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Mason Kingsford - Guest
7:25 pm - Dec 19, 2007
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Shack,
I don’t know if you can do this yet with SculptGenMax, but I did see a tool that allows you to create sculptie maps that actually create hard edges in SL. It’s a pretty cool effect. My guess is that it uses faces to generate the map. I think your tool uses vertices, but I wonder how difficult it would be to offer both options? Anyway, it would be really cool if we could somehow generate hard edged sculpties as well as smoothed with your script. So, I guess this is a feature suggestion, or a wishlist of sorts. Thought I’d throw it out for discussion!
-Mason
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I’m a little confused by the question, since hard edges have always been possible in SculptGenMax.
The primary thing that prevented hard edges was the fact that SL converted the textures to a lossy format when they were uploaded. Thus, the texture in-world was slightly different from the texture that you uploaded and it would have bumps and unevenness. But LL has recently fixed that by adding a checkbox "lossless" in the file upload dialog. And it works perfectly in the latest Release Candidate of the viewer.
The other thing that makes hard edges tricky is LOD. When you view an object in SL
from a distance, it displays the object at a lower level of detail. Essentially,
it discards some
of the vertices in the sculptmap. This can cause a sculptie to look miss-shaped when viewed from a distance. But you can work around this by putting more vertices on the edges.
Neither of these problems has anything to do with SculptGenMax. They are common
problems to all sculptie methods.
Anyway, as far as I know there’s nothing to prevent hard edges in
SculptGenMax. For example, if you look at "cd_stack_64.tga" in the sculptmaps folder of SculptGenMax, it has razor sharp edges…and it was created with SculptGenMax. You just have to be sure that you’re using the latest Release Candidate of the viewer and upload it with "lossless" checked.
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Mason Kingsford - Guest
9:42 pm - Dec 19, 2007
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Shack,
I apologize for not being more clear. What I am referring to is an unsmoothed type of rendering.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgaNsZnM_t4
If you look at this video, about half way through with an odd shaped prim, and again at the end, with a disco ball kind of effect, you can see an unsmoothed appearance to the sculpties. I’m attempted this quickly, but couldn’t replicate it.
When rendering in 3dsMax, you can turn off the smoothing. Again, I’m not sure of the limitations of sculpties in general, but I do like the effect shown in that video. Hopefully that kinda clears up what I’m gettting at.
Regards,
Mason
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Mason Kingsford said:
It’s a pretty cool effect. My guess is that it uses faces to generate the map. I think your tool uses vertices, but I wonder how difficult it would be to offer both options? Anyway, it would be really cool if we could somehow generate hard edged sculpties as well as smoothed with your script.
Mason,
Very interesting. I took a look at the video and I don’t think he’s using faces. When you use faces, you end up with a very smooth sculptmap. His sculptmaps look very pixelated and not smooth at all.
SculptGenMax uses a 32×32 grid. I think what he’s doing is to allow you to use smaller grids such as 8×8 and 16×16. You can’t see it in his finished product, but he’s actually collapsing a lot of vertices on top of each other.
I played around with it some and was able to modify SculptGenMax to accept 8×8 and 16×16 meshes. When I created an 8×8 sphere and used this new version to generate the sculptmap, I got the disco ball that you see in his video. Pretty cool, it gives "shiny" a completely different look.
I’ll see if I can roll it into the next version of SculptGenMax.
thanks for the suggestion!
–Shack
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Mason Kingsford - Guest
3:42 am - Dec 20, 2007
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Awesome Shack - thanks for having a look, I figured you’d be able to sort out what he’s doing to get that effect. Pretty cool huh! If you could roll that into your next release, that would totally rock. I wonder if there’s a way to have both smooth and edges in a single sculptie?
Also, maybe this should be a separate post. But where is the best place to donate to your project?
-Mason
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I’m not sure yet (I need to try it), but I think it might be possible to use a variation of your workflow. Basically, you would start out with a low resolution mesh (say 8×8) and then select the faces that you want smoothed and apply a meshsmooth modifier to just those faces. The algorithm is smart enough to handle a mixture of different mesh resolutions within the same sculptmap.
It would probably be a fairly interesting-looking sculptmap because the edgy parts of it would be big, pixelated squares intermixed with smooth transitions in the smoothed part. Anyway, I’ll test it out today.
As for donations, they are greatly appreciated, but I haven’t had time yet to set up things for Paypal (and frankly my time is better spent on improvements to the website and SculptGenMax). So for now, I guess the best way is to just pay me some Lindens in-world. It isn’t sexy from a technical point of view, but it’s probably the easiest way for everyone involved and it will allow me to keep my focus on the project at hand.
