Archipelis Designer: Sculpty Program for the n00bs?

I include myself in that statement.

I’ve been working with Rokuro since Sculpties debuted to get what I need. This means I’m limited to a 360-degree round, I can’t make holes, I can’t have asymmetry. I would always have symmetry. Symmetrical damnation. See above.

In a pathetic ditch effort to break away from Rokuro, I tried ZBrush… can’t do it. Or at least, I don’t have the patience to do it. I don’t even want to look at Maya.

Then I found this other program one night while checking my email. Ah, the fun of Google Ads on my email. The  program was called Archipelis, and boasted easy SL importation. So why the hell not?

How Archipelis Works Look In SL

My first attempt was a heart. I figured it was a simple shape, and it would give me a good idea of how the program worked with rounded edges and sharp angles. Creating in Archipelis is interesting  – you actually hold down your left mouse button and just … drag. Just hold and drag. It’s easy, and would be even better with a tablet.

You can even switch to a point-system and fiddle with any mistakes you may have made. On mine, my edge was a bit flat and I wanted to fix that. You can see, however, where the program wasn’t responding quite perfectly to my inner angle. I don’t know what was going on with that but it wasn’t enough for me to worry about.

There’s also a quad-view you can try out. I didn’t mess with this much.

Yay! Weird edge fixed — time to import to Second Life! Exportation in Archipelis is easy, as indicated in the above image. Just click, and wait for the green progress bar above your draw area to finish rendering.

A few more clicks, an upload, and there it is! There’s something really odd with the upper right edge though, and I haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet – whether it was me, or the program.

Yeah. Not so awesome. However, at this point I was getting tired and frustrated, and as I am easily and often overwhelmed by new programs, colored my heart and left for the day.

I sent the Archipelis creator an email inquiring what to do about the particular ridging, and got this back:

Regarding the accuracy of the mesh, you have two solutions:

- first increase the mesh quality (but warning this increase dramatically the computation time)

- second, change your workflow and export to 3DSMax or Blender (for instance) to smooth the mesh

(Blender perfectly does that for free).

Hope this explanation helps you.

Thank you

Best regards

Archipelis.com