SCULPTIES COME ALIVE!

Organic objects have always confounded SL's building tools; up to now, sculptures of people and animals are actually a clever (if unrealistic, up close) mesh of curvy prims.  The recently introduced sculpted prims have changed that, of course, and a little over a week, Nomasha Syaka has figured out how to animate them.

"[I]t was done in Maya," he explains, "and the truth be told, I knew nothing about Maya up until about three weeks ago, but I kind of got the fear when the sculpties were announced so quickly."  (My strong sense is his reaction is a common one, among builders, who are struggling to stay relevant in the sculpty era.)

"I used the skeleton device, thingymibob thing," says Nomasha, "animated it 12 frames, and ran them off as a map using [Linden sculptie expert] Qarl's exporter script-- Waster Skronski wrote the script for SL."  In another words, an animated sculptie texture.  "It calls on the user interface of 12 sculpties for each part.  Twelve frames each different movement is a new sculptie. The tail and mane is animated too-- ran a sinewave through the nurb in Maya."

All that jargon translates into animation, and grand possibilities of believable creatures that move through the world.  Nomasha's even created a pose so the horse can be ridden. "I could animate a human sculptie too, make it walk, anything really, that lends its shape well to nurbs or curves," he adds.

The only trouble with a galloping horse is that for some reason, some Residents see the horse transformed into a mass of festering boils:

Qarl Linden is already at work repairing this bug, Nomasha tells me. "Qarl doesn't see them at all, some others don't either-- but most do, so it seems like a client issue."

And then Nomasha Syaka sits me in a giant sculpted apple which is then deposited into a house-sized blender which is actually the head of an anatomically correct checkerboard giant, and purees me into an avatar smoothie.  But that's another story.

Direct teleport to Nomasha's horse-- bubbling or otherwise-- at this link.

Comments

[Michael]

It#s static it first and takes a loooooong time until it animates. The bubbles appear when I click on it.

Can you elaborate on the animation part? From what I know is that you can use a script to only display part of a TGA, and the TGA itself consists of the different animation frames.

But how can the displacement map (that's what Sculpties are called in the real world) be affected by scripts?

[Malachi Rothschild]

That's incredible. I was talking to a friend a number of days ago about the potential in animating sculpties. It would be amazing to see a recreation of The Sorcerer's Apprentice as portrayed in Fantasia.

[Cyn Vandeverre]

I think I have a related bug to the horse-spheres one; I was looking at the submissions this morning and the female torso (next to the skulls) had some truly odd and unintentional looking effects on it-- all the pink stuff below.

http://pics.livejournal.com/cvirtue/pic/0006e9z1/s320x240

[Nomasha Syaka]

Re: It#s static it first and takes a loooooong time until it animates. The bubbles appear when I click on it.

Shouldn't be static - had swithed off the anims to conduct some tests before. The animation is on-going. If this is a client side issue, then diff puters will see diff things.

[Nomasha Syaka]

I just wanted to add that Waster Skronski's scripting work was crucual to this and could not have been done without her.

[Waster Skronski]

'Nomasha Syaka has figured out how to animate them.'

this isnt entirely true. Waster Skronski whas the one that scripted it. (me)

Its a quite large amount of scripts at work here, the animation system is rather put together with glue string and duct tape.. ill promise to inpove on it the next couple of days. for the bubble effect it seems tobe client related.

i dont know if this the place. but if you plan to complian about this please specify your client [normal/firtslook] and your vidcard specifics.

[Michael]

I just checked again - it takes about a minute before it starts to gallop.

[Ananda]

This is wonderful to see this accomplished already! The sphere-ing may be a client issue but it strikes me that it's just as likely to be a streaming packet loss problem. I don't know exactly how your script works but I'm betting it depends on all the displacement map textures *and* prim position updates downloading to the client correctly, and how often does that happen these days?

[Gary Kohime]

Nomasha,

This is great!! fantastic job, am at work at the moment but intend to see this in sl as soon as I can. With sculpties, or at least what I have experienced with them so far (which is not a lot) :) the texture applied to the 'object' is or can be a pretty big challenge to achieve the desired affect on its "skin". Do you see the possibility of adding realistic fur in this case to your creation? Again, great job and thanks to all that assisted with this. Am looking forward for a sl view of this and the future of your endeavors.

Gary

[diddle oh]

um, to load textures before the script calls them you put hide prims inside with the sculpty texture as images on each face, this helps preload and keep them in the cache i think, thanks to nand nerd, hope it helps.

[Gary Kohime]

response to diddle oh...

Sorry I dont understand what your saying about hiding prims. Perhaps I know even less than I thought. Can you please elaborate? Thanks, Gary