AC3D Forums - View Single Post - AC3D\SL Tutorial: Two Shapes, One Sculpted Prim

lisa · 9th October 2008, 03:49 PM

Here's a brief video showing how to pull that one off.

Part 1: Fleshing out a couple of rocks
http://www.independentdeveloper.com/...eprimrocks.wmv

Part 2: Cleaning up a minor defect
http://www.independentdeveloper.com/...primrocks2.wmv

I only made a couple of rocks to show the idea, but you could repeat the same thing ad-nauseum with the remaining geometry to make a whole sheet of rocks.

Basic steps:
- Make a 32x32 plane
- Grab some vertices and move them upward to form the rock. I grabbed several, but if you want more rocks that are smaller, you can grab fewer.
- Leave a gap between the rocks when you make the next one.
- Select the vertices in the gap and scale them down to nothing.
- Import into SL and set sculpt mode to "planar"

Note that I never change the uv map, even though I deform the geometry all over the place.

On the cleanup: there was a "spur" I didn't like, so I moved it to the edge. There are a number of things you can do to make it better still with a little more time. i.e. I didn't do it in the video, but once on the edge you can either scale the spur up to make it appear even with the rest of the edge, or more likely, I'd crush down that whole edge as well and make it degenerate (invisible) too. That's a "final step" thing though; i.e. best to wait to fix the edge until you've made *all* your rocks. Other tweaks would be to scale up the surface of each rock in the uv map to make them "sharper". Of course, most of that can be done with texture trickery anyway--lighting is more important than shape in fooling the eye--so that step is optional.

Here are the before\after cleanup images of the rocks in SL:

9th October 2008, 03:49 PM	#16
lisa Senior Member Professional user Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Phoenix, AZ Posts: 917	Re: AC3D\SL Tutorial: Two Shapes, One Sculpted Prim Here's a brief video showing how to pull that one off. Part 1: Fleshing out a couple of rocks http://www.independentdeveloper.com/...eprimrocks.wmv Part 2: Cleaning up a minor defect http://www.independentdeveloper.com/...primrocks2.wmv I only made a couple of rocks to show the idea, but you could repeat the same thing ad-nauseum with the remaining geometry to make a whole sheet of rocks. Basic steps: - Make a 32x32 plane - Grab some vertices and move them upward to form the rock. I grabbed several, but if you want more rocks that are smaller, you can grab fewer. - Leave a gap between the rocks when you make the next one. - Select the vertices in the gap and scale them down to nothing. - Import into SL and set sculpt mode to "planar" Note that I never change the uv map, even though I deform the geometry all over the place. On the cleanup: there was a "spur" I didn't like, so I moved it to the edge. There are a number of things you can do to make it better still with a little more time. i.e. I didn't do it in the video, but once on the edge you can either scale the spur up to make it appear even with the rest of the edge, or more likely, I'd crush down that whole edge as well and make it degenerate (invisible) too. That's a "final step" thing though; i.e. best to wait to fix the edge until you've made all your rocks. Other tweaks would be to scale up the surface of each rock in the uv map to make them "sharper". Of course, most of that can be done with texture trickery anyway--lighting is more important than shape in fooling the eye--so that step is optional. Here are the before\after cleanup images of the rocks in SL: Attached Thumbnails