Version 1.2.4 fixes the 1.2 bug that caused problems while editing sculpties.

New Tutorial on Sculptie Creation and Baking complex textures

Two new video tutorials were released on the Video Tutorials Page.

“Creating an Apple Pie Sculptie” is a two part screencast. Part 1 shows how to create a wedge-shaped sculptie in 3ds Max. Part 2 shows how to texture the sculpted prim so that it looks like a piece of apple pie. Composite maps are used to bake multiple materials into a single texture for use in Second Life and OpenSim.

If you have any of the following problems:

• rollouts flashing, flickering, or stuttering
• jumping out of sub-object edit mode
• crashing associated with the above problems

Then, the problem is probably caused by Size Limits in 1.2. Please see the Known Issue about Size Limits for more information about the cause and how to turn off size limits.

New Features

• Composite Sculpties – Create a large seamless mesh out of multiple sculpties.
• Improved Sculptmap Generation – Algorithms have been significantly improved when generating a sculpted prim from a lower resolution object. Equivalent results to the shader method.
• Size Limit Toggle – Turn off/on the code that constrains the size of prims in 3ds Max. Turn it off for faster editing.
• Permission Preferences – New preferences rollout for globally setting the permissions, such as next owner, on prims that are exported from 3ds Max. Permissions are carried into Second Life and OpenSim when uploaded via Maxport.

Bug Fixes

For a full list of features and bugfixes click here.

Feature: Composite Sculpties

The most significant improvement in 1.2 is the introduction of Composite Sculpties.

• Create a composite object within 3ds Max that is comprised of several sculptie sub-object elements.
• Export the composite object as a collection of sculpted prims that connect seamlessly and appear to be a single larger mesh.

For example, I’ve created a demonstration video that shows how you can create a 40m long “tunnel” that looks like it is a single mesh, but is actually composed of eight sculpted prims.

WATCH VIDEO: Click Here — Composite Sculpties in 1.2

This is powerful stuff, but be prepared for some bumps here. It took several weeks of development to get this far and resulted in major changes to virtually every subsystem of Prim Composer. I’ve tested the most common usage scenarios, but I’m certain that folks will find holes.

Report any problems to the Prim Composer Support Forums and I’ll address them quickly in a series of weekly releases.

Also, as cool as this is, it does not yet convert an arbitrary mesh into a set of sculpties. Composite sculpties are a big step in that direction, but we’re not quite there yet.

In the meantime, please explore composite sculpties in 1.2 and share your experience with them in the forums.

Feature: Improved Sculptmap Generation

This feature was motivated by an excellent post in the forums that noted deficiencies in the way that sculptmaps were being created. Version 1.2 introduces a new Low Rez: Smooth algorithm that should give comparable results to the shader method when generating sculptmaps from lower resolution meshes.

A new section called Sculptmap Algorithms has been added to the Export Preferences Dialog. It contains the following options:

Sculptmap Algorithms

• Low Rez: Smooth or Hard
• Hi Rez: Closest or Average

Low Rez algorithms apply when a lower resolution base object is being used to generate a higher resolution sculptie. For example, when a 16×16 object is being used to generate a 32×32 sculptie.

Hi Rez algorithms apply when a higher resolution base object is being used to generate a lower resolution sculptie. For example, when a 64×64 object is being used to generate a 32×32 sculptie.

Both Hi Rez and Low Rez algorithms can apply to the same object. For example, when part of an object is at a low resolution and another part is at a high resolution. The two types of algorithms will automatically work when they are needed.

• Low Rez – Hard is almost the same as the default algorithm in previous versions. It can be used to create the “hard edge” effect on things like disco balls.
• Low Rez – Smooth (new default) is an interpolating algorithm that produces results similar to the shader method when generating sculptmaps from lower resolution objects.

The Hi Rez algorithms are both new.

• Hi Rez – Closest picks the point whose UV coordinate is closest to the correct position in the sculptmap.
• Hi Rez – Average averages all the points whose UV coordinate is close to the correct position in the sculptmap

WATCH VIDEO: Click Here — Sculptmap Generation Algorithms in 1.2

Toggle Size Limits

Prim Composer offers configurable size limits that prevent prims within 3ds Max from being scaled larger than the maximum allowed in a target platform such as Second Life and OpenSim. Because these limits vary (10m max for Second Life and a default of 256m in OpenSim), the minimum and maximum prim sizes can be set in Prim Composer > Preferences > Prim Defaults. This is flexible, but there are still some instances where one would like to disable the feature altogether.

Prim Composer 1.2 allows you to completely disable the size limits in 3ds Max.

This is helpful in a couple of ways:

• It speeds up viewport interaction.
• It eliminates nuisances when working with the modifier stack.

In addition to enabling/disabling size limits within a session, there is also a new checkbox in Prim Composer > Preferences > Misc Preferences which allows you to turn off size limits by default.

WATCH VIDEO: Click Here — Working with Size Limits in 1.2

Permission Preferences

There is a new rollout called Permission Preferences in Prim Composer > Preferences. This lets you globally set the permissions in 3ds Max that you want all prims to have.

These permissions are applied to each prim that is exported from 3ds Max and Maxport sets the permissions accordingly when the prims are imported into Second Life or OpenSim.

I just released 7 new video tutorials that show how to install and use Prim Composer:

• Installing Prim Composer
• Installing OpenSim in standalone mode (with and without MySQL)
• Using Maxport to import builds into Second Life and OpenSim
• Using Maxproxy to export builds out of Second Life and OpenSim

Watch the screencasts on the new video tutorials page! Additional screencasts are planned in the near future.

If you looked at these last week and had trouble viewing them, try again. The tutorials weren’t working correctly on IE7, but I hope the problem is fixed. Leave a comment if you’re still having problems.

Website improvements

The new videos page is just one of several website improvements that were put in place over the past two or three weeks.

• Posts and pages have been paginated for easier viewing.
• Prim Composer documentation has been reorganized to make things easier to find.
• Google Custom Search – search the website using Google
• TreeMagic – Cypress – allows you to double-click a word or select a phrase on liferain.com and then automatically search liferain.com, secondlife.com, or other related websites. The results popup in a shadowbox. For example, double-click on the word “sculpties” and then choose (SL Websites > XStreetSL) to search for sculpties in the XStreetSL Marketplace!

Prim Composer Status

A lot of good feedback has come in through the support forums in the past month. Big thanks to everyone who is using Prim Composer and sharing their experiences in the forums!

Over the next week, I’ll be reading feedback carefully and planning the next couple of versions. We should have a new release in the next couple of weeks.

Bugfixes in 1.1.1

• Bugfix 30 (Maxport): TGA textures now upload properly. Previously, non-alpha TGAs would acquire an unseen alpha layer during upload that would cause textures to fight.
• Bugfix 52 (Maxproxy): Maxproxy now exports worn items correctly.
• Bugfix 54 (3ds Max): NURBS plane sculpties now have a correct UV map so that they no longer appear inside out when imported to Second Life or OpenSim.
• Bugfix 55 (3ds Max): Sphere dimples are now imported correctly into 3ds Max.
• Bugfix 58 (Maxport): Maxport command line help no longer prints jibberish for the option descriptions.

