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Old 26th September 2009, 03:01 PM   #1
Tempest
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Default Second Life - Sculptie Starting Shapes (no. of faces) ?

I have got the 3 demo starting shapes.

The cylinder, sphere and box (with rounded corners) that have been very kindly made for us as some starting sculpty shapes.

Just one query about these.

When I was using Wings3D for a trial, I recall being told (on a sphere & poss other shapes?) you can have 64x63, 32x31 etc faces.

The demo shapes for AC3D don't seem to have as many faces as "allowed" so I'm a bit puzzled.

Could anyone explain if this matters?
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Old 26th September 2009, 05:07 PM   #2
Tempest
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Default Re: Second Life - Sculptie Starting Shapes (no. of faces) ?

Just to update, I used the built in CUBE option to try and make a sharp cornered box (overlaying multiple points) and for a quickie test, did not come out too bad.

Guess I'm a bit confused really.

We have the (very kindly made) sculptie starting points (cube, sphere, cylinder) but I don;t understand WHY these are sculptie starting points?

Also (as I said above) they don't seem to have many faces (to allow for moddeling) compaired to the 64x63 faces that I read a sculptie can be (or can be in Wings3D anyway)

Obviously to get the most detail, I'd like to have the most faces that can be supported, so I just need someone to explain things in plain english re this

Also, is there any reason why the exported scupt tga's seem so tiny compaired to other tga sclupt files I;ve seen?

Thanks.

Difficult when you are starting as there are so many things to understand,

The reason I'm a bit puzzled, is that the "blank" for a cube (which is a rounded cornered cube) basically has a grid of 4x4 faces on each side.

Apart from a cushion, I can't see what you can really do with only 4x4 faces to work with?

Last edited by Tempest; 26th September 2009 at 05:59 PM.
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Old 1st October 2009, 07:33 PM   #3
lisa
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Default Re: Second Life - Sculptie Starting Shapes (no. of faces) ?

The Wings exporter and the AC3D exporter work on a completely different principles.

The Wings exporter uses the geometry itself to generate the sculpty. This requires that the topology to be very specific. You can't change the topology of the Wings model, only the position of the vertices. That is why there is a restriction on the number of points / faces.

The AC3D exporter uses an internal rasterizer to project the geometry into UV space. i.e. It works exactly like a normal mapper or displacement mapper, only in reverse. It analyzes the surfaces of the shape and generates a 3D displacement for each point in UV space of the surface. This means that the topology of the model does not matter, only the UV space, so there are no restrictions on face counts or layout.

The size of the bitmap happens to be hardcoded in the exporter. The number chosen was based on recommendations from Linden Labs.
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