Sculpty Avatars?

Anyone got any sculpty avatars yet?

seen sculpty faces around Morris. they are pretty cool, give the furries some time

Sculpty's should help quite a bit as most furry heads are about 100 prims.

Muti-position Furry tails used to be about 80 prims with a script in each prim to change it to be invisable. The new flexi tails are 2 to 4 prims and have one to two scripts.

Then there are paw's and feet...

One nice thing about Sculpties is that the prim itself is takes less bytes and most furries will have the same texture key for each common shape. This means that they will load faster, use less cache space, and bandwidth.

Edit:
Corection: The "old style" furry heads are about 100 prims since they used dozens of tapered tori to make the hair.

and with scripting you will be able to easily change the sculpt texture. so you could even have exspressions. heck I don't know maybe animate things by changing out the texture. OOOO ! OOOO! IDEA! IDEA!

Morphing! we need morphing!. blend one textureing into another. Then you would have smooth aniamtion of sculpt prims. I wonder how hard this would be. This would be so sweet. This has so much potential.

can't wait for an editor I can afford.

Blender is free.

www.blender.org

Shape shifting avatars will now be possible!

With a lot of work

I wonder if they will add client side texture animation for the sculpty shape?

Texture animations should work all the same, unless you talk about sculpties morphing texture animation? o.o

I see the thread went in a slightly different direction than I thought.

With sculpies we might be able to make "manaquins."
I don't know how many verts you'd need to make a good NPC manaquin, but it should be possible now.
With scripted changing of the sculpt texture you could "animate" them too.

Texture animation style support for the sculpty texture would be AWESOME.

I'm currently embarking on the creation of a sculpty horse, I was working on one that's about 50 prims but some of the model is really hard to do without using loads more prims (as if 50 weren't enough) or just look wrong. With sculpties it should be possible
I have to learn Maya first though, I find Blender to be offensively hard to use purely on the basis that left and right clicks are the wrong way around! And it requires a middle mouse button for some things =S

Been trying it myself. The default SL Avatar OBJ files didnt work. Just tried it real quick. Well, it "did" sort-of work. Convert OBJ to SubDiv, SubDiv to NURBS, run exporter. Exporter created over 2015 BMP files before I realized what it was doing. Guess I'll have to weld the vertices together.

It would be really neat to have stores with Avatar Manequins

Sculpties should eventually allow us to drasticly reduce prim count and greatly improve appearance on things like the heads or tails or paws for Furry avatars. Probably better than a 20 to 1 reduction in number of prims needed for basic head or tail shape, for example.

But before that will happen, people will need to figure out a lot of what is needed to make them work at all, and what their limitations are. I know I've picked up a copy of Blender so I can give it a try. Steep learning curve, though, even for an experienced artist.

Being able to animate the texture for the morph layer on a sculptie is probbaly not going to happen any time soon. Since they are limiting the resolution of the morph layer to something like 64 x 64 pixels, mapped to a closed sphere shape, and since texture animation in SL usually requires placing multiple frames in a single texture and swapping between partial views with a script, I seriously doubt they will even try it. You'd need an array functiuon that could reference different morph textures via script control.

As a sculptor, I just find the term 'sculpty' irritating. It's as though the prim itself was an active participant in the process or something, or it's "sculpt-like", which it isn't, because there are no tools in SL that can actually make a sculpty prim - it's a spherical deformation map, pure and simple. Plus, it's very close to the word "Sculpy", which is a trade name for a commercially available low-temperature polymerizing modeling compound.

Though I have to admit I can't think of a better name for the darn things.

What I was wondering was if they could blend one into another. I have a wavey thing running in Morris. It is just a small 10 frame aniamtion which it changes out the texture. Gets the point acrross but very jumpy. But what kind of settings would you need. Start Textexture, End Texture, or a List of Textrues, Time between blends. Then you have to worry about how much processor time this would take.

But for this first version I am very happy with the result.

Yes, but is there an exporter for blender yet? The only one I've seen is the one for Maya released by Linden Labs. If there's one for Blender, don't be stingy!

There isn't an exporter, but there is a way of doing it manually. However, it doesn't seem to be loading the pictures anymore, it MIGHT still be possible to follow:
http://amandalevitsky.googlepages.com/sculptedprims

This tutorial (http://bentha.net/sculpted-tuto/Blender-export-template-tut.html) helped me get started on sculpties.

Quite simple too, I recommend going into sculpt mode instead of edit mode though.

If you download the .blend file at the bottom of that page, and have the latest version of Blender (2.43), then you can use Sculpt Mode on the model and very very quickly create some pretty interesting shapes to play with on the Beta Grid.

Actually modelling something that you actually like... Well, Blender is not beginner-friendly, but there are a ton of tutorials out there. My son uses it all the time, and for the last few days I keep calling him over to show me how to do something, haha.

.

I'm not sure how many here have played everquest 2 before but theres a player race that i play as there called Ratonga. Their sorta like anthro rodent creatures. Soon as sculpted prims get introduced in live, i may try my second attempt at making one in SL for myself. I don't really know how to use blender or maya or anything like that but my original attempt at making a Ratonga av 3 months ago turned out quite ugly. I've been thinking of changing my persona into a rat instead of being a wolf. ;p Just i think the rat avatars in SL right now are not my style.

Just looked 'em up! That'd be SO easy..... A Caveman could do it!
Mostly the head is egg shaped, which SL currently doesnt really have. I might take a shot at modeling the head. I think these sculpty prims are gonna be a boon to the Furries.

I made a head almost like that already, I was going for dragon, but was just trying to see how well a method of modeling worked.

I did it with 6 NURBS circles, on on each end, real tiny, two more for the snout, another two for the skull. The idea was to convert it to a mesh to add finer details (eye sockets), but the mesh wasn't dense enough. Same idea should work well for the mouse.

There are 7186 triangles on the basic avatar model.
Your average Sculptie has 64x64 = 4096 pixels = 4096 vertices = 4094 triangles, right?
So... 2 prims ought to be enough to get as much detail as an avatar?
Sounds like something's off in my calculations