New Features in 1.1.1

There are two new features: bulk texture upload and user-selectable image formats for baking images from 3ds Max.

Bulk Texture Upload

In response to a user request, Maxport has been modified to support the bulk uploading of images without any prims. This would primarily be useful for texture artists who need to upload large numbers of textures to Second Life or OpenSim.

Three new command line options have been added to Maxport:

--dir, --inventory-folder, and --upload-images

All three are required to perform a bulk texture upload.

• dir : specifies a directory on disk that contains the image files to be uploaded. All images in this directory will be uploaded. If you only want to upload a subset, copy those files to a separate directory.
• inventory-folder : specifies the folder in inventory where the images will be uploaded. This folder must already exist. For example, a value of “Textures” would upload the images to the normal Textures folder in Second Life. A value of “Textures/Wood Textures” would upload the images to the Wood Textures folder inside of the normal Textures folder.
• upload-images : tells Maxport that you want to bulk upload images

In addition, you might wish to use the

--noaction

option, which will cause Maxport to scan the images directory, but not upload them. This is a good way to determine how many images will be uploaded and what the cost will be. It also allows you to verify that you’ve entered the command correctly.

Here’s an example of how you might use the new options to bulk upload textures. Put this all on a single line:

maxport.exe -flp John Smith yourPassword --main --upload-images
                  --inventory-folder "Textures" --dir "c:\images"

Note: when bulk uploading images to OpenSim, you might need to clear the viewer cache to see the uploaded items in inventory. Second Life doesn’t seem to have this problem.

User-selectable Image Formats for Baking

The other new feature in 1.1.1 is the ability to specify the image format that is used when baked textures are exported from 3ds Max: BMP, JPG, PNG, or TGA.

This can be set using two new options in the Export Preferences (see figure). You can independently choose what image format will be used for sculptmaps and baked textures.

In addition, for the first time, you can create NURBS-based sculpties directly within Prim Composer.

Prim Composer 1.1 will be released around Midnight EST tonight (Nov 14th).

NURBS Integration

In 1.1, NURBS sculpties are created using a new button called SculptShape. The previous creation button Sculpt has been renamed SculptMap. The SculptMap button, like the Sculpt button before, is used to create sculpted prims from a pre-existing sculptmap.

The new SculptShape button allows you to create sculpts in one of four basic shapes: sphere, cylinder, torus, and plane. Essentially, this is just an automation of the process of creating a sculptie from scratch. Both of the new sculpt creation buttons allow you to choose whether you want the sculptie created as an Editable Poly or Editable Mesh. SculptShapes can also be created as NURBS.

SculptShape is especially nice when creating NURBS because it overcomes 3ds Max’s default behavior of modifying the UV map as the NURBS is manipulated. This was a big problem in the past because the modified UV map was no longer square and couldn’t be used for baking. In some cases, 3ds Max would distort the UV map so much that sculptmap generation would fail. In 1.1, a NURBS sculpt created with SculptShape will not experience this problem. Its UV map will remain square and regular throughout the modeling process.

Known issues with SculptShape creation

SculptShape creates NURBS sculpts by importing basic NURBS shapes from a new file in the installation: “stdscripts/primcomposer/mesh/nurbs.max”. Most people will not have to worry about this. Just install Prim Composer as usual and nurbs.max will be included automatically. However, there is a possibility that people using 3ds Max 7 and 8 might experience problems. nurbs.max was created with 3ds Max 9, so I’m not sure if it will load in Max 7/8. If you have problems creating NURBS objects in 1.1, please post in the support forums and I will provide instructions to create a version of nurbs.max that will work with your particular version of 3ds Max.

Another potential problem occurs when using SculptShape to create a sculpted prim in the cylinder shape as an Editable Mesh. The resulting UV map is sometimes shifted left or right slightly. This is only an issue for baking and it doesn’t seem to happen with NURBS, Editable Poly, or with other shapes. If you experience baking problems, please check the UV map by applying a UVW Unwrap modifier and use it to fix the UV map. You can collapse the modifier stack after your done. If you don’t have problems, then don’t worry about it.

SL to 3ds Max Workflow

Of course, the really big feature in 1.1 is the ability to export prims from Second Life and OpenSim to a local disk. Once exported, you can load the project into 3ds Max or upload it to another grid. In 1.1, prims and linksets can be exported but not textures. You must be both the creator and owner of a prim in order to export it. Basically, you can export anything that you have created. Textures aren’t currently allowed because determining the creator of a texture is more difficult than for prims. Later in this post, I will discuss textures in more detail.

Copyright and Inter-grid transfer

Before I get into the details of how export works, it’s important to look at the legal and moral context in which this operates.

There’s no doubt that content creators have the right to transfer their own works to other grids, including both prims and textures. They do not, however, have to right to transfer the work of other people without explicit permission.

The most common way that this permission would be expressed is in the form of a license such as the GPL or Creative Commons. Without explicit permission from the creator, it is both illegal and immoral to transfer a work out of Second Life. Prim Composer will enforce the rights of content creators to the fullest extent possible.

This task is made unpleasant by the fact that there is no mechanism for determining licensing (SVC-701) or inter-grid transfer permissions (MISC-1277) via an automated process. In the absence of this information, an exporter is forced to err on the side of caution. Restraint is also demanded by the fact that exporting and re-importing content has the egregious effect of removing all of the original creator’s identifying information from the content. In effect, the person who re-imports the content becomes the new creator in the target grid.

It is for these reasons that no prim or texture will be exported unless it was created by and is owned by the person doing the export.

Maxproxy Exporter

1.1 includes a new program called Maxproxy. Maxproxy allows you to export prims and linksets from Second Life and OpenSim grids to the Prim Composer project format on local disk. Architecturally, Maxproxy sits between your viewer and the grid. The viewer connects to Maxproxy which then connects to the target grid. Maxproxy forwards packets from the grid to the viewer, watches the data stream to determine when you select things in the viewer, and responds to chat commands.

How to export

Start Maxproxy first, then start the viewer using the viewer’s –loginuri command line option to point the viewer to the url on which Maxproxy is listening. By default, Maxproxy listens for connections on the url “http://127.0.0.1:8080″. You can get a full list of Maxproxy’s command line options by typing

maxproxy.exe --help-export

on the command line.

In detail, here is what you need to do:

1. Create a new shortcut for starting the viewer.
   • Make a copy of the shortcut that you normally use to start the viewer.
   • Edit the properties of the new shortcut and change the target field to include the –loginuri option.

     The new target should look something like this, although yours could have additional options:

     "C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" --loginuri http://127.0.0.1:8080

2. Start Maxproxy
   • Open a command prompt window (Start > Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt).
   • Change the directory to the location of Maxproxy.
   • Start Maxproxy. To connect to the main grid in Second Life, you would type:

     maxproxy.exe --main

     To connect to a local instance of OpenSim, you would type:

     maxproxy.exe --proxy-remote-login-uri="http://127.0.0.1:9000"

     Maxproxy is ready to receive connections when it prints out the following message:

     proxy ready at http://127.0.0.1:8080/

3. Start the Second Life viewer using the shortcut you created in Step 1 and login as normal.

   Once you are in world, Maxproxy will chat to tell you that it is running.

