Half Past Null

(The following is an ongoing series of tutorials for my offline builder tool, Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

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Sculpty editing is more than a little weird.

A sculpty, or sculpted prim, is the brainchild of Qarl Linden, though the practice he uses has been suggested before.

Think of sculpties as elaborate origami; you’re given a surface with 32×32 faces to fold into any shape you please. These “folds” are then saved as an image file, where each color’s RGB data represents a direction: red for X, green for Y, and blue for Z.



If I just lost you, don’t worry: making them is easy with the right tools.

Such as, say, this one!

(more…)

The importer for Prim.Blender has been posted to Sourceforge, as well as the source section of this site.

Built copies are available here:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Great%20Pubnico/23/71/93/

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Happy 4th of July!

(Even if it’s technically the 5th on the server’s clock)

I’ve released another copy of that wonderful, crazy building tool for Blender! With Sculpties!

It can be found on its SourceForge page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/primdotblender/

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I’ve also posted its code to the Source section.

Yay!

Here’s a quick building tip I find particularly handy for mirroring sculpties along a desired axis or axes in bulk:

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* Along the X-axis:
- convert -channel Red -negate -flop <source> <destination>

* Along the Y-axis:
- convert -channel Green -negate -flop <source> <destination>

* Along the Z-axis:
- convert -channel Blue -negate -flop <source> <destination>

* Along the X- and Y-axes:
- convert -channel Red,Green -negate <source> <destination>

* Along the Y- and Z-axes:
- convert -channel Green,Blue -negate <source> <destination>

* Along the X- and Z-axes:
- convert -channel Red,Blue -negate <source> <destination>

* Along all axes:
- convert -channel Red,Green,Blue -negate -flop <source> <destination>


Example:
convert -channel Blue -negate -flop rook_source.png rook_dest.png

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This is a command-line operation for ImageMagick.

… and works in Cygwin for Windows, Terminal.app for OSX, and your favorite terminal for Linux/BSD.

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If you’re not comfortable with these options, the same effect can be emulated in Photoshop or The GIMP by flipping your image horizontally and inverting the Red (X), Green (Y), or Blue (Z) channels for the desired effect.

These operations may be combined, but you must flip the image horizontally each time you use an axis of rotation. (that is, once for X, Y, or Z, twice (no change) for XY, XZ, and YZ, and three times (once) for all three axes)

Anyway, I figured that’d be a handy little tip and timesaver.

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PS: Support the JIRA thread for mirroring sculpties in the viewer:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-6682

Forum Link: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=265631