general questions about sculpties and texturing / pre-rendering of texture-maps

[raynold]

Hi all.

I'm thinking of purchasing AC3D because of it's ability to export second life sculpties.
I would like to create objects with pre-rendered textures... means sculpty UV-map and shadowed texture-map for an excellent realistic look.
Is it possible to pre-render these texturmaps with AC3D, like in Maya for example?

greetings

[Severa]

I've been using it for a long time now and it's great but I've been wondering about this too. Though loading it up in zbrush and baking in lighting seems to do the trick fine too.

[raynold]

well.... it seems, AC3D even can't handle real materials, right? I just saw a point "Texture" without anymore settings like transparency, shinyness, refraction, ...

Do you know, if ZBrush is able to export that baked textures in a SL-compatible file (UV-spheric projection like the sculpty-map)?

greetings

[Severa]

In Zbrush I just bake the lighting in and save as a texture, Bring it into photoshop and use the flamingpear solidify b and then it fits on the sculpted prims great and looks good. I really found AC3D to do better work than Maya or Zbrush in terms of making the actual shapes though. I'm still having problems and the interface and some of the terms are different. The TCE confuses me and some other stuff, but for making shapes it seems to do it better for SL than Maya. I made better heads then some of the "top" people have with Maya and 3dsMax. The baked textures definitely help to reinforce definition though.

If AC3D can bake any sort of lighting I have no clue though. That's why I use zbrush. I wish there was more video tutorials at better resolutions for AC3D. Not making easy stuff like Pears and Apples but stuff that will show how you could encounter problems and how to fix those problems. Seems all these tutorials for sculpted prims always go for the easiest shapes anyone can do. I'd like to see people do complex stuff like the tutorials you find on 3dbuzz.com but talk about it in a way where someone who is new will understand and learn something.

[Klyde]

What do yoou mean by AC3D can't handle 'real materials' ????

[raynold]

@MyKel_D: AC3D has no direct raytracing visualization implemented like Truespace for example, right? That was it, what I meant. You can define the materials in AC3D maybe, but the rendering does POVray or something else, right?

@Severa: Do you have an idea, why I just get a white texture, using Projection Master in ZBrush? It only works well with a usual sphere (ZBrush-Object)... with Wings3D imports (Obj) it doesnt work ..... dont know, if AC3D will work better.
Or is it just a ZBrush-Setting I missed?

greetings

[Klyde]

Ah ok- Am just new to this so trying to learn the slang.

[lisa]

Originally Posted by raynold

well.... it seems, AC3D even can't handle real materials, right? I just saw a point "Texture" without anymore settings like transparency, shinyness, refraction, ...

If you right-click a material in the palette and select "Edit Material", you can get additional material properties like transparency and specular value, although it is still limited to the standard OpenGL fixed-function material properties.