4. You can move around in your current sim, but sim crossings and teleports might not work.

   Select the prims/linksets that you want to export. Use the normal prim selection mechanisms in the viewer.

5. Save the selected prims by typing the save command in chat. For example, type:

   /save myObject

   in chat to save the selected prims to a project on disk called “myObject”. Type /help in chat for a full list of available commands.

   The actual location of the saved project will be determined by the export directory. By default, projects are exported to “c:\prims\”. Thus, the location of myObject would be “c:\prims\myObject\”. You can change the export directory by specifying a different directory on the Maxproxy command line using the –export-dir option.

   For example, if you wanted to connect to the main grid and to export projects to the directory “c:\projects\”, you would start Maxproxy with this command:

   maxproxy.exe --main --export-dir="c:\projects"

   or

   maxproxy.exe --main --export-dir="c:\projects\\"

   IMPORTANT: the final backslash in the directory name should be omitted or doubled. If you put a single backslash at the end, it gets confused.

   DO NOT do this:

   maxproxy.exe --main --export-dir="c:\projects\"

Note: there is currently no graceful way to terminate Maxproxy. After you logout of the viewer, the only way to close Maxproxy is to type Control-C in the Command Prompt window.

Changes to Maxport

In some cases, Maxproxy is unable to download all of the sculptmaps or textures that the user has permission to export. This happens most often with OpenSim when a texture is being downloaded more than once in the same session. For example, I see this problem when exporting the same object more than once from OpenSim. The first time that I export the object, all of the textures download perfectly, but if I try to do the same export again, then some of the textures fail to download. At this point, I’m not sure if it is a bug in OpenSim or Maxproxy, but I haven’t seen the problem yet with Second Life.

To compensate, a new option has been added to Maxport called –export-textures. When this option is used, Maxport scans the input XML file for sculptmap and texture references and downloads any that do not already exist in the sculptmaps and textures sub-directories. Thus, if textures failed to download with Maxproxy, you can logout of OpenSim and then run Maxport with –export-textures to get the missing textures. For it to work, you also need to specify the first name, last name, password, loginuri, and inputxml on the Maxport command line. Here is an example of how it might look (all in one line):

maxport.exe
        --export-textures -flp first last pass
        -u "http://127.0.0.1:9000" -i "c:\prims\myObject\myObject.xml"

Importing into 3ds Max

Inside 3ds Max, the Prim Composer menu has a new menu item called “Import”. Select this to import a project that was previously exported from 3ds Max or exported from Second Life or OpenSim using Maxproxy.

A dialog will open and prompt you to select or specify the .xml file of the project that you want to import. Press the Import button and Prim Composer will import the project at the origin of the scene (0,0,0). The next release will allow you to click where you want it to be imported.

Textures

Finally, a few words about textures and how I plan to export them in the future. As explained earlier, the guiding principle is that one should be able to export anything that they have created.

The problem with textures is that it isn’t always easy or even possible to know who created it. When a full perms texture is applied to a prim, only the Asset UUID of the texture is stored with the prim. The creator, owner, and all other permission information is stored in the user’s inventory. In this case, the only way to determine the creator of the texture is to search the user’s entire inventory for the original texture item that was applied to the prim.

This is unsatisfying for two reasons. First, many people have very large inventories and this can be a costly search to perform. But a more important issue is the fact that the original texture may not exist in inventory at all, since the texture could have been deleted from inventory after it was applied to the prim. And if it has been deleted, then there is no way to determine if the user was its creator.

The solution that I’m currently contemplating is to search for old textures in inventory. If the texture cannot be found, then Maxproxy will assume that the user is not the creator.

New prims uploaded by Prim Composer will have an encrypted notecard that will be used to certify the identity of the texture creator. One reason that I think it is important to have this mechanism for uploaded prims is that there isn’t a compelling reason why creators should want to or be required to keep baked textures in their inventories. By their nature, baked textures are specific to a particular prim and do not lend themselves to reuse.

I’m hoping to get a first pass at this in the next release.

The Prim Composer 1.02 release focuses on sculpted prims and adds new aspect ratios for sculpties as well as the ability to move the pivot point of a sculptmap. SculptGenMax default settings have also been merged with the Prim Composer preferences dialog.

New Sculpt Aspect Ratios

In the original implementation of sculpted prims, sculptmaps encoded a fixed number of mesh faces (32 x 32) in a 64×64 pixel texture. Larger bitmaps could be used (e.g., 128×128, 256×256, etc.) but they were still limited to 32×32 faces and served no useful purpose after lossless uploading was implemented.

A change is coming! The newest Release Candidate viewer (1.21) adds support for sculptmaps with a variable aspect ratio. As a result, we are no longer limited to 32×32 faces. 16×64, 8×128, and 4×256 faces are now possible by using a non-square texture of 32×128, 16×256, and 8×512 pixels, respectively. These new sculptmap sizes allow a mesh to have a different aspect ratio while maintaining 1024 as the maximum number of faces in the sculpt. By using sculptmaps with different aspect ratios, it is now much easier to model objects that have more detail in a particular dimension, for example, a rope.

In addition, it is possible to create sculpties with less than 1024 faces, since intermediate aspect ratios are also allowed. Thus, a 32×64 pixel texture might generate a sculptie with 16×32 = 512 faces. I say “might” because it’s actually more complicated this. The details of intermediate aspect ratios are currently being refined in JIRA VWR-9384. Please vote for it!

When this is finalized, we will be able to tailor the number of faces to the complexity and shape of the sculptie we want to create. If we don’t need 1024 faces, we can use fewer. This is especially important with regard to lag because fewer faces means a smaller texture to download and, more importantly, fewer triangles to render in the viewer.

Prim Composer 1.02 supports all of the sculptmaps with 1024 faces (texture sizes: 4×1024, 8×512, 16×256, 32×128, 64×64, 128×32, 256×16, 512×8, and 1024×4). As soon as VWR-9384 is finalized, I will add support for the intermediate sizes. Vote for it, please!

New Options

In 1.02, SculptGenMax has a new “Aspect Ratio” section to assist in creating sculpted prims from 3ds Max objects. Prim Composer also automatically detects the aspect ratio of any sculptmaps that are imported using the Sculpt creation rollout and automatically generates the appropriate aspect ratio in sculpts that it exports. Sample sculptmaps using the new aspect ratios are available in the “sculptmaps/aspect” folder of the zip file.

Move the Pivot of a Sculpted Prim

The other big feature in Prim Composer 1.02 is the ability to change the pivot point of a sculptmap. Normally, when a sculptmap is created, its pivot point is placed at its center. However, there are occasions when it is desirable to move the pivot point. A good example is a door sculptie. Putting the pivot on the edge can make it easier to script the open/close door rotations in LSL.

