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Old 26th September 2008, 06:37 PM   #1
Petite Pixie
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Default Getting rid of the UV maps for sculpty and other suggestions.

I recently talked to one of the best sculpty artist in SL about creating with sculptys and I found somethings that make me wonder if these things will work with AC3D?

First she said she uses Blender and a plug-in that removes the UV-map which gives her sculpties very clean square edges and more details. I'm not sure exactly how this works or if it can be made to work in AC3D.

Here's the SLURL for her shop if you'd like to see some of her work. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sculptomancy/114/223/47

You'll find her tutorial there call "Building with Sculpts"

Some of the things she mentioned to me is making the image 128x128 and having it transparent which can be done in PhotoShop (PS7 you have to keep it to 1%) which I've tried and gotten much better results.

Here is what she wrote about lossless Sculpty.

As of current, lossless compression is semi-broken. This is because of the way that the client and server handle image downloads; it "expects" a certain size, and only downloads the amount of data it expects. Thus, for some lossless images, it will lead to only partial downloads client-side, resulting in sculpts that are horribly mangled even more so than compressed images!

Thankfully, there are some workarounds.

When working with sculpt, I usually start off with a 128x128 image; this is the size that most reliably works with lossless uploads. However, the resulting JPG2000 image size is variable depending on the variation between pixel color values, in a way vaguely similar to gif.

First Download the program SL Image Uploader located at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLImageUpload. It is a must for any sculpt designer.

now, select lossless and load an image. It will tell you the resulting jpg2000 image size, which is invaluable. Here are the rules to follow to get lossles to work every time:

1) if the image is less than 5kb in size, upload using the standard lossless feature in the official client. This will give you an inventory texture, which is very preferable.

2) If the image is between 5-6.5 kb in size, upload using SL Image Upload. This won't give you an inventory texture (only a UUID) but it will allow you to use 128x128 images. SL Image Upload is a bit more efficient than the main client at compressing losslessly, so you can use this range.

3) If the image is larger than 6.5 kb in size, resize the image in an image editor to 256x256 using nearest neighbor sampling. Then upload using SL Image Upload, because the main client doesn't allow lossless images this large. Unfortunately such sculpts are slow to load, so use sparingly.

*(written by Aminom Marvin) in second life.

Also you might look up Domino Marama on the web for her amazing tutorials using Blender but there are some good ideas that can be used in AC3D too. I heard she has an amazing plug-in for Blender for sculpties as well.

Anyway I love how easy it is to work with AC3D I just don't know why it's so hard to get even simple shapes to work when exporting to sculpty or why I can export a sculpty with a browser open and get a different result than with it closed even without changing anything in AC3D.
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Old 29th September 2008, 02:54 PM   #2
lisa
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Default Re: Getting rid of the UV maps for sculpty and other suggestions.

Thanks for all the info! All useful stuff.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Petite Pixie View Post
or why I can export a sculpty with a browser open and get a different result than with it closed even without changing anything in AC3D.
...that shouldn't happen, even with the current version! Are you clicking refresh subdivisions in the TCE? If not, perhaps your maps aren't being updated.
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Old 25th March 2009, 11:47 PM   #3
ponk
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Default Re: Getting rid of the UV maps for sculpty and other suggestions.

None of that info still stands as the lossless bug was removed some time ago.

Also, Aminom is definitely NOT a she
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