Ayumi

I've been looking to get into making sculpties and subsequently baking textures.. and I'm having a hard time finding relevant tutorials on how-to make sculpties for SL.

Its possible I'm just looking in the totally wrong places for beginner resources on the subject though. I went through a bunch of tutorials on the basics and tools of blender, but by the time I got to the end.. I still had no idea how much of what I learned was actually applicable to sculptmaps and uvmaps.

So I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction, or give me any tips/advice as to how you started, or where you think a good place for a newbie to begin !

Raindrop Drinkwater

Blender Python Scripts for Second Life Primitives
This script is excellent. It will create the basic mesh for you and bake the sculpt map.

Here's the How-To:
Creating a Second Life Sculptie in Blender

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Beebo Brink

Ayumi, could you please tag this thread for sculpties and blender? I'd like to be able to find it again if I can ever push myself into tackling this learning curve.

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Eboni Khan

I can't get with the blender interface. If you are used to Photoshop I think that Zbrush is the most intuitive interface with the lowest learning curve, only draw back is it is hard to make hard lines imo in ZBrush but you can do great things for clothing and organic sculpts in ZBrush.

The videos at Shiny Life will show you step by step the techniques you need to know to get started in Zbrush. If you can work with clay you can make sculpts in Zbrush.

Shiny Life » Videos

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Beebo Brink

whyroc

I've got a set of free tutorial presentations in world on using blender for sculpties, they were made before Domino's scripts became the method of choice, using the earlier manual method.

The method of actually creating the sculpt map from scratch is a little picky and may not be the greatest for the first time blender sculptor, but it leads naturally into the intermediate/advanced topics of how to use materials baking and texture painting to make textures for the sculpties. Be my guest and have a browse through the 3 levels, I can field questions if you have them

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Poecila/50/54/92 is the main tp point to my sim, the tutorials are off to the side down the main street a little with yellow and green branding 'in2orbit' logo.

-whyroc

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Johnnie Carling

Some Blender/sculptie video tutorials

The blender trail … « machinimatrix

The Blender Underground also has some good basic "how to use Blender" videos, but the later ones get into stuff that you don't need to know to make sculpties.

Blender Underground Video Tutorials

As far as Blender being "hard", I think once you find out where to find the preferences you go "ah ha" and start adapting to the ui. But in the end 3D modeling is a hard thing to learn no matter what program you use.

I don't know about anyone else... but the first time I opened Photoshop (back in the Photoshop 3 days) I thought I'd never understand it and all I managed to do is make a few colored squares, or draw a squiggly line on a photo. But I learned.

Oh speaking of BAD ui's ... back then I had a Photoshop plug-in called Kai's Power tools the worst UI ever invented.

Raindrop Drinkwater

That's Poser and Bryce's love-child.

Miriel Enfield

I've heard that Zbrush doesn't allow you to shrink whole rows of vertices accurately down to points, which would limit the kinds of things you can do. Making a single sculptie look like multiple prims, for instance, requires that you collapse certain vertex rows into points.

If Zbrush does in fact have this limitation, I would not recommend it.

As for Blender and sculpties, this appears to be a decent tutorial:

Sculpt Blend - Second Life Sculptie Tutorials

Oh, and if you're using Blender: Noob to Pro, stop. It's rubbish. Blender's UI is nightmarish enough without bad, hodgepodge wiki tutorials making it harder.

Truthseeker

I'd heartily second both the Machinimatrix and Sculpt Blend pages mentioned earlier.

I'd also recommend Keira Wells' youtube channel for more really solid basics, particularly the ones on setting up lighting & materials for creating & baking surface-textures for your sculpts within Blender.

Raindrop Drinkwater

OMG Truthseeker your avatar!

Cristiano

Sadly, portions of that UI continue to persist in Poser, which was bought out by Metacreations at version 3, who then glommed that Kai's Power Tools UI crap onto the Poser and Painter interfaces. Thankfully, there is no trace left of it on Painter, but Poser still has those stupid orbs and other weird things that defy logic. The main reason it persists in Poser is because Poser keeps changing hands, and each update has actually been fairly minor. It is in desperate need of a complete overhaul. I wish it had been bought out by Corel - they have done excellent updates of both Paint Shop Pro and Painter, but Poser continues to be one big mess.

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Joshua Nightshade

Kai's Power Tools.

Oh god that's a phrase I thought I'd never hear again.

Cindy Claveau

I still have a CD here somewhere of Kai's tools for Photoshop 3.0, I think. The only reason I keep it in my CD stack is because it makes me laugh when I see it.