1.02 adds a new section to the SculptGenMax dialog in Prim Composer called “Pivot Offset”. By default, the pivot offset is 0 for all dimensions. This puts the pivot in the center of the sculpted prim. A pivot offset of -0.5 or +0.5 will place the pivot on the edge of the sculpt. To use this, you must change the pivot offset and then generate a sculptmap in SculptGenMax. If you want to preview the location of the pivot point, you can paste the sculptmap back into the scene. Finally, you should save the sculptmap to disk and upload it manually to Second Life or OpenSim.

This new feature has several limitations. First, a sculptie created in this way will not be exported properly by Prim Composer. You will have to manually upload the sculptmap to SL/OpenSim instead of using the normal upload process via maxport. This is a limitation that will be removed in a future version of Prim Composer.

A more fundamental problem has to do with the way sculpties work. Shifting the pivot point reduces both the precision of the sculptie and its maximum size in SL. With a pivot offset of [0.5, 0.5, 0.5], the precision will be reduced by half in each dimension and the sculpted prim’s maximum size will be reduced to 5m x 5m x 5m.

I should note, however, that size reduction is not always a bad thing. In fact, this is the same principle that allows us to create tiny sculpties, since the prim’s minimum size is also reduced (to 0.005m x 0.005m x 0.005m). The important thing is to know that it will happen.

Generally speaking, you should not move the pivot unless you have a good reason. Also, I can’t guarantee that moving the pivot will work well with the “proportional” option.

What’s to come!

Well, that’s it for this week. I’ll be releasing 1.02 late tonight EDT. The next release will be in about a month unless we have major bugs that pop up between now and then.

I still have some work to do with sculpted prims. After VWR-9384 gets implemented in the RC viewer, I’ll add support for intermediate aspect ratios. I also want to add support for precision sculpties and LOD management similar to what Domino Marama has done for Blender. See these excellent tutorials on Machinimatrix for a demonstration of the concept: Precise sculpted prims: “Level Of Detail” and Precise Sculpted Prims: “The Arch Example”.

But my immediate goal is to enable exporting from SL/OpenSim to 3ds Max. Please no threads about copyrights or content theft. I’ll put in appropriate protections.

Stay tuned…

Issue Tracking with Trac

Starting this week, I’ll be using Trac for project management and bug tracking. The newly revitalized Prim Composer Trac Page is now the official list of known bugs, issues, and planned features. It is searchable and has a handy set of milestones to help you see what’s going on.

The Trac Roadmap shows releases that are planned and what is being worked on. It also has three other useful milestones: Known Issues, Unassigned Bugs, and a Wishlist. From any of these, you can click on active tickets to see what’s there.

The Prim Composer Support Forums will continue to be the primary channel for communicating and discussing problems. When a new bug or issue comes up in a forum thread, I will create a corresponding ticket in Trac and post a link to it in the thread.

Please let me know what you think and especially if you have problems with the new system.

Preferences Dialog

The major new feature in 1.0f is a preferences dialog that allows you to control many aspects of Prim Composer including the min/max size of prims and the default size of baked textures. There’s a lot to love there and I’ll be describing the new dialog in detail in a future post.

Bugfix: Baked Texture Seams

The texture seam issue that occured when baking across multiple prims has also been fixed. For a full description of the problem, see my previous post.

Bugfix: Exporting instanced prims

There was also a problem in previous versions regarding instanced copies of prims. When they were exported, their size information was not imported into SL correctly. That has also been fixed in 1.0f.

OpenSim and SQLite

The last big change has to do with OpenSim and the SQLite database. SQLite makes it easy to get started with OpenSim without a lot of configuration. And in many cases, it performs quite well. However, it is much slower than MySQL when linking a large group of prims (> 50).

In preparation for the 1.0f release, I performed import tests with linksets containing between 2 and 100 prims and with scenes containing between 2 and 400 prims. To get large linksets to work with SQLite, I had to add a lot of pauses in the importer. With a linkset of 100 prims, it was downright painful.

So, in 1.0f, a new option has been added to maxport “–delay”. If you are using SQLite as your OpenSim database and you have linksets in your import, you will need to start using this new option. Type your maxport command as before and put something like “–delay 10″ at the end. Note: there are two dashes before “delay”. A delay of 10 seems to work well for a SQLite database but you can adjust the value up or down to fit your needs. Delay defaults to 1 and increasing its value causes the import to slow down.

If you don’t add the delay, then OpenSim+SQLite will probably work fine with maxport as long as you don’t have many or large linksets. If you start having problems, add or increase the delay.

The delay is not needed for importing to SL or to OpenSim when OpenSim is using MySQL as its database.

Conclusion

Well, those are the major points regarding the 1.0 Final release of Prim Composer. Be sure to check out the release notes on the Prim Composer Download Page for full details about what has been changed.

In the next couple of days, I’ll be posting additional information, including a full description of the new preferences dialog.

seams on baked prims

At first, I thought this was a bug in Prim Composer, but now it looks more like it is a bug in the SL viewer.

You can verify it yourself with a simple experiment using only the SL viewer.

1. Upload a texture that is half red and half white (red_white.png).
2. Create two cubes and place them so that they are exactly side by side.
3. Apply the red_white texture and rotate the textures so that the white part is in the middle of the two prims.

red seam in middle

When I do this, I see a red seam going down the middle of what should be solid white. It looks as though the texture has been very slightly offset from where it should be. As a result, a very small part of the red side is wrapping around to the white side.

VWR-9013

I’m fairly certain that this is a bug in the Official SL Viewer and have reported it in JIRA as [VWR-9013]: “Texture Seam Bug: UV mapping of prims is slightly offset”.

Update – Texture Bleeding

After talking to a couple of people and doing some reading, looks like this is a case of texture bleeding which is a well known problem in 3d graphics and games. I tried in vain to find a good technical reference link on the web that would describe the causes of it. Instead, I found lots of people saying: “My texture’s not right.” And other people replying that you need to compensate by extending the texture a little bit outside the UV map. If anyone has a link to a detailed technical explanation about why it happens, I’d love to see it.

Anyway, I’ll be fixing this in the next release of Prim Composer which will probably be around Sept 19th. I’m on vacation next week.

1.0 Beta 5: Baking and Automatic Uploading of Textures for both Prims and Sculpts to Second Life and OpenSim

Today, I’ll be releasing Beta 5 of Prim Composer 1.0 (1B5). The previous release gave us the ability to texture prims and sculpties in 3dsMax. 1B5 takes it to the next level by automatically generating baked textures and uploading them effortlessly to Second Life and OpenSim. The final 1.0 release is around the corner and demonstration/tutorial videos are on the way.

Got OpenSim?

If you haven’t gotten a copy of OpenSim, you’ll want to get working on that. Uploading baked textures gets expensive on the main grid.

Overview

In my previous post, I described Prim Composer’s support for UV mapping and materials. If you missed that, you’ll want to read that first. 1B5 adds automatic texture exporting and baking to 3ds Max as well as automatic importing of textures to Second Life and OpenSim via maxport. Both sculpts and regular prims are supported.

