sculptie

This topic was meant to be a video-tutorial for the "Primstar Basics" back to late 2009 but due to Domino's health condition and my stressful life we obviously couldn't do it.

So... Back to the topic, took the time take some images of the basic process on how to use bezier curves and sculptify the way I do it which is probably the most handy and commonly used among Blender users nowadays.

Bezier Curves usage can vary from easy (like this one) to a pretty complex manipulation to generate animations.

Here's a node setup for baking sculpties manually. You'll need to apply any subsurf and multires and then edit the uv map and move the top row and right hand side in by 1 pixel for an accurate bake.

Here's a test file I put together for the new baker. It uses an 8 x 256 oblong map to give 16 separate blocks which should work on LOD2 and LOD3. Do an Image - LOD bake on the sculpt map to make studying how I did it easier.

Basically, I cleaned up and copied a 4 x faces, 3 y faces sphere mesh along the UV Map leaving a gap of two faces (for 2 LOD levels) between each. This let's you model without connecting lines as the baker will fill in the gaps. Just make sure the edge of each gap is drawn to a single point on the mesh.