In this tutorial you’ll learn how to make objects with more than one sculptie in Blender, and import all of it into Second Life, plus how to make duplicate sculpties in your blender file.
E Pluribus Unum
Sometimes it’s necessary to build an object with more than one sculptie. A knee-high boot, for instance, may need to be attached to more than one bone on the SL skeleton, or an object may have clearly different pieces like a belt and a buckle or a sword with a sheath, or a shape may simply be too complex to do easily with one sculptie.
You can model all of the sculpties you need in the same .blend file to be sure that the two sculpties fit together, and to do useful texture tricks, like having the sculpties cast shadows on each other. (See this tutorial)
Primstar Scripts
Domino’s new Primstar scripts actually include the ability to export multiple sculpties with a script that will let you recreate a multi sculpt object in Second Life.
Once you have things finished the way you want in Blender, bake the sculpt maps for all the sculpties you want to export. Next, select all the sculpt meshes in Object Mode, making sure the root prim is highlighted in bright pink.
Press Ctrl-P and select “Make Parent”. Double check that the other meshes are parented by selecting just the root object and moving it around. If the other objects follow, you’ve got it.
With that root object selected, go to the top menu and select File > Export > Second Life LSL (to dir). Browse to a folder (preferably an empty one) and hit ‘export’. This should save all of your sculpt maps and ONE plain text file with the extension .lsl. Open this lsl file with a program like Notepad, select all the text and copy it.
In world, rez a plain cube on the floor. Upload all of the sculpt maps and add them to the contents of your box. Next, create a new script inside the box, then double-click the new script to edit it. Delete the default script and replace it with the text you copied from the .lsl file.
Hit Save, and after a few seconds, the script will ask you to create a prim, name it “Primstar” and put it into the box. Do that. Then the script will ask you for linking permissions. Once you give the permissions, the script will start recreating your object in world, ending by linking everything together.
Duplicating a Sculptie
If you want to make a single sculptie that will be used on multiple parts of your build, go into Object mode and press Alt-D. And move the new object to where you want it.
This will create a new object, but the mesh for both will remain identical. If you edit the mesh in Edit Mode, both objects with change. If you scale/rotate/move the object in Object Mode, it will only effect the one object.
If the shape you need for a new sculpt mesh is similar to a mesh you already have, but not identical, go to Object Mode and press SHIFT-D instead. This will create a copy, but both the object and the mesh will be separate, so you can edit the new one without effecting the old one.
Adding a Mesh from an Older File
If you have a sculptie from a previous file that you’d like to add/edit in your current one, you can ‘append’ the object.
You may want to save your current file now, in case of error. Now we’ll be using a function in Blender that lets you browse inside another .blend file and select a part to add to your current file. Go to File > Append or Link.
From here, you may actually start inside your current .blend file, which is useless because Blender doesn’t let you append anything from inside your current file. (Can someone explain to me why Blender does this?) Hit “..” until you see the contents of your save directory, then find the .blend file that contains the mesh you want to append and click it, then click “Object”. From here you’ll see a list of the objects in that file. Hopefully you’ve renamed your sculptie objects so that you can easily identify them. Select the one you want, and click “Load Library.”
If you haven’t been doing it already, it’s good practice to rename your objects in Blender
This makes browsing with the Append feature easier, and also lets Primstar name your sculpt maps or you before you export them to your hard drive.
Great tutorials. On this one i have 4 meshes. Baked the 4maps went and made 1 mesh the parent of all 4. Exported to dir and problem is i get 4 lsl files one for each mesh. What am I missing.
Do you still have all four meshes selected? I believe you only want the parent mesh selected. (Also try moving just the parent mesh and see if the others follow, just to make sure they are really parented.)
Alt- D does not copy objects while in object mode for some reason, also, I get a “Python script error” whenever I attempt to export a sculpt. What do i do? I’ve re-installed Blender and still have no luck.
A python script error can mean one of many different things. Usually these errors will generate text in the console. (If you’re running windows, this is the other window that opens with Blender.) Reading this text might be enough for you to figure out the problem on your own. Otherwise, write the error here and I might be able to help you better.
It might be that you don’t have the right version of Python installed. 2.7.x and 3.0 are both not compatible with Blender currently. You’ll need version 2.6.x, found here: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6.5/
Hai. Im trying to upload about 24 sculpts at once by using this technique. I baked all the maps and then did the parent thing. Once i try to export it it only exports 1 of the tga maps and then a lsl document which i cant open or do anything with. It doesnt give me any scripts and the other sculpts are missing.
Is there something im missing?
The .lsl file is the script. You just need to tell your operating system to open the file in a basic text reader like WordPad, but if its only exporting one tga file, then there will only be one sculptie in the script, which won’t do you any good.
Did you select just the parent object and move it around to make sure it was properly parented?
Yup, but it still only made one sculpt map. Im going to give it a few more trys. I have tried baking all the maps at once and i tried doing them seperately. Its probably something simple i didnt click.
I notice its making the same map every time i try it, could it be something with that sculpt itself?
Also, the bake map isn’t changing maps when i click on different sculpts. I bake one map and then click on another sculpt and the map is the same as the one i just baked. When i try to bake the new sculpts map, it is kind of overriding the map of all the other sculpts.
That would do it. If there’s only one file in Blender, then the exporter only has one file to export. Did you by chance make your other sculpties by duplicating the first?
Fix it by assigning new 64 x 64 images to the other sculpties before you bake them.
oh yes, actually i made all the sculpties by duplicates to make it easier on my self. Ill try that now!
Well i tried to assign new images but now it wont bake the sculpts at all. I’m getting this message in the blender window whenever i try.
debug gui 000 – bake failed after 0.0197sec.
The sec changes whenever i try and bake.
That.. is odd. Quickly make sure that you actually have the new images assigned. Go into edit mode and select all the pixels. Look in the UV/Image editor and see if it shows the small black image. If not, probably what happened is you didn’t switch to multires level 1 before creating the new sculpt image. It’s a weird quirk of Blender. Won’t let you assign new images to a mesh at higher levels of multires.
That’s the only thing I can think of, anyway. If that doesn’t work, you might have to email me the file so I can take a quick look. So long as you don’t mind.
Heyhey sorry for the absence, but i saw that the levels were at 2, so i switched them to 1. Now the problem is that im getting an error message saying ::
Runtime Error: couldn’t load image data in Blender
I dont know what this means, but when i try to bake it doesn’t bake anything. The bake sign stays there and then if i click the background it goes away without doing anything. Also its still changing the sculpt map of the previous sculpt i baked.
Do you think it could be a problem with my program? Im going to keep giving it a try.
Also i can send the file to you with no problem.
Hmm. Not sure about that one. I tried googling it, and the only person who seemed to have solved that problem reinstalled Python. So maybe try reinstalling Python and/or Blender and see if that clears up the issue.
What exact versions of blender, python and primstar are you using? also, do you use the installer or unpack one? (not sure this matters i am just running out of ideas to try here)
infact, i think people would appreciate direct links to download everything you have for your blender. i know i would! ^^ hope you do that
I.. actually DO give pretty direct links to everything that I use in the installation tutorial. You might want to check that out.
Thank you so much! i had completely missed the install tutorial. I had the same problem most did and for the life of me couldn’t figure out what was wrong. After doing your install tutorial it worked smoother than smooth! thanks again