[sldev] Sculpties: Vacuum-Forming, Skittering, Zone Linking

[John Hurliman]

Laurent Laborde wrote:
> On 9/28/07, Dale Mahalko <dmahalko at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> 1. Vacuum-Forming
>>
>> A sculptie is best defined as a balloon. It is a continuous shape that is
>> extremely flexible, and pliable, that can be poked and prodded and molded
>> into practically any shape. The difficulty in working with a sculptie is
>> finding ways to manipulate this balloon.
>>
>> One of the easiest ways to make complex meshes and individual prims
>> translate into a sculptie, is to treat the sculptie as if it were being made
>> in a vacuum-forming machine. To do this, traditional meshes and prims are
>> placed inside a sculptie "inflated" to its maximum size, and the sculptie is
>> then programmatically "deflated" so that it surrounds and conforms to the
>> shape of the meshes/prims within.
>>
>> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8573678537143717206
>>     
>
> I tought about something like that some days ago.
>
> - create an object with random mesh
> - create a "soft-body" sphere around it (a ballon)
> - reduce presure in the ballon
> - wait
> - enjoy.
>
> exemple of soft body stuff + white paper :
> http://panoramix.ift.uni.wroc.pl/~maq/eng/softbody.php
>
>   

Cool link, thanks. I created a very very crude version of something 
along these lines when sculpties were first released that created a 
sphere of 64x64 points around an arbitrary mesh, raycasted each point 
inwards at the center of the mesh and use the collision point as the 
final pixel value in the sculpt map. It worked fine for a simple cube, 
but when I started trying it on more complex objects it gave very 
bizarre results, mostly because 64x64 is a very small amount of points 
when they are all equidistant. A better algorithm would be able to bias 
more points to complex parts of the object (like the sharp corners of a 
cube).

John Hurliman