Dec
2007
1.0 RC2 - Includes important New Features and Bug Fixes!
ScultGenMax Homepage
WHAT’S NEW
- New Feature: Multi-resolution sculptmaps (including Hard Edges and hard edges combined with smooth)
- Adds several new sculptmaps to the distribution as examples of what can be done, including the disco ball.
- New Feature: Vastly increased UV map smartness
- correctly handles UV maps that are shifted to the left or right.
- correctly handles many UV maps now that are totally incorrect
- Bug Fixed: Error pasting sculptmaps into scene
OVERVIEW
This is a major release with important new features and bug fixes. If you had problems in RC1 importing sculptmaps, then give this a try.
RC2 revolutionizes the process of sculptie creation in SculptGenMax. All previous versions required a fixed-resolution 32×32 mesh with a nearly-perfect vertex grid as the UV map. RC2 can handle meshes with both larger and smaller resolutions and even meshes with mixed mesh resolutions. And it no longer requires a perfect UV map. Many UV maps that aren’t even close to a perfect grid will now work.
How to use it
If you don’t need the full detail of a 32×32 mesh, you don’t have to use it. Start with an 8×8 or 16×16 mesh instead. Then, if you need more detail in one part of it, apply a Mesh Select to select the part that needs more detail, and then MeshSmooth to smooth out that part. You can also use Tessellate instead of MeshSmooth and probably other modifiers. I haven’t had time to fully explore this, but it opens a world of new possibilities!
Many of the modifiers such as MeshSmooth will create UV maps that are very un-gridlike. RC2 doesn’t care. It will happily devour many of them and create a valid sculptmap. However, there is one important thing to remember. Any surface textures that you bake from the sculptie must have a perfect grid UV Map or they won’t work properly in SL. So, if you want to bake textures for these sculpties, you will need to generate the sculptmap and then import the sculptmap back into the scene. The process of importing will create a new sculptie in 3ds Max that has the same shape as your original, but with a correct UV Map for baking.
Conclusion
There’s a lot to play with here and I’ve only just started to understand how this can be used to create new types of sculpties in 3ds Max. It opens lots of possibilities and a lot of questions as well. If you need help with this, feel free to ask in the SculptGenMax support forums. You don’t need to register and it will make sure that your questions (and the answers) are visible to the entire SL community (including the teen grid which does not have access to adult SL forums).
Enjoy! And let me know how it goes…
–Shack
Last update: 2007-12-30
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