking the relative scaling into account. And because reducing the color range can have negative impact on the look of your sculpted prim (it gets more and more bumpy when you reduce the color range), the better option is to rescale the sculpties after they are imported into SL.

You could do this by using an LSL script where you only need to specify the bounding box size. In blender we have a tool for this, which creates LSL scripts for generating and scaling sculpted prims in world. I do not know if such a tool also exists for Autodesk products.

Well, you need to think twice or even more often about all of this. But once you got it, all becomes rather easy and understandable, even the 'weird" features of sculpted prims begin to become logical :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: after you stared at this for a while.

Here is an introduction into sculpted prims (sorry for the very very bad voice in that video, i aught to change that sometime in the near future)