Half Man Half Dog

Posts Tagged ‘SL’

In November 2009 I bought TheBlack Box’s Sculpt Studio after seeing several quite incredible single prim builds in the Sweet Sculpties Flickr group .  Since then I’ve mainly used it for simple little sculpts that would have been impossible in Hexagon (Mechanical parts,hard edges, LOD resistance) but the past weekend I decided to make something a little more ambitious.

Due to my unfortunate habit of making things and generally wanting the place to look nice (I know, I really must stop that) our plots in Nautilus (double prim land) were almost full. Not a problem for a store, but it’s my sandbox too, so I couldn’t rez half the stuff I’ve been working on. When we arrived in the sim we made an enchanted glade at ground level, complete with sculpted trees (mainly from Botanical – they’re beautiful!). As terraforming is impossible in the sim, I made 64m x 64m sculpted ‘ground’ to make at more interesting. With the trees, rocks, logs, mushrooms, shadows, light beams, enchanted well and collision prims for the sculpted terrain , the area took up a little under 300 prims.

Looked lovely but was unseen since we moved the entry point from ground level up to the store at 1000m.

Determined not to make the same mistake again, I decided (well I asked, Tracey agreed on the condition that it looked nice) to make a rustic cabin and fencing, with a few linden trees to match the surrounding landscape. Back up on workshop island I fired up Sculpt Studio and made a rough frame from one sculpted prim.  One of the major strengths of SS is the ability to easily  ‘chop’ sculpted prims up into several parts with the use of  ‘pole’ slices (slices where all the points are in exactly the same place, thereby making the resulting part of the sculpted prim so thin as to be unrendered by the viewer (It’s possible to get 64 distinct parts from one prim!).

Here is the single(!) 256 slice prim that makes up the floor planking, door and shutters set up on the Sculpt Studio ‘mat’. Each plank uses 6 slices; a single pole slice at each end and two normal slices to give the shape a degree of LOD resistance (Level Of Detail – when things are further away in SL, the viewer renders a lower detail version of them).  Due to the inherent precision problems with subdividing a single sculpty into so many parts I had to do a lot of previewing, adjusting individual slices, previewing again and so on.

After a lot of tinkering and some swearing I finished the wooden parts, most of the final adjustment time was to make them slightly irregular and rustic looking. When it came to making the roof, the members of the in world Sweet Sculpties group were very helpful ( In fact, without in world groups I wouldn’t be able to do half of what I can today ) and I decided on a corrugated iron roof for that shanty town look Another 256 slices, setting up the first 8 to form the first two undulations then use of the SS’ Slice Repeater – 10 minutes’ work instead of the hour or so it would have taken to do manually.

The whole thing had to be phantom in order to get inside which meant that it looked nice but didn’t really work as an interactive object. What use is a shack with permanently open door and shutters? Lots of slice manipulation later, I had 4 different sculpt maps for the front of the shack, in various states of window and door openage. Using the llDetectedTouchST function I was able to tell which part of the sculpted prim was being touched, so with a little scripting the door and shutters now open and close when clicked (For those who do a bit of scripting, it’s often possible to discard the x axis float on a 256 slice sculpty as the 4 or 6 slices that make up one ‘plank’ span the whole map). Adding a hollowed transparent cube to provide something solid for the walls with an llSetPrimitiveParams to block/unblock the door makes it very functional, with the added advantage of being able to put the 4 different sculpt maps for the door and shutters on it, cutting down the loading time when the map changes.

In between fiddling around with that, I’ve also made a fully sculpted husky muzzle \o/

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.