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Article Overview

1. New sculptmap aspect ratios
2. Changing the pivot point of a sculptmap
3. Future directions
4. ALL (printer friendly)

The Prim Composer 1.02 release focuses on sculpted prims and adds new aspect ratios for sculpties as well as the ability to move the pivot point of a sculptmap. SculptGenMax default settings have also been merged with the Prim Composer preferences dialog.

New Sculpt Aspect Ratios

In the original implementation of sculpted prims, sculptmaps encoded a fixed number of mesh faces (32 x 32) in a 64×64 pixel texture. Larger bitmaps could be used (e.g., 128×128, 256×256, etc.) but they were still limited to 32×32 faces and served no useful purpose after lossless uploading was implemented.

A change is coming! The newest Release Candidate viewer (1.21) adds support for sculptmaps with a variable aspect ratio. As a result, we are no longer limited to 32×32 faces. 16×64, 8×128, and 4×256 faces are now possible by using a non-square texture of 32×128, 16×256, and 8×512 pixels, respectively. These new sculptmap sizes allow a mesh to have a different aspect ratio while maintaining 1024 as the maximum number of faces in the sculpt. By using sculptmaps with different aspect ratios, it is now much easier to model objects that have more detail in a particular dimension, for example, a rope.

In addition, it is possible to create sculpties with less than 1024 faces, since intermediate aspect ratios are also allowed. Thus, a 32×64 pixel texture might generate a sculptie with 16×32 = 512 faces. I say “might” because it’s actually more complicated this. The details of intermediate aspect ratios are currently being refined in JIRA VWR-9384. Please vote for it!

When this is finalized, we will be able to tailor the number of faces to the complexity and shape of the sculptie we want to create. If we don’t need 1024 faces, we can use fewer. This is especially important with regard to lag because fewer faces means a smaller texture to download and, more importantly, fewer triangles to render in the viewer.

Prim Composer 1.02 supports all of the sculptmaps with 1024 faces (texture sizes: 4×1024, 8×512, 16×256, 32×128, 64×64, 128×32, 256×16, 512×8, and 1024×4). As soon as VWR-9384 is finalized, I will add support for the intermediate sizes. Vote for it, please!

New Options

In 1.02, SculptGenMax has a new “Aspect Ratio” section to assist in creating sculpted prims from 3ds Max objects. Prim Composer also automatically detects the aspect ratio of any sculptmaps that are imported using the Sculpt creation rollout and automatically generates the appropriate aspect ratio in sculpts that it exports. Sample sculptmaps using the new aspect ratios are available in the “sculptmaps/aspect” folder of the zip file.

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