I'm about to have all the free time I want in which to learn sculpting, but I have Zbrush and have not had a good relationship with Blender in the past. From what I gather here, Zbrush will work great for me on organic-type stuff but not for things like stairs, furniture, or hard objects?

whyroc

Blender has a couple advantages over others as it stands right now. With Domino's scripts you can make off center sculpties,also blender can zero scale pixels on individual axes or all of the them, which is handy in so many ways. A bonus is that Blender will handle oblong sculpties (with the scripts) .. this makes the learning curve worth it in my eyes. The sculpt mode too is indispensable when it comes to working with scultpies for sl, similiar to Zbrush.

-w

Rev Eponym

I like Blender a lot, now that I've worked with it enough to understand its basics.

But it doesn't. Fucking. Bake. Specular.


Correction: KPT was their baby-daddy.
Bryce was originally called KPT Bryce, remember.

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Beebo Brink

As a beginner, nothing you just said made any sense to me at all, so it's hard to judge whether it would affect my decision to use Zbrush over blender.

For the moment, the project I have in mind is mostly shaping objects for clothing accessories, such as a tie or scarf. I'm hoping Zbrush is the best tool for that because the tutorial I just watched actually seemed doable. The ones on blender scared the shit out of me.

Rev Eponym

Basically, ZBrush is for creating organic, sculpted shapes, while Blender or another 3D modeling package is for doing the orthogonal, straight-edge work that ZBrush isn't designed for.

It doesn't seem like a one-or-the-other argument to me, because ZBrush models, by default, need the support of a conventional modeling program. Unless they've added new features in ZB3.
.

Maxx Monde

Rhino coupled with the freebie dos-command converter isn't too bad. The price may be a bit up there, but it does have nice controls and things.

If that has been mentioned previously, disregard I didn't read the whole thread.

Beebo Brink

I just saw the purchase price for Zbrush... never mind.

Rev Eponym

As has been mentioned here -- Blender has a Sculpt mode that, while nowhere near as good as ZBrush, is an emulation of its organic-modeling style, for that exact purpose.

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whyroc

Sure it does.. totally possible using nodes to separate the the diffuse and specular channels. You will need to be pretty familiar with nodes i can take a sample screenshot and post it here with the node window set up. ... basically make 2 input material nodes, but use the same material for both. select the diffuse channel on one, the specular on the other and mix it with an RGB curve.

Now this will sound like gibberish to most folks. Believe me i understand.. its taken me 2 dedicated years with Blender to get to the point where its actually quite easy and intuitive. Blender is what it is.. its not for everyone thats for sure.. but if you can master it very rewarding.

Beebo, I think its sort of pick your poison analogy here. Sure you can have fun making sculpties with inworld tools or a variety of somewhat suited tools.. or step up to a real 3d application (maya/3dsmax..etc. for mucho $ or free Blender) none of which are going to be a walk in the park.

-why

Rev Eponym

Awright then, cool! You tell me it's possible, I'm willing to learn. I'll start messing with Nodes this weekend. I've tried to do it before, but I need some guidance.

Hey, would you mind starting a new thread here, when you post that screenshot? It'll take the tech talk away from those who don't need it, and I know there are other SLUers who would be interested in this exact subject. Right, Raindrop?
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Raindrop Drinkwater

Right!

Miriel Enfield

Like whyroc said, Blender does, in fact, bake specular. Of course, because it's Blender, the process is ludicrously complicated and impossible unless you already know how to do it, to the point that even most guides to Blender say it can't bake specular.

WarKirby posted a tutorial about this in this earlier thread, complete with helpful screenshots.

As for 3D programs in general, I know there are some cheaper programs out there (Milkshape, for instance?), and they almost certainly have better UIs than Blender, because I'm not sure it's possible to make a UI that's worse than Blender's. I'm not sure how many features they have, however, but it's worth looking into.

And yes, Blender's UI is really that bad. It seems like every time I learn something new about it, I have another reason to sigh and wonder wtf the developers were thinking. Labeling is inconsistent, unintuitive, or nonexistent (I'm not kidding, Blender has some important buttons that are totally blank); buttons and options can be difficult to find, and some menus require hotkeys to even see; and speaking of hotkeys, the plethora of them means that you're liable to hit one by accident, have something happen, and not necessarily be able to fix it.

Using Blender is like using a program written in a language you don't speak (actually, it's kind close to this as is, no simile needed, given some of the labeling bullshit). If you've memorized exactly what you are and aren't supposed to be pressing and clicking, you'll be fine, and probably find the hotkeys helpful. If you haven't, you're fucked.