In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to make a single sculptie look like more than one object.
Making the Cut
If you look at the image here, the cushions on this chair are both the same sculpted prim. They are connected by a tiny, invisible line of points. I’ll be showing you how to do just that. Before you read this tutorial, it’s recommended that you go through the Precision Sculptie tutorial.
The method was developed by Aminom Marvin.
The Long and Short of It
(Or… just short)
Okay. You want to know how to do this? I warn you. You will gawk at the simplicity.
Select one loop of vertices and scale it to 0. (You can scale to zero easily by tapping S, then the number 0.)
Then select the loop just above or below and scale it to 0 as well. Be sure you deselect the previous loop. (Did you know that you can select a loop in Blender by holding ALT and right-clicking on one of the edges in the loop?)
Congratulations! You just made a fractional sculptie! If you bake this and import it into Second Life, it will look like two separate objects. Maybe
Maybe? Yes. The pole may still show up. It will be thin, but it will be there, until you snap the vertices to the Precision Grid!
The Precision WHAT?
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you need to read through the Precision Sculptie tutorial. If you have read it, you might want to run through it again real quick, cause I’m not going to repeat much here.
Just remember that you need to set the grid to .01, scale the object to 2.55 x 2.55 x 2.55, line it up to the grid, then snap your vertices to the grid. After you’ve done this, you can bake your sculpt map and import it into Second Life and you should have completely invisible poles.
Tricks, Tips, and Notes
For simplicity’s sake I’m going to be referring to the separate sections of a fractioned sculptie as “pieces.” So in the first example in this tutorial, the sculptie would be separated into the top piece and the bottom piece.
Trick: Half Poles
If the one-point poles are taking away too many points for you, sometimes you can get away with using what I call ‘half poles.’ This only works if an end of one of the pieces will end up inside of another piece – hidden. Like…. THIS:
A brief summary of what’s going on here. I only pinched off a single loop, instead of two, then cap off the piece that will have the visible end. Then I resized the other piece so that the end would fit inside the capped piece (reduces clipping and other uglification problems). Then I rotated the smaller piece and repositioned it so that the connected end is now inside the larger piece. All the crap in between the two ends is inside the larger piece. No one’s going to see it, unless they’re trying to figure out how you made your awesome sculptie.
Tip: Don’t do it when you don’t need to.
I’ve seen a few people use Fractional Prim Modeling in cases when it’s really not necessary. Like… if you’re making a 1-prim sculptie hamburger, you probably don’t need to completely separate the patty from the buns. You’d just end up wasting vertices.
Often times you can get better results by using other methods to visually divide a sculptie. Be smart about it.
I would love to see more examples of this!
Maybe a tutorial on how to make a ladder?
I generally don’t like to get too specific with my tutorials. Like… perhaps some people would be able to take a tutorial on making a ladder and apply it to other things, but other people would look at a tutorial for making a ladder just to make a ladder, then ask for a tutorial on how to make a chair.
Maybe I’ll go through a few examples in either the blog or the forums or something, as far as tutorials, I’d rather keep to general information. People are generally smart enough to figure out the specific applications on their own.
Would this method be used to create an object that has more than one hole in it, such as the aforementioned ladder, or a honeycomb or lattice, etc.? Obviously if you only need a single opening you would use a torus, but how to do something with multiple openings? BTW thanks for making these tutorials. Several times before I tried to make sculpties with blender and got so frustrated I gave up. Since following your examples, it has been much easier to understand and i’m getting very inspired to create in SL again.
Thanks for the compliments.
And yes, you can use this to create a ladder pretty easily. In fact you wouldn’t even need to use half-poles for all of the rungs going up, so long as they were skinnier than the side posts. Maybe I’ll have to post some example screenshots in the forums.
A honey-comb would be more tricky, since you’d have to figure out how to get the hexagon shapes. Depending on the method you might not even have to split something like that, but instead fold it almost like an accordion.
First of, many thanks for this tutorial and the others. I’ve finally understood multi-part sculpties thanks to your excellent explanations.
I’ve been trying to do the thing with lining up the poles on the precision grid to hide them but not quite getting it to work (not using Blender though, but the principle should translate to other 3d software) and I wanted to ask if you’d consider posting a sculpt map for for the example as point of comparison.