Materials and Light

Prim Composer 1B5 can generate and upload either baked or unbaked textures. If you apply a material to a prim with a plywood bitmap and upload the texture unbaked, then the texture in SL/OpenSim will look exactly like your plywood bitmap. If you add lights to the 3ds Max scene and upload the baked texture, then the texture in SL/OpenSim will also have lighting and shadows.

Baking increases the number of textures in your build

Be careful with texture baking! It looks cool but comes at a big price. Without baking, Prim Composer can often upload a single texture for a prim. When baking is turned on, it must generate a different texture for each face of the prim. For a box that is cut and hollowed, this means that baking requires 9 different textures to be generated and uploaded. This will hit your pocketbook immediately in the form of upload charges to Second Life and it will increase lag for the people who are viewing your build.

Duplicate textures are possible

Also, you should be aware of the fact that each time Prim Composer uploads a texture, it is a new texture that must be downloaded by the people viewing your build. Just because two textures look the same doesn’t mean that they are. It is possible with Prim Composer to create a build that has a much greater number of textures than it would if you created it directly in the SL viewer, even if you aren’t using baking.

Prim Composer attempts to minimize the number of new textures in a particular scene, but you must be aware of the issue. Consider a table and chairs with a mahogany wood texture. If you create them in a single 3ds Max scene and import the whole scene with unbaked textures, then there’s a good chance that Prim Composer will only upload one texture. But suppose that you import the table first and then later you import the chairs. In this case, one mahogany texture will be uploaded when the table is imported and a different mahogany texture will be uploaded with the chairs. The two mahogany textures look exactly the same, but now people who look at your table set in SL/OpenSim will have to download two textures instead of one. This is a simple example to illustrate the problem, but it can get much worse than this if you aren’t careful, especially with baked textures.

Baked Shadows

Inventory Integration will mitigate these problems

Inventory integration is a planned feature for Prim Composer to help combat texture overload. This will allow it to know which textures already exist in your inventory and thus do not need to be uploaded.

Targa (TGA) Image Problems

One final word of caution. The version of libsecondlife that 1B5 uses has a problem uploading TGA images. When a 24-bit TGA image is uploaded, it gets converted into a 32-bit image with an alpha channel. The image looks the same, but is treated differently by the SL viewer because of the alpha channel. When applied to a prim, it will fight with other alpha textures to be on top.

If you’re looking for a lossless texture format, my recommendation is to use the PNG image format instead. It is a widely-supported, lossless format that has some compression and it works well with 1B5.

For sculptmaps, it doesn’t matter. 3ds Max reads TGA fine and 1B5 now uses PNG as its output format for sculptmaps and baked textures, so you’re covered.

Be careful, but have fun

Well, enough of the doom and gloom. It’s important to understand the dangers, but that shouldn’t stop us from having fun, right? The remainder of the post describes the new features of Prim Composer that support texture baking and texture uploading.

Material Rollout

In 1B5, materials get a new rollout when they are assigned to a prim called “Second Life – Texture Parameters”. The rollout allows you to change texture-related values that have no direct representation in 3ds Max: color, fullbright, transparency, glow, shininess, and bumpiness. When these values are changed, they are applied to all faces of a prim. They have no visual representation in 3ds Max, so if you change the glow or shininess, you won’t be able to see how it looks until you import the prim into SL or OpenSim. Also, these parameters are applied after any baking in 3ds Max. If you have transparency in your baked material and you also turn on transparency in the SL – Texture Parameters rollout, then the resulting prim in SL or OpenSim will have double transparency.

Material Rollout

Since the SL texture parameters in the material apply to all faces of a prim, it is not currently possible to have different faces with different values. For example, you cannot add glow or shininess to a particular part of a prim. If you turn on these parameters, they apply to the prim as a whole. If you really need finer-grained control, please let me know. It is definitely possible, but not yet implemented.

In addition to the texture parameters, there is a button called “Refresh”. If you press this button and the material is a Multi/Sub-Object Material, it will fill in descriptive names next to sub-materials in the material: top, bottom, x+, x-, outside, hollow, etc. These labels are also automatically generated when you assign the material to a prim. Refresh is provided in case you add additional sub-materials after the material has been assigned and you would like the labels to be generated again.

Prim Rollout: Bake Textures

There is also a new rollout on prims called “Bake Textures”. This rollout allows you to set the resolution of bitmaps that will be baked from that prim and to disable baking for specific material IDs. All of the possible material IDs are listed, but unused material IDs are disabled. This gives you a handy place to see which material IDs are being used by a particular prim.

Prim Rollout

Why would you want to disable baking for a material ID?

As described in the overview, baking is expensive. Each face of a prim in SL/OpenSim (top, bottom, etc.) corresponds to a material ID in 3ds Max. If a prim has 9 faces in SL, then 9 textures will be baked by Prim Composer. But suppose that only 2 of those faces are visible in your build. Why waste resources by baking all of them when only 2 are visible?

Example: a floor

Imagine that you are using a box as the floor of a house and you want to bake some shadows onto it. Chances are that only the top of the box is visible, but an uncut box has 6 faces in SL. There is no reason to bake all 6 faces, so you can use the box’s “Bake Textures” rollout to disable baking on everything except the top.

Delete or disable sub-materials that are not visible

In fact, you might want to take it farther than this. If you disable baking on a face, Prim Composer will still generate a texture for that face. It just won’t bake the texture. If you want to really improve things, you could disable or delete the unneeded sub-materials in the Multi/Sub-object Material associated with the prim. If you disabled all of the sub-materials except for “top” (material ID 2), then the floor prim would only upload a single texture, the one that is visible.

Export Dialog: Textures and Bake

New Export Dialog

Finally, there are two new options under “Bitmaps to Export” in the export dialog: a “textures” checkbox and under it a “bake” checkbox. When both of these are unchecked (the default), Prim Composer behaves as before. No textures are exported from 3ds Max and none will be imported into SL or OpenSim.

If you check “textures”, then Prim Composer will export the diffuse bitmaps for the prim. This is equivalent to the way that texturing works in the SL viewer.

If you also check “bake”, then Prim Composer will bake light, shadows, opacity maps, specular maps, and whatever else your material has. If you are using a procedural texture, then you must bake if you want it to show up in SL.

New errors indicator and button

There is also a new colored box at the bottom of the export summary dialog that turns green if the export was successful and red if there was a problem. If there was a problem, the “Show Errors” button will be enabled. Press it to see what the errors were.

Next Steps

The two big things on the horizon are the 1.0 final release and video tutorials. The complexity of Prim Composer has risen to a level that demands better documentation and video tutorials are probably the most time-efficient method to deliver that. It is also time to come out of Beta. There are a few small things that I want to push into 1.0 such as hooking up the physics, phantom, temp on rez, checkboxes, but additional features will be pushed into 1.1.

1.1 will include basic exporting from SL/OpenSim to 3ds Max and some sculptie improvements. There’s a lot left to do beyond that and I’ll get there as fast as I can. By the end of the year, there will be another major release. I’ll make some more status posts between now and then.