And of course, keep posting your ideas here. As Mastercard says, that’s priceless. Seriously, the beauty of open source is that people can contribute in different ways through ideas as well as code. It’s the free exchange of all this that makes open source work.
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RC2 now has the ability to do low-resolution hard edges and to combine hard and soft through multi-resolution meshes.
Now, I’m thinking about next steps. One thing that seems like an obvious need is the ability to import a low resolution mesh.
Currently, when you import, it always creates a 32×32 mesh from the imported sculptmap.This means that if you create an 8×8 mesh, export its sculptmap, then re-import the sculptmap, then the re-imported mesh becomes a 32×32 mesh which is not what you started with.
One way to do this would be to allow you to specify the resolution that you want when you import. So, maybe I could tell SculptGenMax that I want to create an 8×8 mesh or a 16×16 mesh instead of 32×32. That’s good and I think it is needed, but it also seems like it would be good if it could automagically know that the sculptmap is low resolution and import accordingly.
I need to think more on how this could work, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up on my thought process.
–Shack
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Mason Kingsford - Guest
11:49 pm - Dec 31, 2007
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Thanks Shack for the update! I’ve been busy over the holidays but starting to play again. One thing I’ve discovered with the hard edges is that I need maps to be 128×128 as opposed to 64×64. Myself and a few others couldn’t get the 64×64 disco ball to fully rez in. It looked like strips instead of faces. The 128 size seems to help alot.
Anyway, Happy New Year and all that jazz :)
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That’s interesting. The 64×64 disco ball rezzes for me, but it takes several seconds to get its full detail. However, I just did a test with a 128×128 disco ball and it had full detail immediately when I applied the texture. Good to know that 64×64 might pose a problem for some setups. I’ll experiment with it some more this week.
If this is a consistent result, then we need to make sure that LL is aware of it. We finally got a true lossless 64; it would be tragic if we can’t use it because of other issues in the way textures are processed.
Still, it’s good news that you are having success with RC2. Keep me posted about your experience with it. I took a break between Christmas and New Years, but I’ll be back in full swing tomorrow.
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Harmpie - Guest
12:42 pm - Feb 4, 2008
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yeah there seems to be a problem in SL. Sometimes it doesnt load the
sculptmaps fully, it seems to only do that to lossless uploaded ones.
This bug has been reported on Jira as well, its called VWR-3922
Sculpties/Sculpted prims rez differently after each login
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Harmpie - Guest
12:44 pm - Feb 4, 2008
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Its a major Issue, often the sculptmap rezzes right first time, but
drops back in detail after relog, or after you’v been teleported away.
Anyway,
I would have never noticed this problem if I couldnt make awesome
looking sculpties like I can now, and I couldnt make awesome looking
sculpties if it wasnt for you Shack, so thanks a lot for your script
its great. 
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Mental Raymaker - Guest
11:48 am - Feb 9, 2008
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Hi Folks,
i think the way to create hard edges is to have verts and therefore edges on top of each other! Look at your discoball it actually has 32 x 32 verts. Try to move one vert and another one is right beneath it! LOD sucks big time for sculpties! It should be removed from affecting them!
cheers
Mental
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Mental Raymaker said:
i think the way to create hard edges is to have verts and therefore edges on top of each other! Look at your discoball it actually has 32 x 32 verts. Try to move one vert and another one is right beneath it! LOD sucks big time for sculpties! It should be removed from affecting them!
Of course, you’re right about having edges and verts on top of each other, but I think there’s more going on here than just LOD. Part of it appears to be the way that shiny and perhaps lighting in general works in SL. It seems to try to soften edges rather than accentuate them. When we put edges on top of each other, it creates adjacent visible faces that are not adjacent in the underlying mesh and this seems to trick the lighting system into making them look more different and therefore "hard". But that is just my impression. I haven’t had time to experiment with it in a comprehensive manner.
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Mental Raymaker - Guest
3:29 pm - Feb 9, 2008
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and… Do you know of the tool: OGLE. Its an open gl extractor. You can grab meshes from sl with it! I use it to grab the avartar mesh for different poses and body types mainly. But i also grabed sculpties to check what is happing with them. A sculpty always has 32×32 verts to start with. Then LOD takes some verts away the further you go away with your camera. I cant realy remeber now but i think it does that like this: First every third vert is removed then 2 of 3, which would explain strange things happeing with a 32×32 mesh…
mental
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