Hi, Im new to blender and been completely at a loss on how to accomplish this. So if anyone can help any recommendations is welcome.
Problem: How to pull specific faces out from the the center of a object instead of it following the 3-axis’s. I know ‘extrude’ will accomplish this but the problem is since I am dealing with ‘sculpt’ mappings I cant use extruding as it adds faces and causes issues. So I am left with only being able to pulling faces from the actual object itself.
There is a example of the problem, The red line is how it acts, but the green line is what is desired, Ive tried using local and several other methods but nothing seems to work I can slide it side to side around the face of the cylinder but not in and out from its center point. If anyone has ideas how to do this. Thank you ahead of time.
I’m actually brand new to blender as well. I’m not quite sure if I fully understand you but I recreated this and set my cursor to the selected object which is the center. Using normals after placing the cursor to center allows me to 'move" the faces in essence from the center of the object. Can you explain a litter further is this is what you are trying to achieve?
welcome to blenderartists!
unless you’re using some kind of blender 2.5-old-fashioned-blender-2.49-lookalike theme, it looks like you are using 2.49.
if you are just starting now, i HIGHLY recommend (nay, insist!) that you use 2.59. it will save you a lot of trouble later on, and 2.5x is much more intuitive.
sorry, im not exactly sure what youre asking. you want to translate based on normals? you can change the Transform Orientation by hitting Alt-Space -> Normal
Yeah unfortunately any version higher then 2.49 isnt possible without having to ‘pay’ for these add-ons. Reason: Im doing sculpted prims for second life and the newer plugin for 2.59 isnt ‘free’ I figured out how to move them by using CTRL-E and ‘edge slide’ but unfortunately trying to keep this slide to a exact distance to my ‘center point’ of the object is where now Im running into trouble. Example make a torus, I select now a ‘ring’ of vert points and slide them but if I take the next set next to them I lost the ‘radii’ distance from them. So now what I need is how to ‘slide’ verts from a exact distance from the center point of the object. As SL sculpts only allow exactly up to 1024 verticies so adding more isnt feasable (and if you do you cause all kinds of issues when you render the sculpt map and rez it in world. I’ll try to put up a pic to show a good example of the now current stump Im at.
As you can see I have some verts selected and if I ‘edge’ slide now it will roughtly follow exactly along the shape of what I have now when I want it to slide around the center point of the object (with a fixed radius). Reason being is Im trying to move the verts towards the sides so I can keep a rough curve for the torus and then would allow me to take some verts and use some straight lines. Ie. Im making a bed frame with a curved top and then straight uprights down the sides and having the bottom half of the torus then pulled and mirror flipped on the other side and then stretched out way from it. Being so new to blender deleting and adding verts Im trying to avoid but if that might be the only possible way to do this maybe then Im going to be force to learn that method too. but I am a newbie and learning quickly. 8)
Thanks munk, yeah I figured out that. Thanks for the help. now Im just having a similiar issue but since its a torus its acting completely different then a simple flat plane wrapped into a cylinder and Im losing the ‘distance from center’ now. Think I figured it out as well with alot of trial and error. rotation/scale around ‘3d cursor’ seems to be accomplishing what I was needing as well. Albeit I dunno how ‘reliable’ that will be if that cursor happens to get off center but its working for now.
If it “happens to get off center” you can snap it right back by selecting 2 or more equidistant vertices on opposite sides, then Shift-S->Snap cursor to selection.
yeah that works good too for straights but this is on a curve of a torus now. Heh what Im trying to do really is not for a beginning modeler I guess but its not really me or blender its the restrictions that are put on sculpt maps for SL. 1024 verts max so sculpt textures of 32x32 verts or some combination of such like Im using 16x64 for my torus because I dont need alot of verts around the axis of the torus now Im just running into the issue of using quads on a torus and then trying to pull out straight parts from the ring of the torus to the center point like a bicyle rim (good mental example) without merging any of the verts. Lets just say its real annoying 8(
If you’re referring to the bsurfaces addon, that will be open-sourced in a couple of months. The initial paid period gives the author a chance to recoup his costs.
What’s a sculpt map? I’m genuinely curious. I’ve never heard the term before.
