Construction Parameters:

  • Width (default=1): Range [1, … ] Number of faces along each individual Brick’s X-Axis
  • Depth (default=1): Range [1, … ] Number of faces along each individual Brick’s Y-axis.
  • Height (default=1): Range [1, … ] Number of faces along each individual Brick’s Z-Axis
  • Rotate (default=0): Range [-360, 360]

Bricks can be used to create fractional sculpties. A fractional sculptie is one single object which looks as if it where made out of two or more unconnected parts. But despite its look, it is still based on a regular sculpty mesh and all apparently isolated parts are connected to each other by “tiny tubes”. While you can see these connection lines in blender, they will go away once you have uploaded your sculptie to SL. With Primstar-2 you can temporarily separate the fractions into detached Submeshes. See below for instructions how to do that.The number of generated Bricks will be highly dependent on the settings of Width, Height, Depth and Subdivision Levels. As a rule of thumb you can say: The more bricks you get the less faces are available for each brick (because the total number of faces may never exceed 1024 for the entire sculptie !)

The Construction Parameters:

  • Width (default=1): Range [1, … ] Number of faces along each individual Brick’s X-Axis
  • Depth (default=1): Range [1, … ] Number of faces along each individual Brick’s Y-axis.
  • Height (default=1): Range [1, … ] Number of faces along each individual Brick’s Z-Axis
  • Rotate (default=0): Range [-360, 360]

Subdivision Levels and LOD

Fractional sculpting is very sensitive to LOD. If you do not take care here, your model will fall badly apart when you move your camera just a few meters away. So you have to take special care how to cut your object into fractions. Primstar-2 tries to optimize the fraction to always get the best possible LOD behaviour. The number of Subdivision levels is the key here! Here is the mapping:

Subdivision Levels Stable LOD’s Bricks
0 3 up to 64
1 2,3 up to 16
2 1,2,3 up to 4
3 0,1,2,3 up to 1

Modeling with separated bricks

Once you have created your bricks array with a subdivision levels > 0 then you can temporarily separate the bricks as follows:

  1. Go to Object mode
  2. In the properties Tab select the “Modifiers”
  3. Apply the Subsurf Modifier
  4. Go to edit mode and select all collapsed vertices along the connection lines between the bricks. Take care to not select the vertices which are located on the surface of the bricks.
  5. delete the selected vertices. Now you will end up with all your bricks separated

Hint: Also remind that the vertices are collapsed, so just right clicking does not work as expected. Use the border select tool instead! And ensure that “limit selection to visible” is DISABLED(!)

Note that with Blender 2.4 this option was disabled by default, while with Blender 2.6 it is enabled by default.

 

[PS-Youtube id=”8dZUoJBqeXE” w=”640″ h=”386″]

Examples

16 Bricks (stable with LOD 2,3)
All bricks
1 Brick (scaled to Cube)
Width 1
Depth 1
Height 1
Rotate 0
Subdiv. level 1
8 Bricks (stable with LOD 2,3)
All bricks
1 Brick (scaled to Cube)
Width 1
Depth 2
Height 2
Rotate 0
Subdiv. level 1
4 Bricks (stable with LOD 1,2,3)
All bricks
1 Brick (scaled to Cube)
Width 1
Depth 1
Height 1
Rotate 0
Subdiv. level 2