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Post edited 4:28 am – Jun 23, 2009 by steffy

Hey everyone

I was playing around with the cloth modifier to make some objects, but can't seem to get it to work with primcomposer objects anymore, anyone else tried to use this modifier?

yea.. sorry about that, should probably have added a little more information hehe.

if I use the cloth modifyer on a normal max object it works fine, but if I try to use the modifyer on a primcomposer object, lets say a Editable poly plane.

the object becomes unresponsive as soon as you hit simulate. and if you deselect simulate, then deselect the object and reselect it, simulate is active once again.

It worked when I was using max9 (not 2009) and primcomposer 1.1.4

but as I tried again a few days ago, on a new project that needed it, the thing above happened

Hello Steffy,

Better late than never :) Solution is to turn OFF Prim Composer's Size Limits before applying Cloth modifier. This will fix it.

Best regards and wishes

Bid said:

edit:  I played a bit more and found in the “Group” sub-tool of CLoth, if I made a group and did a weld, it all behaves as one big cloth.  YAY!

Make sure that it exports to Second Life or OpenSim correctly.  Welding could cause you problems.

Good tip about deactivating size limits ;)

Thanks

Kitsune Shan

Post edited 8:35 am – Jul 6, 2009 by Kitsune Shan

Yeah, i thinked the same.

Is really easy. Make a big shape (plane for example). Divide it in more than 32 x 32 faces for example multipliying by 4, 32 x 32 * 4= 128 x 128.

Then, export the sculpt as 256 x 256 and cut the image in photoshop in 64 x 64 pixels squares (4 squares ). And you finally get 4 sculpts ^^

Easy

Post edited 12:07 pm – Jul 6, 2009 by Shack Dougall

Amis said

So you can start with one big prim composer plane (or regular ) , subdivide it , apply cloth and than use this method to cut the final shape to X number of sculpties.

Kitsune said

Is really easy. Make a big shape (plane for example). Divide it in more than 32 x 32 faces for example multipliying by 4, 32 x 32 * 4= 128 x 128.

Then, export the sculpt as 256 x 256 and cut the image in photoshop in 64 x 64 pixels squares (4 squares ). And you finally get 4 sculpts ^^

Easy

Amis said

I don't think Prim Composer can export ( for now ) sculpt image different than 64×64? no matter how dense is the mesh ( correct me if I'm wrong )?

Great ideas.  Unfortunately, the problem is more complicated than it seems.

Amis, great tutorial and you are correct.  Prim Composer will not export a sculptmap with greater than 64 x 64 pixels.

But there is a bigger problem with Kitsune's idea.  If you export one big sculptmap and then cut it up into 4 smaller sculptmaps, then each of the smaller sculptmaps will use only a fraction of the full color range.  As a result, the maximum size of these sculpties will be greatly reduced.

For example,

1. create a plane with 64×64 faces
2. create a 128×128 pixel sculptmap from it.  You could use the original shader method that existed before Prim Composer to do this.
3. Use photoshop to cut it into four 64×64 pixel sculptmaps.
4. Upload the sculptmaps to SL and create sculpties from them.  Position the sculpties to form the plane.
5. Now, scale the prims as large as you can.  I think you will find that no matter how many sculpties you use, the maximum size of the plane is still limited to 10m x 10m.

But it gets worse.  Because each sculptmap is only using half of the colors in X and Y, the resolution of the sculpties in each dimension is also cut in half. 

Thus, there is no benefit to using multiple sculpties using Kitsune's method.   It can't make things that are bigger than 10m x 10m and it can't make things that have more resolution than a single sculptie.

The method shown in Amis' tutorial is much better, but it still won't give results as good as a composite sculptie.  The edges of the sculpties won't line up perfectly because of rounding errors. 

I think the best results would be obtained by using Amis' method to create a composite sculptie.  Instead of dividing the mesh into 4 separate meshes, you could divide it into 4 sub-elements.  I haven't tried it, but I think this would create a composite sculptie that Prim Composer could export.

Post edited 1:42 pm – Jul 6, 2009 by Shack Dougall

Amis said:

Great idea Shack! I've just tried it. It works better with detaching to element than to a object. There are still some overlapping , but it's tolerable. With detach to object , i receive very tiny gapses between prims , which i fix manually.

Great!

Sculpties weren't designed to do this, so any method is going to be less than perfect.  But I worked hard to make the edges of composite sculpties line up as much as possible.

I've mentioned this in other places, but it is worth repeating.  There is a preference called Fix Color Out of Bounds (in Prim Composer > Preferences > Export Preferences > Sculptmap Algorithms).  Some composite sculpties export better with this turned off, whereas others look better with it turned on.  If the composite edges don't touch, you might be able to fix it by changing this preference.

The other thing that I'd like to mention is that the sculptmaps in composite sculpties do get scaled proportionally to some extent.  This is necessary to make the edges of the sculpties line up in Second Life.  This means that the maximum size of a composite sculptie is less than it would be if you simply sliced it into individual sculpties.  Also, the size limits code doesn't take this into account yet.  So, if you scale a composite sculptie up to its maximum size in 3ds Max and then upload it to Second Life or OpenSim, then the sculpties will probably have large gaps between them.  The workaround is to upload it to SL first and then scale it to its maximum size.

Hello Naiman,

This is the tutorial , but in it i use detach to object. Shack gave idea to detach to element and explanation above is how to recreate composite sculptie compatible mesh.

http://amis.diinoweb.com/files…..%20cut.zip

Best regards