A sculpt map is verties mapped to the RGB of a image. Here I’ll give a ref. and yeah like the photos too but yes inward. The main restriction is lack of being able to merge/extrude vertexs pretty much if you dont have a base2 map of verts 2x2, 4x4, 8x8, etc up to 32x32 or some combo of that like I said 16x64 works it wont render properly. Here’s a nice link on info of them http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_FAQ
yeah its not the version of blender its the issue its just how to ‘get around’ limitations of what I gotta do the plugin is called ‘Primstar’ which only supports 2.49 as it is a python script plugin they have a Primstar-2 but ya gotta fork money over for it or get lucky and someone gives ya a copy. They got it all packaged up in a bundle called JASS-2 (blender 2.49, python and primstar all wrapped up) but if ya wanna move on to the lastest blender they looking for ‘donations’ for their work on python now. oh guess I gotta wait for a mod to approve posted links but when someone does its a wiki page that explains ‘sculpt maps’ do a yahoo on “vertices for second life sculpties” and you’ll see the second life wiki link.
Wysiwyg: yeah exactly like that but in the case of what I wanna do, they will not merge to a ‘point’ in the middle but stay square like so…
I left some of the verts selected so you can see the relationship of their positioning on the ‘sculpt map’ on the right. And I think my biggest issue is that triangle faces dont work everything has to be ‘quads’ :mad:
i uploaded a video with a few techniques/actions, im still not sure which way the faces need to go…
let me know which: http://www.screencast.com/t/kH1CNLpsEN
Nice video yeah thats exactly the kind of motions Im trying to do but the problem is ‘extrude’ adds verts when you pull the face down. Like with a quad you adding 4 more verticies then boom sculptmap bake fail because its not a valid sculpt map anymore. I have to use exactly what verts are created when using ‘add sculpt/second life mesh’ and also I cant merge any as doing so ends up creating ‘triangles’ if you look at the picture to the right on my post. you can see what I got ‘selected’ on the left edit window shows its relation to the vert points on the right side sculpt map. any removal or adding them deforms the sculpt map then it wont render properly inworld. Yeah its a real pain… but yeah that video shows what I should be ‘able’ to do simply enough and I was doing but I found out the hard way it’ll just break everything in the end. I’ll see if I can get a nice close up pic showing like one of the major roadblocks Im running into regardless what version or even program. Im using blender because to be honest I found this so much easier to use then anything else. (so mad props to the blender devs out there if you read this btw)
so basically, you want that shape, but without creating more vertices when extruding? sorry, i dont think that possible…by definition if you want to add more geometry to your shape, you need more vertices to define the shape…
im not familiar with second life or the addon, but if youre saying that you cant modify the number of vertices, then you wont be able to make that shape any more complex…
edit: i just read up a bit on sculpt maps. is that where you run into the problem? or the UV mapping of the sculptmaps?
please clarify
I can’t even begin to imagine what led to the decision to implement it like that in Second Life. It’s just awfully backwards to save vertex data in a texture when there are so many fine mesh formats out there. Good luck with your project.
heh yeah Im not and btw mesh building is about the most horrid method you can do for a ‘on the fly on demand’ building like in SL its just not reasonable thats why they started with just simple primitives then added sculpts later to make it more ‘flexible’ remember nothing is stored locally its not like a game you buy and you DL specific objects textures etc imagine if you had to download 15k different textures and mesh objects every single time you changed a simulator. It works just they have some real restrictions on it, and thanks Wysi yeah Im still trucking Im mainly just trying now to just simply overlap two verts to simulate something so when it comes to mixing a ‘curve’ based object and flat faced shape is where Im running into issues. My friend toki makes insane crazy sculpts but she does it in linux using purely ‘math’ designing. I can actually do alot in photoshop like make huge mountain/hillsides and nice things with planes. Its when it comes to like a mix of arcs and flat faces is where I get in trouble. and thank you all for all the support and suggestions so far. considering Ive been only doing modeling for 1 week now and got this far Im far from giving up (3d modeling that is) you all are great.
oh Wysi just seen your post above sorry so here is my reply to that one:
I havent even gotten into baking/texture wrapping at all ‘yet’ and as for the problem its not the LOD or the amount of detail either. Im actually able to aquire by taking for instance a torus is just a round ring of O shaped verts now like in my pic if you look close you can see that to achive a straight extrusion from lets say the outside to the center like you were showing me in the video. What I have been doing is taking the next ‘ring’ of verts and sliding it over almost right on top of where I pulled down some verts from already basically and effectively just stacking verts on top of verts (which in mesh any verts that occupy the same space isnt even rendered ie a face with ‘zero space’) and I know this is going to then give me ‘texture wrapping issues down the line’ so this is why Ive been trying to avoid it. Maybe its just not possible and I wont be able to mix arcs and flat faced objects in the same mesh. Which is okay either way Im saving myself alot of primitives being used as from what Ive made so far some of the stuff Ive made has basically cut my primitive usage down 90%+
