creating sculpties from arbitrary meshes in 3ds max 9

7/29/2019 Creating Sculpties From Arbitrary Meshes in 3ds Max 9

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Creating Sculpties From Arbitrary Meshes in 3ds Max 9

A Tutorial by Chip Midnight

What's This Tutorial About?Since the image of my sculptie head was posted on the SL Wiki, I'vereceived numerous requests for details about how it was created. Thistutorial should answer those questions and show you two methods forcreating a sculptie and matching texture map in Max 8 or 9. What do Imean by an "arbitrary" mesh? That would be a 3d model that wasn'tspecifically created with SL sculpties in mind that does not conform toeither the polygon limitations or UV mapping of an SL sculptie. In thistutorial I'll be creating a sculptie from the head portion of a Poser 7model. The intent of this tutorial is not to teach you how to use 3dsMax. You should already be familiar with the basics of Max.

What You'll Need

3ds Max 8 or 9 (The "Projection" modifier wasn't added to Max until version 8 so some of thistutorial isn't possible in earlier versions)

Abu Nasu's Sculptie Shader (a max material for baking sculpt maps in Max)A paint program that can invert an image and use Photoshop plugins. (An excellent free onethat fits the bill is Irfanview.)Flaming Pear's free "Solidify" Photoshop Plugin (download the "free plugins" pack and installit).

Method One: The Down & Dirty Sculpt ie

Step One: Prepare Your Target Object

In the screenshot below you can see the head model. To prepare it, I've capped the holes in the mesh (the eyes and neck)and I've centered the pivot point to the object. I've also created a simple lighting setup and textured the object (with just adefault gray texture. I'm lazy, what can I tell ya?). This could be any mesh, but in general this technique works best withorganic shapes without a lot of complex protrusions.

ating Sculpties FromArbitrary Meshes in 3ds Max 9 http://home.comcast.net/~pixelforgeltd/Tutorial.ht

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Step Two: Create the Projec tion Sphere

Create a sphere inthe top viewportwith 33 segments.Don't worry aboutthe size of thesphere or it'splacement.

It's not possible tocreate a parametricsphere in Max with

the correct numberof polygons (1024)so I'm using asetting that createsa sphere with a bitless than that.

Step Three: Prepare The Projec tion Sphere


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1 - Align the sphere to the target model (in this case, the head). The fastest way to do this is with the align tool. Yoursphere should now be sitting at the center of your target model. Depending on the topology of the target model youwon't always want your sphere aligned to its center. The idea is to situate the sphere so that if it enclosed the targetmesh and you followed a line perpendicular from the center of each polygon of the sphere, each of those lines wouldinterset the target model.

2 - Now set the size of the sphere very small, like .01 units. The exact size doesn't reallymatter. We're basically just getting it out of the way.

3 - Add a "Projection" Modifier to the sphere (from the dropdown list of modifiers on the modify

panel). In the "Reference Geometry" subpanel, click the "Pick" button and then click the targetmodel.

Max will create a projection cage with the topology of the sphere around the target model. Italmost always does a horrible job auto-wrapping the cage around the target. In the followingscreenshot you can see it didn't do too badly this time.

We want to return the projectioncage to the shape of thesphere. To do so, go to the"Cage" subpanel and drag the"percent" value all the waydown to -100 (note: the numberwill return to 0 as soon as you

let go).

Next, raise the "Amount" value until the now sphericalprojection cage is large enough to completely enclose thetarget model.

Now we have a lovevely sphericalprojection cage and we're all ready tostart baking textures. Simple, huh?

Note: While it's possible to move thepoints of the projection cage aroundto try and get more detail in certainareas, I don't recommend it. InMethod Two I'll show you a better

way to do it. This is the quick anddirty method so more on that fancystuff later.

Step Four: Bake a Texture Map


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Now we're going to use the projectionmodifier to bake a texture map for use in

SL. Step four and five can be done inany order. I'm just doing the texturemap first because the material isalready on the target mesh. With thesphere selected, go the the "Render"menu and select "Render to Texture."Enable the projection modifier, thenbring up the options panel and turn off"Ray Check."

Next, in the "output" subpanel, add a "complete map." Set it to save out a TGA file, in 32 bit, with "premultiplied alpha" turnedoff. Set the desired output size. For this I'm going to render a 256x256 texture. At the bottom of the Render to Texture dialog,check "render to files only." Finally, hit render. The resulting texture map is below:

Notice how the top and bottom of thetexture end in a sawtooth pattern? This isbecause the top and bottom rows of thesphere are triangles rather thanrectangles since they all end at the northand south poles of the sphere. To fix that,open the texture in Photoshop and run

the Flaming Pear "Solidify A" filter on it.That will fill in the holes with the value ofthe surrounding pixels. (This is why weturned off ray check and premultipliedalpha). Resave the texture as a 24 bitTGA. The final texture looks like this:

Step Five: Bake The Sculpt Map

This is really exactly the same as step four, but using Abu's sculptie shader. Open the material library containing the shader

and drag it to an open slot in your material editor, then assign it to the target model. Then repeat everything you did in stepfour. Make sure you change the output filename so you don't overwrite your texture map, and change the output size to128x128. In Photoshop, after running Solidify on it, invert the image. The resulting sculpt map is below:

Because the texture map and sculpt map were both created from the same projection, they'll line upperfectly in SL. A screenshot of the textured sculptie in SL is below:

As you can see, the results aren'tperfect. Since the vertices of the


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sculptie are evenly distributedaround the whole mesh, some areasthat could use extra detail, like theears, are a bit odd. But for a quickmethod for getting an arbitrary meshinto SL, it's not bad at all. In MethodTwo I'll cover some additional stepsyou can take to improve the accuracyof the final sculptie.

Method Two: The Conform MethodComing Soon!


creating sculpties from arbitrary meshes in 3ds max 9

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