Sculpted Prims with Wings 3D

A one prim pillow scultped in Wings 3D

If you came here because you want to use Wings 3D to create sculpties, you came to the right place. If you want to still review all your options, look at the Sculpted Prims: Creator's Guide and return here later.

The pillow to the right is one prim. That is the whole point of a sculpty. You can make a highly irregular shape from only one prim. (This picture is from Wings, so the sculpty is not painted yet.)

Wings 3D is an open source 3D modeler with an active user community outside of Second Life. See the many demos and tutorials at YouTube. Wings can be used to create complex 3D models, and a plug-in is available to export the model as a sculpt map compatible with Second Life. It can also be used to help with the painting of the object (UV mapping).

When making a sculpty in Wings, you should not use many of the built in features. In particular, you should not add or delete vertexes, edges, or faces as you create your model. As described below, you start with a 32x31 sphere (or smaller), and model by deforming and painting it. The normal use of Wings involves adding more and more polygons where you need them to modify the overall shape. You will see this in the various Wings 3D tutorials on the web. However, Second Life sculpties require a very specific set of polygons. Don't add or delete as you go along.

Getting Started

• Obtain Wings 3D version 0.98.36 or later from the [Wings 3D site]. Please note: The exporter will not work if you get version 0.98.32a, which is identified as the latest stable release.
• Obtain the Wings 3D Exporter from the SL forums. [1]. There are at least two versions, one from Omei Turnbull and one by Strife Onizuka.
• Take some time to become familiar with Wings, perhaps following one of the tutorials at YouTube or at the Wings site.

A lot of useful commands have quick keyboard shortcuts. Here are some useful ones:

• x, y, z - Look down the x, y, or z axis
• v, e, f, b - enter vertex, edge, face, and object selection mode
• o - toggle orthographic view
• r - reset view
• a - aim camera at current selection
• space - deselect current selection

Also go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, and make sure Advanced Menus is checked.

Troubleshooting Tips

Just a few things account for almost all problems you are likely to encounter.

• The sculpty option doesn't appear in the File/Export command. Check the Wings version number (File/Help/About Wings 3D). If the version is 0.98.32a, the exporter won't work. If the version number is OK, use File/Install Plug-in to to install the Sculpty plug-in, exit Wings and try again.
• "Unsupported Mesh Size" message when you export. You probably overlooked the restrictions on the use of Wings commands. Start with one of the templates supplied with the exporter, and don't use Wings commands that change the number of vertices. The other possibility is that you imported a sculpty bitmap with an unsupported size. The importer will allow you to do that without any warning, but the exporter won't be able to handle it.

Tutorials

• HTML tutorials
  • Beginning level
    • Natalia Zelmanov's blog
      • Part 1, Part 2.
      • Wings in conjunction with Rokuro.
      • Texturing with Wings.
    • Apprenons à faire des prims sculptés avec Wings 3D (Learning to make sculpties with Wings 3D), by Nibb.

• Video tutorials
  • Beginning level
    • Wings 3D sculpty creation and importing by Paulee Perenti.
    • Wings 3D sculpty texturing and Sculpt a Heart by Ty Gould.
  • Intermediate level
    • DanielFox Abernathy's series of tutorials.
      • Tutorial #1 - Staircase
      • Tutorial #2 - Revolutions
      • Tutorial #3 - Interlocking Rings

Wings 3D References (not specific to sculpties)

• Wings 3D Manual (Wikibooks, in progress)

Other Useful Information

• Read through the Second Life Forum articles about sculpties. You might learn something.

Step-by-step sculpty creation in Wings

1. Create a sphere. It should be 8x7, 16x15, 32x31, or 64x63. The low resolutions are good for experimenting, but 32x31 resolution will probably be used for final products. This sphere will contain the exact final set of polygons you must maintain. If you add or delete, your object will appear freaked out in Second Life. (Look for the preset model of cylinder and torus, too.)
2. Shape your object from the sphere. Think of the sphere as a lump of clay, and push and pull it into shape without tearing it. The basic techniques are selection and tweaking.
   1. Selection: there are numerous tools in Wings for selecting sets of vertices, edges, and faces. Then the entire selection can be moved, stretched, and rotated, plus several other transformations.
   2. It is useful to grow or shrink the selection (+ or -), then transform, then grow a little more, then transform,, and so on.
   3. Once you have selected part of your object, you can Move, Scale, or Rotate that part. There are a few other operations. Remember, you cannot use operations that change the number of vertices or the edges between them.
   4. Tweaking: In tweak mode, you can grab one vertex, edge, or face and move it around. This is best combined with magnetism, which causes nearby polygons to also move along with it. The strength of the magnetic field can be adjusted. A weak (blue) field moves the closest neighbors, while a stronger field moves ones that are farther away.
   5. Tweaking is like pushing and pulling on the sphere as if it were a lump of clay.
   6. Another useful trick is tighten. Select a large number of edges, and tighten them. Wings will readjust them so that they are all more equal in length, without distorting the model.
3. Save the 3D model. This will be called a .wings file.
4. Using the Second Life plug-in, export the sculpt map. A .bmp file will be created. See Wings 3D Exporter for details.
5. Upload the .bmp file, and apply it to a sculpted prim.
6. Optionally, paint the sculpty.
7. Upload the paint job, and apply it to the sculpty.

(See this thread about UV mapping in Wings for more details.

Some relevant features of Wings

• In Second Life, alt-mouse is used to zoom around and rotate the camera view. In Wings, there are several different ways to accomplish the same thing. Preferences can be used to make Wings emulate several other 3D modeling packages. Maybe someone will make Wings emulate the Second Life viewer, or better yet, will add similar options to the viewer so that it can be made to emulate Wings, Maya, or Blender.
• The x, y, z coordinates in Wings are not aligned with Second Life coordinates.
• The default sphere in Wings will make a small object in Second Life.

For other info regarding this and other 3d software, check out Sculpted Prims: 3d Software Guide.