Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Improper Mapping in Blender: a problem

I'm trying to be a little more zen about certain things annoying me (times when people refuse to stop jumping up and saying LOOK AT ME I'M RIGHT LOOK AT ME DO WHAT I WANT!...take a step back, a deep breath, and just stop feeding into it and walk away. They are free to think they won, in reality they aren't worth my time. There's a reason I'm a misanthrope). I know I'm also a bit less able to deal because I've effectively had a bad cold for a year and a half now. *sigh* I want to go home.

My new new irksome though is not related to people. I've finally run into the wall that I've known was there for a while about Blender's imprecision on mapping the sculpt texture. Instead of mapping the points where SL maps them, it has a tendency to basically map in between (this is most disasterous on the edges, as that's where the problem begins, and has the greatest deformation). This is not such a huge deal for a lot of sculpts: SL does a bit of deforming your mesh here and there anyway, although your seams may still be somewhat messy, which is not cool. This becomes a greater deal with sharp edges (which have needed a fair bit of PS post anyway, in my experience- even when they shouldn't), as, even when you redo the edges you've still got a pixel of messy lead in (which can be eliminated by making it the edge as well, so long as you can sacrifice it- but it still means the sculpt and texture are pulling off. One top of this, the corner corner top/bottom edges...are just a total wreck, because it doesn't pull them where it ought to.

In this case, I can probably reason through the math and do it all in PS from a Rokuro (not that I actually want to do that, but this problem right now is entirely fueled by the 10x10x10 prim size limit, it's not a hard shape in of itself), but that simply won't work in some cases, nor does it change the fact it's always stretching things improperly. I'm not comfortable with many of the tools in sculptypaint yet, and I don't think it has the robust _sculpting_ tools that I need, but it does map properly (too bad it doesn't import .objs itself for mapping), and, damn. Stairs. Truly, totally, awesome. Too bad I don't see a way to work another staircase I'd like to with it, that's going to be "a challenge" and require a lot of fixing it up in PS, I'm sure- although I think perhaps the map here has given me a good concrete view of how to (until I try it and find the niggling things I haven't thought of, of course). Aside from everything else, it's pretty brilliant for importing your sculpt map and finding out what havok Blender has dealt with the way it goes about it- whether it's even worth trying to pull into SL.

I've got an idea to try that will, I'm reasonably certain, require a bit of post to get functional (if it's even possible, which I'm not sold on- it's a kinda sorta maybe, not a perfect answer), to get around the problem. This model has enough other troubles inherent in the way Blender deals with it I'm not sure it's a model case to try though. (I think it would actually be pretty straightforward to write a program that would take the one data and convert it to the other correctly, that's just not something I'm up to. I do not write programs, and haven't any desire to learn that, a little light coding and scripting is more than enough, thanks.)

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