Overview

All of this might be a little easier if you understand what we're trying to do. As you probably know already, the shape of a SL sculpty is determined by a rainbow-ish image. How does this work exactly?

A sculpted prim is a mesh made of 32x32 vertices. Those vertices are positioned in 3D space along X, Y, and Z coordinates.

The colors of an image on your computer are determined by Red, Blue and Green (RGB) values. So what Second Life does with sculpties is it takes the Red value in an image and converts it to a value for X, Green becomes the value for Y, and Blue becomes the value for Z. So, if you were to use a 32x32 sculpt map, each pixel would determine the location of one vertice on the sculpted prim. (Typically, SL sculpters use at least a 64x64 map. We'll get to why later.)

So what we're trying to do in Blender is:
A) Create a template 3D Mesh that we can form into our desired shapes.
B) Flatten the template onto a 2D image grid.
C) Tell Blender to record RGB values onto the image based on the position of our vertices.

Lets get started.

The Cylinder

Open up Blender, or if you have Blender open already, start a new file (File > New).

Now we're back to the beginning, but right now, everything in your 3D space is useless for making sculpts. So select it all (tap A) and then delete it (tap DELETE). Now we have a clean slate.

Now the easiest shape to create a sculpty from is a cylinder, so with your cursor in the 3DView window, tap SPACEBAR to bring up a menu, and go to Add > Mesh > Cylinder. This will give you another menu that will let you specify how you want your cylinder to look. What we want is a cylinder with 8 vertices and NO End Caps. So click on the current number of vertices and replace it with 8, and click on the End Caps button so it's toggled off. Leave the rest as it is, then click okay to create your cylinder.

If you're looking at something that looks like a wheel with spokes, you didn't deselect the End Caps button. Delete and start over. If you're looking at just a simple ring of vertices, you're good to go.

More Rows

Blender works in several different modes. Luckily you only need to know about two. You are currently in Object Mode. You can only select entire objects in your 3DView.

The other mode we need is Edit Mode, which will allow us to move individual vertices within our cylinder. The TAB key will let us toggle between Object Mode and Edit Mode. Switch to Edit mode now.

If you're still looking at the top of your cylinder, tap NUM1 or NUM3 to look at either the front of the side. Both will look nearly identical. You'll probably see two horizontal lines of vertices, connected by faces.

Now do some counting here. You have 8 columns of faces, and 1 row of faces. We want a square grid. So you need more rows. We'll be adding these with LOOP CUTS.

Loop Cuts

With your cursor placed near your cylinder, tap K and select Loop Cut from the popup menu. You'll be shown a pink line. If you move your cursor around from here, the line may change positions from the horizontal center of your row, to the verticle center of your columns. We want to make the cut horizontally, of course.

If you click ONCE, Blender will give you a new row of vertices, however it will let you move the vertices up and down the cylinder. In some instances, this is very useful, but for creating our sculpt template it is NOT. So right-click to cancel the loopcut, or hit CTRL-Z to undo. Then start a new loopcut (Tap K > Loop Cut) and this time click TWICE. The first click will give you the row. The second click with set it in place. If you don't move your cursor inbetween clicks, it will place the vertices in the exact middle.

Repeat this 6 times, always in the center, until you have 7 evenly spaced horizontal lines of vertices inbetween your original set. If you count the rows of faces, you'll see that you have 8. So now you have 8 columns and 8 rows.

UV Unwrap

Now for the first time, I'm going to have you split your 3D View screen. You do this by placing your cursor at the top edge of the 3D View, then, when it changes to the resize-cursor, right click and select "Split" from the popup menu. Then place the new edge where you want it.

You can actually split the screen as many times as you want this way, and you can split it along the side edges as well, but I prefer having large views to multiple ones, especially since changing the camera view is so easy. (NUM 1, 3, and 7)

But besides just changing the 3D view, you can change the divisions to show something else entirely. On the bottom left of each of your 3D views, you will see a tiny menu with an image that looks like a grid. If you click it, it will give you a list. You'll see that your current division type is named '3D VIEW'. Oh my gosh.

Most of the other types are irrelevant to sculpties, but I want you to change the right division from the 3D view, to the UV/Image Editor.

UV Image

Now in this UV/Image Editor, we're going to create a new image and assign it to all the faces on our mesh.

The easiest way to assign faces to an image is to have the faces selected before you create the image (or before you load another). So with your cursor in the 3D View - still in Edit Mode, tap A until everything is selected. Your faces should be pink, and your vertices should be yellow.

Then in the UV/Image Editor, go to Image > New and create an image that's 64 x 64. You can click on the current numbers to insert the new ones manually.

Now we need arrange the vertices into a grid on our image, but there's one problem.