In the meantime, please let me know about any problems or suggestions that you have in the Prim Composer Support Forums.

UV Maps!

UV Maps for Regular Prims!

Today, I’ll be releasing Beta 4 of Prim Composer 1.0. Time for an update and a hint of things to come! The future’s so bright, I’ve got to wear shades.

Important!

One quick note before I begin. If you haven’t done it, please turn off True Color dithering in 3ds Max. This is essential if you want to work with sculpted prims. I’ve added a note about this in the Prim Composer Installation Notes.

Bugfixes

1.0 Beta 4 (1B4) has a couple of bugfixes and one major new feature: UV Maps for Regular Prims. First, the bugfixes:

BUGFIX: Sculptie Position

The most important bugfix is a change in the way that sculties are exported. Previous versions assumed that the position of a sculpted prim was its center and exported accordingly. In some cases, this caused sculpts to be imported at an incorrect position in SL. 1B4 fixes this by exporting the true center of the prim rather than its position.

Circle around Pivot

Move the Pivot

One pleasant side-effect of the previous bugfix is that it is now possible to move the pivot point of both sculpts and regular prims without affecting the export. One useful application of this is to copy a prim while rotating it to create a perfect circle of prims.

For example, create a sculpt or regular prim. Move its pivot point away from the object. Now, rotate the object 45 degrees and hold down the shift key when you finish the rotation. A dialog will pop up. Set the number of copies to 7 and it will create 7 copies of the prim so that the 8 prims form a circle. Don’t forget to turn on angle snap to make it easy to get a precise 45 degree rotation!

Pivot and Sculptie Center

One important note: in this thread, I talked about using the pivot to change the center of a sculpt. I haven’t done that yet, so if you’re waiting for that, this isn’t it. I want to do something like that and I will soon.

In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, the idea is to have a way to create something like a sculptie door. A door needs to rotate on its edge, so it makes things easier to script if the center of the sculpt is on its edge. Anyway, it’s coming…

BUGFIX: Prism and Hollow

1b4 also fixes a couple of problems in the shape and sizing of Prisms and hollows. Prisms in previous versions did not match the shape in SL and some of the hollow sizes were incorrect. Both of these have been fixed.

BUGFIX: Export All Ignores Hidden Prims

Export -> All now ignores hidden prims. Previously, it would export them to SL.

New Features

Smoothing Groups and Seams

All of the new features in 1b4 relate in some way to the texturing of regular prims. Here are the major ones:

• Mesh seams in regular prims removed. This eliminates lines in the mesh when it hasn’t been cut or hollowed.
• Smoothing groups implemented for mesh faces. In previous versions, some faces in the mesh appeared to pop out unnaturally. Their shading didn’t match the faces around them and some of the corners looked shadowy. Fixed with smoothing groups. Take a look at the “before” and “after” pictures on the right.
• Material IDs implemented for mesh faces. In SL, we can apply different textures to different parts of a prim: top, bottom, sides, etc. In Prim Composer, this is now implemented using MaterialIDs. More on this later.
• UV Maps for regular prims. Previously, only sculpts had UV maps. Now, all prims in Prim Composer have UV Maps. You can apply materials to prims and they render flawlessly. You can’t export materials yet, but that’s coming in Beta 5.

UV Maps and Materials

The exciting new feature in 1b4 is the ability to apply materials to regular prims and render them. This is a major step toward true offline building. As mentioned previously, 1b4 cannot export materials, so you won’t be able to see textures in SL, but that is coming in the next release.

SL: Select Texture

If you haven’t worked with materials in 3ds Max, then you will need to do some homework. I recommend 3dBuzz, 3D-Palace, and CG Academy for video tutorials. Also, I will be producing some videos of my own in the near future.

As described here in the LSL Wiki, each prim in SL can have up to 9 faces, each of which can be textured. These faces represent major parts of the prim such as the top, bottom, hollow, and end cuts. In SL, you can select individual faces using “Select Texture” in the edit dialog. In Prim Composer, this is done using Material IDs and the Multi Sub-Object Material.

Multi Sub-Object Material

1b4 defines a standard set of material IDs that are used for all regular prims. These material IDs range from 1 to 14.

Below is a picture of a Multi Sub-Object Material that has been applied to a sphere prim. Notice that only a subset of the 14 material IDs are actually used. For the sphere I have used IDs 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14, representing the outside, path cut begin, path cut end, profile cut begin, profile cut end, and hollow, respectively.

The complete list of material IDs:

Multi Sub-Object Material

1. Default
2. Top
3. Bottom
4. X Plus
5. X Minus
6. Y Plus
7. Y Minus
8. Outside
9. Inside
10. Path Cut Begin
11. Path Cut End
12. Profile Cut Begin
13. Profile Cut End
14. Hollow

These names were derived from the LSL Wiki page on faces. Please look there for additional insight. There is no material ID for dimples. Use the profile cut material IDs, instead. If a prim doesn’t have a particular feature, then the corresponding material ID is unused. For example, spheres don’t have a top and bottom, so material IDs 2 and 3 are unused for spheres.

You can enter the names “Top”, “Bottom”, etc. into the Multi Sub-Object material to help you remember which is which. You can also change the color of each of the sub-materials, so that it is obvious on the prim. This is what I did in the sphere example above.

Obviously, you have to know how to use materials and the Multi Sub-Object Material, in particular. I can’t teach you that here, but once you understand materials, this should allow you to put just about any material that you want on a prim: procedural materials, bump maps, specular maps, transparency maps, reflection, ray tracing, …

Future

I’m energized about what’s to come. The next release will support automatically importing textures into SL and OpenSim. Once that’s done, it’s time to produce some demonstration and tutorial videos. Somewhere in the middle of that the final 1.0 release will occur.

But this is just the beginning. Some of the things that I’m planning (in no particular order):

• integrating opensource LSL tools into 3dsMax to create mega domes and similar things.
• inventory integration — Move textures and objects from your inventory to 3ds Max and back.
• Automated packaging — Extend maxport to package the things that it imports. On a large scale, this would be something like a sim in a box.

And that’s just the beginning, too! I’m also looking forward to hearing your ideas. The future awaits! Let’s go!

I’m happy to announce that Prim Composer for 3ds Max has been officially released and is now available for download.

Prim Composer is a complete offline builder for Second Life and OpenSim. Create regular prims and sculpts within 3ds Max and import them into either Second Life or OpenSim as linked sets. Hierarchical grouping and gizmo scaling are supported within 3ds Max.

1.0 Beta 1 was released on June 28th and Beta 2 was released a week later on July 4th. If you got Beta 1, the only changes in Beta 2 are to the Maxport importer. Additional diagnostics and safety checks were added to test for common problems such as no-build parcels, full parcels, and insufficient funds for uploading textures.

SculptGenMax is now a part of Prim Composer

Prim Composer includes the latest build of SculptGenMax which is accessible from a new top-level menu in 3ds Max. SculptGenMax will continue to be developed but it will no longer be downloadable as a separate standalone product.

