Beginners guide: Introduction to 3D Wings and the Exporter.

In the following article we offer you a short introduction to Wings 3D. In addition to a definition of the term, this article also contains detailed information about an Exporter plugin. Wings 3D can be used to create a 3D configurator.

What is Wings 3D?

Wings 3D is an advanced subdivision modeler that is both powerful and easy to use.

Originally inspired by Nendo and Mirai of Izware, Wings 3D has been developed since 2001, when Björn Gustavsson and Dan Gudmundsson first started the project. Richard Jones was in charge of Wings and programmed many new features between 2006 and 2011. Wings 3D is currently maintained by Dan and Richard with the help of the large community.

Wings 3D offers a wide range of modeling tools, a customizable user interface, support for lights and materials, and an integrated auto UV mapping feature. There is no support in Wings for animation.

The Exporter plugin for Wings 3D.

An Exporter is a plugin for Wings that creates an SL-compatible texture file from the .wings model. In the case of Wings 3D, the Exporter plugin is also an Importer. This allows Wings 3D to read sculpty files created in special sculpty programs like Rokuro, Tokuroten or Sculptypaint. Wings 3D can then be used to add additional details that are not possible in these simpler programs.

The Wings 3D plugin was written by Omei Turnbull and can be downloaded for free.

First templates.

To create a model, first open one of the .wings template files from the plugin zip file. These templates are named after the number of segments and layers and whether the surfaces are represented by triangles or quadrangles.

For most models 32x31tri.wings is a good choice. There are very few advantages in modeling with a 64×63 mesh and there are considerable disadvantages. Of the nearly 3,000 additional nodes in a 64×63 mesh, only 32 of them actually have an impact on the sculpture in SL. Unless you know exactly which 32 nodes they are, you risk simply being disappointed because the details of your model are based on some of those 2950+ nodes that are ignored when they come into SL. As for the triangular vs. four-sided surfaces, the triangular Wings surfaces allow for better adaptation to the way SL presents its model. The only disadvantage of triangular surfaces is that they make the model look more “present”.

The big advantage of starting with one of the templates instead of creating a sphere with the Wings command is that the templates contain UV maps that allow you to create and preview sculpty textures with only Wings and any 2D painting program.

Other topologies.

In the original version of sculpties, SL supported only sculpties with a “spherical” topology (that is, the surface has no fractures and the solid has no holes). At the time of writing, SL has incomplete support for the planar topology (one surface fracture), cylinder (two surface fractures), and torus (no surface fractures, but a hole in the solid). The Wings 3D plugin fully supports all four topologies.

Import/export options.

The Ex- and Importer now has a number of options that allow the SL sculpty to better match the Wings model (or vice versa). To access these options, click the box on the right side of the File/Export/SL Sculpties menu. If you click anywhere to the left of the field, Wings will export with the default option values.

Export options.

• Bitmap size. The size of the sculpty bitmap is not necessarily tied to the size of the model. The main reason for this is that using a 128×128 bitmap for quite some time after the introduction of Sculpties was the best way to minimize the compression artifacts generated by SL, regardless of the resolution of your model. At this point, however, a 64×64 bitmap combined with the lossless upload option is generally a better choice.
• Allow recentring? Without this option, accuracy can be compromised due to quantization errors if your model is not aligned with the intersection of the major axes, as floating-point numbers are mapped to the 8-bit integers required by SL. Re-centering does not change your Wings model. It allows the exporter to easily select a better coordinate system for creating the sculpture. The default setting is that re-centering is allowed. But if you want to create very small sculptures, you can do this by creating your model eccentrically and then unchecking this option. You can also use this option if you want the sculptured shape to be shifted from the center, e.g. to change the movement when the prim is rotated.
• Allow rescaling? Without this option, models that are long and thin are very prone to quantization errors, so this is an important option for these models. However, the default value is that it is disabled. When enabled, the exporter creates a “compact” sculpture, i.e. one whose length, width and height are all the same. After the Sculpty has been split into SL, you need to pull it back to its original shape. The additional step makes this an “advanced” technique, but the increased accuracy of the result makes it very rewarding.

Import Options.

• Topology. The sculpty bitmap format does not specify the intended topology, so you have the option to specify one when importing. Spherical is the default. For example, changing a sculpture from spherical to planar topology does not change its overall shape at all – it only creates a gap along the seams of the sculpture.
• You now have the choice of creating triangular or four-sided surfaces. The default is triangles. As already mentioned, triangular surfaces allow the wings to be better adapted to the look of the model in SL.

Texture preview.

If you start with one of the supplied templates, you can use Wings in combination with any 2D painting program to texture your model. The steps are as follows:

1. In the Geometry window of the menu window, select Outline. The Outliner window shows you all the components of your model. Click with the left mouse button on the entry “Standard Sculpty Texture”. Release the mouse button, click on the texture line again with the left mouse button and drag & drop it onto the “Sculpty Material” line. When prompted, select “Diffuse” (There is a peculiarity in the Outline window that requires separate actions to first select an element and then do something with it). Your model should now have a pattern of black lines and colored squares with letters. This is the default texture with the required Sculpty UV map. The pattern will guide you as you paint a texture.
2. Let Wings create a new texture bitmap file by right-clicking on the Default Sculpty Texture and selecting Make External. (Remember that when you use the Outliner window, the context menu refers to the selected item, not the item you are moving the mouse over. If the context menu doesn’t contain the options you expect, it’s probably because you forgot to left-click the line first). Name the texture file as you like, but choose a name that distinguishes it from the sculpty bitmap file.
3. Open the file you just created in your favorite painting program. You should see the texture wrapped around your model in the Wings window. For better orientation, select your entire model in Wings and open the UV Editor window from the Windows menu. You should see the same texture bitmap you see in your painting program. Now bring both the Wings Geometry window and the UV Editor window into Face Selection Mode. (This is the third of four icons in the middle of the toolbar at the top of the window.) If you now select an area of your model in the Geometry window, the corresponding area of the texture in the UV editor window will also be highlighted. Use this as a guide to find out where to paint with your painting program. Continue to finish your texture. Wings do not reflect their painting while you work, but if you want to update the view of Wings, save your file in the Painting program, right-click the texture line in the Outliner window and select Update.
4. If you are satisfied with the results, export the sculpty bitmap file from Wings. The texture file that you painted is ready to use and is not edited by Wings.

Other interesting features.

• Export Selected: Useful if you have several objects open in Wings at once. In this case, select the one object you want to export and choose Export Selected instead of Export. Note, however, that Wings easily switch from (frequently used) Export to (rarely used) Export Selected when you mouse over the Export Selected line while switching to the Export submenu.

• Texture Orientation in SL: The sculpty bitmap is rotated so that you do not have to rotate the texture in SL when applying it to a newly created Sculpty.

We hope we were able to give you a first overview of Wings 3D.

Thank you very much for your visit.