Post edited 1:50 am – Dec 9, 2009 by softpaw
Hi everyone! I hope people still read this, because I'm having a heck of a time trying to get something to work, and all the 3DS tutorials in the world don't seem to be helping. I'm a little new to 3DS Max, but I've been able to figure most things out thus far, I'm just stuck on this problem (and I don't know anyone who uses it and will give me advice/assistance beyond “yep, sculpties are hard, have fun”).
So, I'm trying to create a sculpty that's a hollow cylinder. My initial attempts to create it using a normal cylinder failed, because I didn't know what a mess the standard prim-composer prims made of the UV map, and I've been able to get the basic shape to work now by starting with a “sculpty cylinder”. However, I have a new problem, my finished product is only one-sided. The outside of the cylinder looks right, but since it's only one vertex thick, SL thinks there's no inside, only an outside, creating some interesting visual effects that just won't do. And, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to remedy this situation.
Thus far, I've tried:
-Applying the map as a sphere instead of a cylinder (creates a solid object)
-Re-importing the map to 3DS as a sphere (couldn't figure out how to hollow it)
-Generating the map starting from a torus (couldn't figure out how to increase the hole size or square off the edges without going edge-by-edge, a painfully tedious and imprecise process)
-Re-importing the map to 3DS as a torus (couldn't figure out how to decrease hole size at all)
-Merging two cylinder meshes and connecting them (couldn't find a way to connect the top and bottom of each cylinder without capping the whole thing or leaving gaps)
-Importing to SL as a torus (creates a paper-thin object)
I'd greatly appreciate any help y'all can provide, I'm getting really tired of things not working.
On a semi-related note, would it be possible to have future versions of Prim Composer automatically create the correct UVW map for all prim types, instead of just sculpties? It'd save a massive amount of frustration for those of us who are more used to SL than 3DS, I would've had this figured out and done with days ago if I could just make a normal prim, distort it, and generate a sculpt-map from it.
Oh, and just an FYI, this forum's "New Topic" entry box is incompatible with Opera, with no way to disable the WYSIWYG editor, I had to blow the dust off Firefox and come here with it just to post a thread.
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