Half Man Half Dog

Archive for December, 2009

When sculpted prims first made their appearance in SL I messed around with Wings3D, producing several slightly mishapen but still usable sculpties, the most useful has undoubtedly been the pillar I made for our ruined temple in Sabulella. Tracey had bought me a copy of Hexagon 2 while it was on offer at DAZ3D, they’d just bought Eovia and were keen to push their new software. Hex is very intuitive to use, the tools are pretty comprehensive and I made a few things for use in Tracey’s Poser renders, as it was completely incompatible with sculpt geometry.

Then in March 2008 a patch was released for Hex, including support for Second Life Sculpted Primitives, a whole new tooltab with the basic sculpt shapes just a click away, I was delighted. For a little while. Right up until the moment I imported my first sculpt map, in fact. For reasons only the developers at DAZ3D can know, they decided to make the sculpted prims 64 x 64 vertices (probably due to the recommended size for sculpt maps being 64×64), the problem with this being that sculpted prims have only 32×32 vertices. Even a post on the official forum got no useful replies, so I continued to blunder around with approximative shapes and losing most of the detail when imported into SL.

From what I’d seen in world and from lurking on various forums, it seemed Blender was the tool of choice for sculpted prims. With Domino Designs’ Primstar scripts the process is very easy, the tutorials on their site explain everything very quickly and simply. The hard part (at least for me) is getting comfortable with Blender’s rather unintuitive interface, I’ve used 3 or 4 mainstream 3D modelling programs in the past and all were easy to adapt to, certain UI conventions being common to them all. Blender seems to have been designed without reference to other programs which makes learning it a struggle but arguably makes for a better workflow, once you’ve mastered the program.

As an example of why Blender seems rather alien to me, in order to make a symmetrical object, you first have to delete half of the faces then apply a mirror modifier. In other programs I’ve used there’s a symmetry option which simply mirrors what you do to one half of the existing mesh on the other half, just one click instead of the half dozen that Blender requires for the same effect.

But as you can see, it works, even for rather peculiar looking prototype avatar heads >_>

After much fiddling with graphics and debug settings in Emerald, I was finally able to get shadows to render on my ATi HD3450. Some uploaded alpha textures disappear, only prims cast shadows and it drops framerate by 50% but it’s fun to play around with:

Like so many other new features (Reflective surfaces, alpha channel avatar skin, 1 bit alpha image uploads), I doubt it will be part of the mainstream viewer any time soon but hopefully alternative viewers will improve it to a usable point before then. While Emerald’s shadow rendering works, Kirsten’s viewer is reputed to be the most advanced. I could never get it to work with my graphics card >_<

The bewildering variety of debug settings can sometimes be a little too tempting to fiddle with… becoming invisible, setting LOD on sculpties are fairly safe and simple, but idly fiddling with render settings can make things very strange indeed…with black fur the effect is relatively small, with a white skin it turns the avatar into an eye watering glowy…thing.

I cannot remember quite what I did to make my skin glow, but thankfully a relog reverted any changes I’d made.

I’m not entirely sure why I decided to create this blog, but at times there are certain things I feel like talking about that aren’t really suitable for the Random Inspiration Blog .