You may notice that we have a clear top and bottom on our mesh, which will corrispond with the top and bottom of the image, but what about the sides? What we need to do is assign one vertical column of vertices to be an Edge Seam. This will tell Blender where to cut the mesh when it unwraps it onto the image.

In your 3D view, tap NUM7 to view the top of your mesh. You'll see a ring of vertices. Deselect everything by tapping A. Now I will introduce you to the B selection tools.

Border and Brush Selection

The Border and Brush selection tools are the two most useful tools for selecting multiple vertices at once.

Tap B once to get the Border Selection tool. This will let you select vertices with a selection box, much like you select a part of an image with the Rectangular Marquee tool in Photoshop.

Tap B twice to get the Brush selection tool. This will give you a circular cursor. If you click and drag with this tool, any point that is touched by this cursor will be selected. The brush size can be changed by scrolling the mouse wheel. Also, to deselect points with this tool click them with the mousewheel. To get out of Brush Select mode, Rclick.

Now that you know how to use the B key, deselect everything, and select JUST the top vertice in your ring (illustrated above) using either of the B selection tools. Now rotate your view slightly by clicking and dragging with your scroll wheel, and you'll see that all the vertices underneath the one you selected were ALSO selected. This is what the B tools do by default, and it's what we want.

With those points still selected, and with your cursor in the 3D View, hit CTRL-E and select "Mark Seam" from the popup menu. This seam will be both the right and left sides of your image. Now we can unwrap.

Select all the vertices by tapping A until all the vertices are yellow, and the faces are pink. Then tap U and select "unwrap."

You'll notice that your vertices are now represented as a squashed grid on your image. We'll need to stretch them out.

Then, remember your basic editing hotkeys?

Tap A in the UV Editor to select all your vertices. Then tap G to grab and move, and Y so you only move them along the Y axis (up and down.) Place them at about the middle of the image. Then tap S then Y to scale the vertices along the Y axis until they cover the entire image. After you do that, there's one more thing to do. Go to UVs > Snap to Pixels, then tap G, and if things still look lined up, LClick to set the pixels. This makes certain that your vertices are all lined up perfectly with your image.

Now ... we get to the hard part.

RGB Setup

(( The rest of this tutorial is practically obsolete, and only for people who want extra hands-on experience. Once again, Domino's export scripts are much more accurate than Blender's default Bake function. ))

Now we need to get Blender to record and RGB value for each vertice based on it's XYZ coordinates.

This is very technical, and I don't even know all the details on how it works, but I'll do my best to explain what we're doing and why. If I don't explain something perfectly, bear with me.

For the first time, we are going to pay attention to that bottom division, called Buttons. By default, Blender shows you the Editing set of buttons which are selected by either pressing F9, or selecting the button marked in Yellow above. We will use this set of buttons a lot in the future, but right now we want the Shader buttons (marked in Red) and specifically we want the Material subset (Marked in Green). From here we need to add a new material to our document. Go ahead and click "Add New."

Now don't freak out. There are a TON of new buttons, but you only need to know about a few of them. First, marked in Red is your material's name. Rename it something like "sculpty" or "sculpt material."

Then click the VColPaint button, marked in yellow. This stands for Vertice Color Paint, and allows Blender to paint each vertice a different color, which is what we want.

Finally, we need to add three textures to our material. Go to the very right box (marked in Green) and click Add New. Rename this texture Red. Then, on the left, below your newly-created Red texture, add a second texture and name it Green, then a third and name it Blue.

Now we need to define the textures using the two other tabs in the Texture section. In the Map Input tab, simply change the XYZ input to how it looks below. In the Map To tabs, change the color to pure red, green, or blue respectively, and change "Mix" to "Add" on all three. Make sure yours looks the same as these.

Red

Green

Blue

Now go into the Texture Buttons (marked in Red) and change the Texture Type on all three to Blend.

Now, if everything has gone smoothly, your template should be finished! Woo! Almost time to celebrate, but lets check to make sure things work. How? One simple way to do that. Bake a sculpt map.

Baking

Baking is a 3D modeling term for recording a hard copy of something that was created automatically.

If you made a ball bounce in Blender with a physics engine, for example, you could Bake the bounce animation, or record it, so you wouldn't have to use the physics engine again to get the same bounce.

Our material texture is automatically created based on where each vertice is located. What we want to do is record that information onto the image that we already set up. So go into the Scene > Rendering buttons (marked in Yellow) and then go to the Bake tab (marked in Red). Select Textures (green) and then click the Bake button. If your image looks like the one in the image above, Congrats! Now SAVE YOUR TEMPLATE! Save it somewhere where it won't get lost, and give it a good meaningful name like sculpt-template.blend

If your image looks different — if the colors are way off, you may have done something wrong. You can try double-checking your work, or restarting the tutorial, or you can figure that you understand the inner-workings of the template well enough, and work with the templates created by Domino Marama's scripts.

And now, finally, you are ready to start modeling!