Second Life Export Troubles

[Michelle_Nephew]

Hi there. Working on my first sculpt for Second Life. Here's what it looks like in AC3D:



I used the "sculpty-cylinder.ac" template provided to build from. But when I imported it into SL it looked like this:



It's actually hollowed out, too, so it's bowl-shaped from the top. So I looked around these forums a bit ... found a link to directions for UV mapping at http://www.independentdeveloper.com/...rom_existing_3 ... so I remapped it then I tried importing again. Now I get this:



What can I do to make this work properly? Thanks for any help you can give me!

[Michelle_Nephew]

My sculpt texture currently looks like this, which strikes me as strange:



Before I re-mapped it, the texture looked like what I'd consider a "normal" sculpt texture ... edge to edge color.

[lisa]

What does the uv map look like? The texture coordinates need to be edge to edge.

Also, did you save the original on the first one, before you remapped it?

[Michelle_Nephew]

I do have a copy saved from when I was seeing if committing the subdivisions helped at all, before I remapped it. The sculpt texture from that looks more normal (edge to edge), except for a black bar at top and bottom (see image below). But when I import that texture into SL, I get the second image in my first post.



Is the UV map something different? Where do I find it?

[Michelle_Nephew]

Also, I'm on a G5 Mac, running OSX 10.4, in case that matters.

I tried snapping that last sculpt texture in AC3D to get rid of the top bar, and took it into photoshop to pull the right side down to get rid of the bottom bar. It's still pretty messed up in SL, though. The top is flat, anyway, instead of being bowl-shaped, but the three points are just a jumble. It looks like the second image in my first post, minus the big spike coming out of the lower left side.

[lisa]

Actually, what I'm looking for isn't the image of the texture--though that gives me a pretty good idea--but an image of what the coordinates look like in the texture coordinate editor. I've attached a picture.

I'm guessing that you probably have more than one polygon using up the same part of the map. What happens then is that one part of the map overwrites another when you export. You need to map it so that only one face occupies each part of the map.

You should fix that bottom edge in AC3D, too. Just switch the TCE to vertex mode, grab each point, and tell it to snap to the bottom.

You said you started with the cylinder model? The cylinder is mapped correctly to begin with, and most tools won't hurt the map, so it's a bit of a mystery. *But*, if I had to hazard a guess, here's what I'm theorizing went wrong at least to the top and bottom... Looking at the first map and you're model, I'm guessing you grabbed all of the surfaces at the poles and combined them. Ordinarily, combining surfaces is just fine and doesn't hurt anything. However, the poles are a special case. If you look at the poles, you'll notice there's a very small hole. The hole is very tiny, so that it doesn't show up at all when imported into SL. But, in AC3D, it allows me to keep the points disconnected and have a discontinuity in the map so that I can force a spherical map on to a cylindrical shape. If you combine those surfaces, the map snaps together and your texture coordinates become zero height.

If you really wanted them combined, you'd have to remap the top so that it is more like it was originally (use a cylindrical unwrap around the y axis). Then use a little LSL script with llSetPrimitiveParams to change the sculpt map mode to cylinder to handle the discontinuity, because the default SL spherical unwrap can't handle a non-spherical map. Personally, I just found it easier to leave the little hole, which again is too small to render in SL anyway.

As far as the jaggy in the middle, I'm not sure, but I'm guessing something similar. A vertex on the left is snapped together with a vertex on the right, so the discontinuity is lost and it's trying to stretch it across the whole thing instead.