Talk:Sculpted Prims with Wings 3D

Welcome to the Wings 3D tutorial...

Obviously, it needs a lot more detail.

Don't talk about it. Don't discuss it. Edit it, grow it, improve it.

Forum references

I'd like to point out that basic account users have no access to the SL-Forums. Any information which requires forum access will only be available to a certain group of users.

Should you wish to make the information available to everyone, extra measures need to be made.--Vernes Veranes 14:13, 23 June 2007 (PDT)

Point taken. Actually, basic accounts do have access to the Wiki. (I know because I have a basic membership.) But you do have to provide your credit card number, or whatever else they're requiring right now for identification.

Still, the Wiki is a much better place than the forums for long-term documentation, so I hope all the information migrates here as it becomes stable. The forums are a better place for identifying and working out issues, which is why new information will always appear there first. --Omei Turnbull 09:49, 25 June 2007 (PDT)

New NCI Class

NCI have started an in-world class on using Wings 3D to make sculpties, but I can't currently recommend it (posted June 2010). Unless there's been a major change in the exporter, allowing a non-standard mesh to be remapped to a sculpty-valid mesh as part of the export, which hasn't been documented here, the class is badly misleading.

(This sort of thing might be possible: I think there are in-world tools to make sculpties which match assemblies of ordinary prims. But has it been done?) WolfBaginski Bearsfoot 07:16, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Qarl Linden created sculpties as an easy way to give SL builders more flexibility than they had with traditional SL prims. They can be seen as a very constrained subset of 3D meshes. The result is that a general-purpose 3D modeling tool (like Wings 3D, Blender, Maya, 3d Max, etc) can create them, but only if the tool is used in a constrained manner. There is no (practical) automatated technique for remapping an arbitrary 3D model into a valid sculpty. Any class teaching how to use a general purpose 3D modeling tool for sculpties needs to cover what capabilities of the tool to use, and not to use, when creating sculpties. That's as true for high-end professional tools such as Maya and Blender as it is for less complex tools like Wings 3D.

A different approach, which various people have taken, is to create new programs specifically for generating sculpties, and only sculpties. These can be even easier to learn, and very useful for those cases where what you want to build fits well with what the program developer had in mind. But then when you decide to model a shape that is outside the targeted design space of that program, using that tool may give very poor results, if it is even possible.

Disclaimer: I wrote the Wings 3D exporter at a time when there were no other good options for most people. I had to learn Wings 3D in order to do that, and it is the only 3D tool I have ever really used. So undoubtedly I am biased in favor of it. But I think it is still one of the two best options (the other being Blender) for someone who actually wants to develop 3D modeling skills while they are making their sculpties. When making recommendations, keep in mind that once SL supports more general meshes (Real Soon Now), sculpty-specific tools will probably be of little interest any more.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Omei Turnbull

I'm not a big fan of Wings 3D, early on in the development of the exporter I tried to add new features to it, Erlang was my first exposer to a Lisp language. This and poor performance unfortunately gave me a poor opinion of both Wings 3D and Erlang. In the scheme of things Wings 3D isn't really any worse then other modelers out there. Omei has done a good job summarizing the situation. -- Strife ^{(talk|contribs)} 05:36, 22 June 2010 (UTC)