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Sculpt Texture Generator
Index
How do you create 3d objects on a 2d webpage? This is the question I asked myself when I realised that making sculpt map textures for Second Life was actually quite easy, it's the interface that's the difficult part.
The following pages contain tools for making sculpt map textures from numbers entered on a form. In each page they process the numbers slightly differently, allowing for a large variety of sculpts.
In most cases you need to enter a list of points corresponding to locations on the surface of the sculpt. In others though, such as Rounded Cylinder, you just change a few parameters to create a sculpt.
Revolve
- takes a series of radii and revolves them around the z-axis.
Z,R Revolve
- takes a series of radii and corresponding z-positions and revolves them around the z-axis.
Variable Radius Sphere
- takes a series of radii for different points around the circumference of a sphere.
Constant Cross-Section
- takes a series of x,y coordinates and creates a constant cross section.
Z,R Cross
- combines the x,y coordinates of a cross section and the z,r for height and scaling.
Rounded Cylinder
- takes a radius between 0 and 120 and applies it to the edges of a cylinder.
Waves
- uses a few variables to create a series of sculpt maps which when animated look like ripples.
Sculpted Snapshots
- upload a depth snapshot and it produces a sculpt which you can use to give your snapshot a cool 3D effect.
Links:
- Sculpted Prims - Second Life Wiki - The Sculpted Prims Bible
- Building Tips - Second Life Forum - Where all the Sculpty chat seems to take place.
- Sculpty exporter for Wings 3D - Second Life Forum - The simplest exporter I've seen yet.
- RGB displacement map from Blender? - Second Life Forum - If you can handle Blender.
- Maya to Second Life: a new option for builders - Second Life Forum - If you can afford Maya.
- Show Us Your Sculpties! - Second Life Forum - The place to post your sculpty snapshots.
- Waves in Second Life Using Sculpted Prims - Clear Night Sky - Kiwini Oe talks about using Z,R Revolve to make rippling sculpty water.
- Sculpt Studio - XStreet SL
- Sculpties.info wiki - From the makers of Sculpt Studio, a wiki with details on using the Sculpt Studio and also details information on Sculpt Maps that extend to any tool.
Updates:
Feb 2010: I have invested in a Sculpt Studio (XStreetSL link) which is quite popular with my friends. I am considering ways to incorporate my tool such that anyone who wishes to progress from these pages to making more detailed sculpts can export their works into Sculpt Studio. I'll update here if and when I have any luck.
Feb 2010: And now all pages accept clicking on the preview window for setting the points x,y or r,z. Checkboxes are used to select the points you wish to work with.
Feb 2010: Big news worthy of another update. I'll be rolling out enhancements to each page to allow points to be placed by clicking on the preview window. It's already up and running on Revolve, why not check it out.
Feb 2010: MOAR!!! I've added some more pages and further enhanced the existing ones. Moving too fast to document it here. Any questions or suggestions please fling them my way in-world by IM or Notecard.
Jan 2010 : Despite stating that I would not be undertaking any further work in this section I have tweaked a few pages, namely adding a second parameter to the rounded cylinder which allows for independant control of the radius of the top and bottom edges. Not sure if anyone is actually using these, if you are please drop me an IM in-world and let me know. I really should update the example images for each of the sculpts as I'm sure they aren't as rough looking now. Also looked at reversing the z-axis on some pages as it seems that the sculpt map is upside down when imported into Second Life.