Current users of SculptGenMax are encouraged to upgrade to Prim Composer as soon as possible to ensure maximum compatibility between .max files and future versions. SculptGenMax works exactly the same within Prim Composer as it did before, so you don’t need to learn anything new to get started.

Getting Started

Installing Prim Composer is straightforward, but existing SculptGenMax users will need to delete the previously installed SculptGenMax files first. See the Installation Instructions for more information.

A Guide for Prim Composer is also provided. Read this to get an overview of how it works.

If you have problems, feel free to post in the Prim Composer Support Forums.

Future

Development of Prim Composer is ongoing with many new features planned such as texturing and better integration with your Second Life inventory. Video tutorials are also coming soon.

Time for a Status Report

A lot has been happening with the development of Prim Composer and I want to take a moment to bring the community up to speed. This week I’ve been surveying the current landscape of open source tools for Second Life.

Open source and SL

libsecondlife

libsl

I looked at libsecondlife, of course, to see how difficult it would be to use it to automate the prim import process. Looks good. I was able to quickly set up a working development environment, although it will take some time to fully understand the library.

OpenSim

OpenSim

I also dropped in on the OpenSim project and was delighted by how much it has matured. To be honest, when I first heard about OpenSim over a year ago, I was skeptical. I’ve seen projects like this come and go with high hopes and little substance. But looking at it today, I’d say that OpenSim is poised to become a vital part of every builder’s repertoire.

OpenSim

Open source grid server

OpenSim is a backend server that utilizes the same protocol as Second Life to communicate with 3d clients such as the Second Life viewer. Because it supports SL’s protocol (via libsecondlife), it can be used with the official viewer from Linden Lab and it implements services that are similar to LL’s commercial grid.

OpenlifeGrid

What this means for builders is that it is now possible to run a limited, but functional equivalent of the Second Life main grid on your home computer, completely separate from Second Life and without the cost of tier or the need to connect across the internet. It’s not completely stable yet and many things are missing, but to my delight, it does actually work.

Visit a public grid

A good way to try OpenSim is to visit one of the public grids that are forming on the internet: OSGrid and OpenlifeGrid are two good examples. You’ll have to create a new account on their websites first, but then it is relatively simple to launch the official SL viewer and connect to these OpenSim grids. The websites for both of these grids include FAQs and forums to help you get started.

Wright Plaza — OSGrid

Do it yourself

You can also run OpenSim on your own computer by downloading OpenSim directly from opensimulator.org or by getting a somewhat more user-friendly Ready-To-Run version from openlifegrid.com. But I recommend going to one of the public grids first to get an introduction. For example, OSGrid has a good orientation center at Wright Plaza with posters that describe some of the finer points.

Prim Composer

So, what does all this have to do with Prim Composer?

Freedom!

OpenSim gives us the freedom to build when and how we like. It provides a cost-free way of seeing how our builds will look in Second Life with no file upload charges. And we can demo large builds to clients without having to own or rent a sim in SL.

Greater dependence on libsecondlife

Support for OpenSim will require a change in the way prims are exported by Prim Composer to Second Life (and now OpenSim). Previously, my focus was on building a LSL-based importer which would be augmented by libsecondlife to allow easy uploading of the images and notecards needed by the LSL script.

With OpenSim in the picture, this is no longer a viable option, since LSL support in OpenSim is very limited. At some point in the future, LSL will work for this, but not right now. Essentially, this moves the focus from LSL to libsecondlife. Now, the entire import process will be driven by libsl.

Delayed release

The primary impact of this is that it will take me a little longer to finish the first version of Prim Composer, but it will also have more functionality than was originally planned for the first release. Basically, it pushes it out by about a month.

Max9 Required

Another big change is that I’ve decided that the first version will require Max9 or above. Max8 and below might be supported in a later version, but no guarantees. Please leave a comment below if this is an issue for you. I need to gauge how large is the demand for older versions.

The reason for making Max9 the minimum supported version is that .NET support was added in that version. The shift to libsecondlife puts a greater emphasis on .NET as well as XML (since libsecondlife supports an export format that is in XML). All of this is easier and cleaner with Max9’s .NET integration.

Update (June 2008): The first version of Prim Composer will not require Max9, but future versions might for all features to work.

Coming in Q2 2008!

Yes, it really is almost here. Just a little bit longer. It will be worth the wait!

1.0 RC4 – Improved Usability, New Installation Procedure

ScultGenMax Homepage

WHAT’S NEW

• New Feature: Improved Usability – save your settings! SculptGenMax remembers your choices!
• Enhancement: Source code has been completely reorganized to support Prim Composer. Requires a new installation procedure.

Save Your Settings

Save Settings!

RC4 brings greatly improved usability. You don’t want to use “proportional” because it reduces sculptmap detail? No problem. Uncheck “proportional” and save your settings. You’ll never have to worry about it again! RC4 will remember your preferences and restore them the next time you run 3ds Max.

Here’s a quick list of the usability changes in RC4:

• Save your settings! New “Settings” menu allows you to save your settings between different 3ds Max sessions.
• SculptGenMax also remembers your settings if you close the dialog and re-open it within the same 3ds Max session.
• Improved visual clues. The X, Y, and Z fields under proportional are now blanked whenever a sculptmap is loaded from a file or the dialog settings are changed. This provides a visual clue that the bitmap being displayed was not generated with the dialog’s current settings.
• Imported objects are named after the sculptmap. So, if you load a sculptmap named “banana.bmp”, the imported object will be given a name such as “banana.bmp01″. This helps you keep track of the sculptmap that was used to create a particular object.

New Installation Procedure

Copy primcomposer directory to stdscripts

The source code for RC4 has been reorganized to better support the upcoming product: Prim Composer (see next heading). While this doesn’t change the way SculptGenMax works, it does require a small change in the installation procedure.

Previous versions of SculptGenMax were packaged as a single .ms maxscript file that you simply had to execute. RC4 is packaged as several files, some of which have to be copied into place before you start 3ds Max. An installer is planned, but not yet available. Until then, we will have to install SculptGenMax manually using the following procedure:

• Quit 3ds Max if it is running.
• Copy the “primcomposer” directory that comes with SculptGenMax into 3DSMAX_HOME/stdplugs/stdscripts/ (where 3DSMAX_HOME is the directory in which 3ds Max is installed). If this is done correctly, then there will be a directory stdscripts/primcomposer/ that will contain several files such as sculptie-mapgen.ms and sculptie-import.ms
• restart 3ds Max
• in 3ds Max, MAXScript>Run Script…, and select SculptGenMax.ms in the file dialog and press “Open”.
• if this is your first time installing ScultGenMax, you will also need to create a custom button. Refer to the installation instructions for more info.

Basically, the installation is the same as before, except that you now have to copy the primcomposer directory to stdscripts. Post a message in the support forums if you have problems.

Prim Composer is Coming!

Source Code Reorganized

As mentioned, the source code for RC4 has also been completely reorganized so that it can be used in conjunction with the upcoming release of Prim Composer. Many of you have been anxiously awaiting Prim Composer, but in case this is new, here’s a brief explanation.

