Creating a sculptie in Blender

From the Blender menus select Add - Mesh - Sculpt Mesh.

This will show the Primstar Add Sculpt Mesh dialog where you can set exactly what type of sculptie you want to create.

Let's take these options in groups.

The Shape settings control the basic shape of the mesh. The current shape is displayed in a text control, and there's a file selector icon which you can use to select an existing sculpt map image.

Clicking on the Shape display will popup a list of all the included sculpt mesh shapes.

The first group, above the separator, are mathematically generated. The options below the line are library sculpt maps. These are specially designed 512 x 512 sculpt maps that add variety to the starting shapes. Just click on the one you want, or outside of the popup menu to cancel.

You can add new library sculpt maps to the library folder in the primstar directory as png files. When baking them you should turn Finalise off as you want off vertex pixels to be a part of a continous surface to support odd face counts. You can create new folders in the library to add categories for the sculpt maps.

The Geometry settings control the grid layout of the basic mesh shape. Usually you will set these to the lowest lod that you want to model at. You can see the effect of changing the settings on the Map Info display. If you chose Torus X, Torus Z or a library shape then the radius option will also be enabled.

The Radius controls the size of the profile of the shape. With a torus, the higher this number the fatter the donut. On library shapes it only has an effect if the shape is based on a torus map. Then it affects the Z height of the shape.

If you set either of the face counts to a non-power of two number, then the clean LODs option will be enabled.

The Clean LODs option is also used as a warning flag when the modelling mesh doesn't match the final sculpties mesh. Most times, enabling Clean LODs will clear the warning. If it doesn't then there is usually another warning box suggesting something else to change.

Sometimes you will want to leave the warning and create the mesh anyway. This has an effect on how the shape is generated as the UV co-ordinates are used as the path and profile values.

If you don't use Clean LODs, you can manually align the UV to the LOD map after creation. Aligning manually to the brighter blue dots will help preserve LOD. You can automatically align to the nearest sculptie point by running UVs - Scripts - Align to Sculpt Map from the UV Image Editor.

The Map Info Display tells us the final size and face counts for the different LODs. The map size is displayed in bold at the top, this is the size of image the sculptie will bake to. So here we can see we are modelling at LOD1 with 8 X faces, 8 Y faces and 2 levels of subdivision.

You can change the Subdivision settings to affect the number of LOD levels above the basic geometry. Any change to the number of levels will update the Map Info Display. Using subdivision has an effect on the mesh shape. If you want the exact shape, set Levels to 0 and set the X Faces and Y Faces to the desired LOD3 face counts. You can bake the sculpt map and use Image - Import as Sculptie to get a multires version of the mesh.

Changing the level will adjust the maximum face counts. Here we've reduced the Levels to 1 and this gives a map size of 32 x 32 and LOD2 and LOD3 are the same. Normally you want this set high enough to get the final sculpt map size you desire.

You can change the type of Subdivision between Multires and Subsurf. This is really a personal preference that will affect the modelling workflow. I normally use subsurf and edge creases to do the initial stages of sculptie modelling. If you prefer working in Blender's sculpt mode, then multires may be a better option. Some people prefer to set levels to 0 and increase the geometry face counts to 32 x 32 to model just with the full LOD3 mesh. Experiment and find which technique suits your style the most.

Changing between Catmull and Simple will set the subdivision to smooth curves or straight lines. For edge crease modelling you'll want to set this to Catmull.

The library shapes tend to respond well to various different geometry and subdivision settings. You can experiment with the different shapes to get a feel for the possibilities.

Currently the Mesh Type is fixed as Quads. This means that each face in the sculpt mesh has 4 edges. The triangle option isn't currently under development but is planned for a future version of Primstar.

When you are happy with the settings, hit the Build button to create your sculpt mesh. Underneath the Build button are two options for saving the current settings. With Save ticked the current settings will be used the next you open the dialog. If you also tick Default the settings will be saved to disk and will be used even after restarting Blender.