The Pipe Problem

Lets say you want to make a sculptie pipe to import into Second Life. You want this pipe to be long, skinny, and as windy as possible. You decide to use three edge loops per bend to keep the pipe looking nice.

Using the default 32x32 mesh, you come up with something like the image on the left. You wind up with nine or ten bends, which is okay, but not as bendy as you'd like. (Note that if you had accounted for any amount of LoD, you'd have even less bends then that!)

Now take a look at the cross section of this pipe:

There are 32 points on every edge loop in this pipe, which is a problem in more than one way.

First of all, you don't need 32 vertices to make something that skinny look round. These are wasted vertices.

Second, sculpties start doing wierd things when you have a lot of vertices in a small area. The more points you have in a small area, the more chance you have for jagged edges when you import that sculpt into Second Life. (See this troubleshooting guide.)

So. What do we do? We make an oblong sculptie! This is pretty easy to do. When you bring up the dialogue to create a sculptie, by default it shows 8 x 8 faces with 2 levels of multires. Change this to 4 x 16. When you enter the number for Y, initially, it will turn black and the Build button will be greyed out. Usually this just means the dialog wants you to press Enter so it can recalculate your sculpt mesh.

Look at the cross section of this new sculptie:

Now each edgeloop has half the number of vertices, which is still plenty to make it look round. We aren't wasting nearly as many points, and we won't have so many problems with edges becoming choppy.

What's more is, those points we took from the diameter of our edgeloops now go into making the length of the pipe. We can add even more bends. (Or we can work with multires so our pipe doesn't loose it's shape at a distance.)

Look at the difference between our original pipe and the oblong pipe. We have a lot more to work with. This doesn't just apply to pipes. It'll work for anything that has a long, skinny shape, like the frame of a dining chair, or scaffolding for a building, or a streetlamp, or a pencil twisted in the shape of a heart!

Baking an Oblong Sculptie

Domino's new primstar scripts automatically assigns your mesh an image sized based on the faces and and subdivision levels that you started with.

So if you started with a mesh with 8 x 8 faces and 2 subdivision levels, it will assign a 64 x 64 image.

If you start with a 4 x 16 mesh and 2 levels of subdivision, it will assign a 32 x 128 image.

In previous versions of my starter tutorials, I instructed people to start without subdivision levels (no multires) because I felt it was easier ( and I STILL feel it's easier) to start defining a mesh with less vertices.

However, if you start with an 8x8 mesh and no subdivision, your mesh will be assigned a 16x16 image, which isn't what you want. So now it's better to start with the 2 levels of subdivision and then manually delete the higher levels if you wish to start with a simpler mesh.

Tips, Tricks, and Notes

Oblong Tesselation is still rather new and while I use it all the time now, I can't, for the moment, think of any tips specifically related to it.

But as a note, there is some functionality of oblong tesselation that's still being developed. Particularly the ability to use LESS vertices than the current 1024, which would be useful for certain simple geometric shapes.