Prim Composer takes building to the next level in 3ds Max. It is a complete offline building environment that supports both sculpties and conventional prims.

• Create sculpties in 3ds Max.
• Create traditional prims in 3ds Max such as boxes and spheres using the standard SL parameters such as cut and hollow.
• Select a group of sculpties and prims within a 3ds Max scene and scale them as a group using the mouse. Scaling works automatically to limit the size of any prim in the selection so that no prim gets too large or small to be a valid prim in SL.
• Export the 3ds Max scene of sculpties and prims to disk and import them automatically into Second Life as a single object. Size, location, and rotation of prims is automatically preserved so that the resulting set of prims in Second Life looks exactly the same as in 3ds Max.

Well, that’s the goal, at least. The first version will require some manual intervention such as creating and pasting notecards and uploading images. But the plan is for all of this to be automated as much as possible using things like libsecondlife or perhaps a modified client. And the first version will not support texturing. You will still have to manually texture the prims in SL once they’ve been uploaded.

But it is still a huge leap forward for SL building in 3ds Max. And it’s coming very soon now! The changes in SculptGenMax 1.0rc4 make it possible for Prim Composer to delegate to SculptGenMax for common tasks such as importing objects and generating sculptmaps.

Stay tuned!

1.0 RC3 – Includes Planar Fix and Tiny Sculpties!

ScultGenMax Homepage

WHAT’S NEW

• New Feature: Tiny Sculpties – easily create sculpties that are less than 1 cm in diameter.
• Bug Fixed: Planar sculpties work better. In previous versions, the 33rd column of the sculptmap was being ignored.
• Addition: LSL scripts for changing between different topologies are now included in the download.

New! Tiny Sculpties!

Tiny Sculpties

The real world is full of tiny things and so too is the virtual world of Second Life. With conventional prims, builders use techniques such as cutting and dimpling to make objects smaller than the 1cm minimum prim size. For sculpties, we need something different.

Create tiny sculpties in SculptGenMax! RC3 adds a new field to the SculptGenMax dialog called “multiplier”. This multiplier has a value between 0.1 and 1.0 and is active whenever proportional mode is checked. At a value of 1.0, SculptGenMax works normally and the objects produced will be scalable in size from 1cm to 10m. Set the value to 0.1 and the size range of the resulting objects will be reduced by 10 (ranging in size between 1mm and 1m). See the photo on the right for an example of what a 1mm disco ball looks like. The object behind it is a 1cm cube.

This new feature is a welcome addition, but there are a few things to keep in mind:

• The multiplier only affects sculptmaps that you generate after setting its value. So, to generate a tiny sculptmap, you must set the multiplier and then generate the sculptmap.
• The multiplier has to be between 0.1 and 1.0. You can set this manually by clicking inside the slider and typing in a number, but be sure to press return to make sure that your value is registered.
• Be aware that tiny sculpties will have less detail than their normal-sized equivalents.
• Let me know how it works for you! Leave a comment about your experiences!

1.0rc3 Dialog

Planar Sculpties and the 33rd column

RC3 also fixes a bug in the handling of sculptmaps with a plane topology.

Sculpties with the sphere, torus, and cylinder topologies have sculptmaps with 32 usable columns. Previous versions of SculptGenMax used this number of columns for planar sculpties, as well. But it turns out that sculptmaps are actually capable of encoding 33 columns of information. In the case of sphere, torus, and cylinder, this 33rd column is unused because the topologies wrap horizontally. But planar sculpties do not wrap and thus are capable of using the 33rd column.

Big thanks to Gearsawe Stonecutter for pointing this out.

RC3 changes the way that sculptmaps are handled in two ways:

• All sculptmaps are generated with 33 columns. (previously only 32 columns were generated)
• When a planar sculptie is imported by pasting into the scene, 33 columns are used to generate the object in 3ds Max.

From a practical standpoint, most people won’t notice the change. But please post a message on the support forums if you encounter problems.

ScultGenMax Homepage

Mixed Resolution Meshes

WHAT’S NEW

• New Feature: Multi-resolution sculptmaps (including Hard Edges and hard edges combined with smooth)
• Adds several new sculptmaps to the distribution as examples of what can be done, including the disco ball.
• New Feature: Vastly increased UV map smartness
• correctly handles UV maps that are shifted to the left or right.
• correctly handles many UV maps now that are totally incorrect
• Bug Fixed: Error pasting sculptmaps into scene

Disco Balls

OVERVIEW

This is a major release with important new features and bug fixes. If you had problems in RC1 importing sculptmaps, then give this a try.

RC2 revolutionizes the process of sculptie creation in SculptGenMax. All previous versions required a fixed-resolution 32×32 mesh with a nearly-perfect vertex grid as the UV map. RC2 can handle meshes with both larger and smaller resolutions and even meshes with mixed mesh resolutions. And it no longer requires a perfect UV map. Many UV maps that aren’t even close to a perfect grid will now work.

Horrible UV, but it works!

How to use it

If you don’t need the full detail of a 32×32 mesh, you don’t have to use it. Start with an 8×8 or 16×16 mesh instead. Then, if you need more detail in one part of it, apply a Mesh Select to select the part that needs more detail, and then MeshSmooth to smooth out that part. You can also use Tessellate instead of MeshSmooth and probably other modifiers. I haven’t had time to fully explore this, but it opens a world of new possibilities!

Mixed Resolution Scultmap

Many of the modifiers such as MeshSmooth will create UV maps that are very un-gridlike. RC2 doesn’t care. It will happily devour many of them and create a valid sculptmap. However, there is one important thing to remember. Any surface textures that you bake from the sculptie must have a perfect grid UV Map or they won’t work properly in SL. So, if you want to bake textures for these sculpties, you will need to generate the sculptmap and then import the sculptmap back into the scene. The process of importing will create a new sculptie in 3ds Max that has the same shape as your original, but with a correct UV Map for baking.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to play with here and I’ve only just started to understand how this can be used to create new types of sculpties in 3ds Max. It opens lots of possibilities and a lot of questions as well. If you need help with this, feel free to ask in the SculptGenMax support forums. You don’t need to register and it will make sure that your questions (and the answers) are visible to the entire SL community (including the teen grid which does not have access to adult SL forums).

Enjoy! And let me know how it goes…

–Shack

ScultGenMax Homepage

SculptGenMax

FEATURES

• torus, plane, and cylinder SUPPORTED
• import sculpties INTO 3ds Max as well as export them out.
• completely new, faster algorithm.
• vastly improved installation and FAQ instructions
• new website with dedicated support forums

WARNING: There’s lots to love here, but please be patient if you encounter difficulties. This version is probably more sensitive than previous versions to the quality of your UV map. Do not install this if you are on a deadline and the previous version is working for you.

If you encounter problems, please post to the new support forums at liferain.com. You don’t need to register and it will make sure that your questions (and the answers) are visible to the entire SL community (including the teen grid which does not have access to adult SL forums).

Enjoy! And let me know how it goes…

–Shack

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Including:

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