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UV Maps!

UV Maps for Regular Prims!

Today, I’ll be releasing Beta 4 of Prim Composer 1.0. Time for an update and a hint of things to come! The future’s so bright, I’ve got to wear shades.

Important!

One quick note before I begin. If you haven’t done it, please turn off True Color dithering in 3ds Max. This is essential if you want to work with sculpted prims. I’ve added a note about this in the Prim Composer Installation Notes.

Bugfixes

1.0 Beta 4 (1B4) has a couple of bugfixes and one major new feature: UV Maps for Regular Prims. First, the bugfixes:

BUGFIX: Sculptie Position

The most important bugfix is a change in the way that sculties are exported. Previous versions assumed that the position of a sculpted prim was its center and exported accordingly. In some cases, this caused sculpts to be imported at an incorrect position in SL. 1B4 fixes this by exporting the true center of the prim rather than its position.

Circle around Pivot

Move the Pivot

One pleasant side-effect of the previous bugfix is that it is now possible to move the pivot point of both sculpts and regular prims without affecting the export. One useful application of this is to copy a prim while rotating it to create a perfect circle of prims.

For example, create a sculpt or regular prim. Move its pivot point away from the object. Now, rotate the object 45 degrees and hold down the shift key when you finish the rotation. A dialog will pop up. Set the number of copies to 7 and it will create 7 copies of the prim so that the 8 prims form a circle. Don’t forget to turn on angle snap to make it easy to get a precise 45 degree rotation!

Pivot and Sculptie Center

One important note: in this thread, I talked about using the pivot to change the center of a sculpt. I haven’t done that yet, so if you’re waiting for that, this isn’t it. I want to do something like that and I will soon.

In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, the idea is to have a way to create something like a sculptie door. A door needs to rotate on its edge, so it makes things easier to script if the center of the sculpt is on its edge. Anyway, it’s coming…

BUGFIX: Prism and Hollow

1b4 also fixes a couple of problems in the shape and sizing of Prisms and hollows. Prisms in previous versions did not match the shape in SL and some of the hollow sizes were incorrect. Both of these have been fixed.

BUGFIX: Export All Ignores Hidden Prims

Export -> All now ignores hidden prims. Previously, it would export them to SL.

New Features

Smoothing Groups and Seams

All of the new features in 1b4 relate in some way to the texturing of regular prims. Here are the major ones:

• Mesh seams in regular prims removed. This eliminates lines in the mesh when it hasn’t been cut or hollowed.
• Smoothing groups implemented for mesh faces. In previous versions, some faces in the mesh appeared to pop out unnaturally. Their shading didn’t match the faces around them and some of the corners looked shadowy. Fixed with smoothing groups. Take a look at the “before” and “after” pictures on the right.
• Material IDs implemented for mesh faces. In SL, we can apply different textures to different parts of a prim: top, bottom, sides, etc. In Prim Composer, this is now implemented using MaterialIDs. More on this later.
• UV Maps for regular prims. Previously, only sculpts had UV maps. Now, all prims in Prim Composer have UV Maps. You can apply materials to prims and they render flawlessly. You can’t export materials yet, but that’s coming in Beta 5.

UV Maps and Materials

The exciting new feature in 1b4 is the ability to apply materials to regular prims and render them. This is a major step toward true offline building. As mentioned previously, 1b4 cannot export materials, so you won’t be able to see textures in SL, but that is coming in the next release.

SL: Select Texture

If you haven’t worked with materials in 3ds Max, then you will need to do some homework. I recommend 3dBuzz, 3D-Palace, and CG Academy for video tutorials. Also, I will be producing some videos of my own in the near future.

As described here in the LSL Wiki, each prim in SL can have up to 9 faces, each of which can be textured. These faces represent major parts of the prim such as the top, bottom, hollow, and end cuts. In SL, you can select individual faces using “Select Texture” in the edit dialog. In Prim Composer, this is done using Material IDs and the Multi Sub-Object Material.

Multi Sub-Object Material

1b4 defines a standard set of material IDs that are used for all regular prims. These material IDs range from 1 to 14.

Below is a picture of a Multi Sub-Object Material that has been applied to a sphere prim. Notice that only a subset of the 14 material IDs are actually used. For the sphere I have used IDs 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14, representing the outside, path cut begin, path cut end, profile cut begin, profile cut end, and hollow, respectively.

The complete list of material IDs:

Multi Sub-Object Material

1. Default
2. Top
3. Bottom
4. X Plus
5. X Minus
6. Y Plus
7. Y Minus
8. Outside
9. Inside
10. Path Cut Begin
11. Path Cut End
12. Profile Cut Begin
13. Profile Cut End
14. Hollow

These names were derived from the LSL Wiki page on faces. Please look there for additional insight. There is no material ID for dimples. Use the profile cut material IDs, instead. If a prim doesn’t have a particular feature, then the corresponding material ID is unused. For example, spheres don’t have a top and bottom, so material IDs 2 and 3 are unused for spheres.

You can enter the names “Top”, “Bottom”, etc. into the Multi Sub-Object material to help you remember which is which. You can also change the color of each of the sub-materials, so that it is obvious on the prim. This is what I did in the sphere example above.

Obviously, you have to know how to use materials and the Multi Sub-Object Material, in particular. I can’t teach you that here, but once you understand materials, this should allow you to put just about any material that you want on a prim: procedural materials, bump maps, specular maps, transparency maps, reflection, ray tracing, …

Future

I’m energized about what’s to come. The next release will support automatically importing textures into SL and OpenSim. Once that’s done, it’s time to produce some demonstration and tutorial videos. Somewhere in the middle of that the final 1.0 release will occur.

But this is just the beginning. Some of the things that I’m planning (in no particular order):

• integrating opensource LSL tools into 3dsMax to create mega domes and similar things.
• inventory integration — Move textures and objects from your inventory to 3ds Max and back.
• Automated packaging — Extend maxport to package the things that it imports. On a large scale, this would be something like a sim in a box.

And that’s just the beginning, too! I’m also looking forward to hearing your ideas. The future awaits! Let’s go!