Am I the Only One who Thinks Sculpties are Ugly?

Sure, sculpties can be ugly. I especially hate the LOD. But... otherwise the stones around my campfire would have been 6 prims, now just 1 sculpty. It's all about finding the right balance for prim count and visual quality.

I tend to agree, my old card had a hard time rendering sculpts, sometimes it just wouldn't especially if the area had a lot

with the new card, they pop up very quickly

I think sculpties are great when they are used to make organic objects like rocks and pieces of wood. They have greatly enhanced shoes and hair too. I don't think they make a good replacement for things that are straight and geometrical like houses.

I am a sculpty fanatic. However, I do have to admit to the problems people have mentioned here. Dealing with LOD switches is very difficult and getting sensible texturing is even harder. Doing both at the same time is .... arrggghh!

By the way, the distance at which the LOD switches depends on the mesh detail settings in graphics preferences as well as the size of the sculpty - it happens much nearer for a 0.2m shoe than for a 10m rock, and it can be different for different residents. How bad the effect is depends on the detail of the sculpty design.

Sculpties were originally designed for rounded "organic" shapes, and this is where they work best. People like me, most of them more clever, have tried to push the technology beyond it's intended scope, with angular objectes of ever greater complexity, and that is where the problems can arise.

There have also been a number of difficult problems affecting sculpties. The lossy upload of the earliest sculpt maps led to irregularities that badly affect some of the older sculpties. A strange delay in downloading led to long delays in proper rezzing, leaving us looking at horribly mangled things.

There is a load of improvements and fixes in the latest release candidate viewer that should improve the performance of sculpties in many ways, but will not remove the problems completely. That will have to wait for the implementation of real meshes.

Possibly. I often see every texture in view fully rezzed and still blobby sculpties all over. In fact, one or another of the trees in my yard will quite often simply refuse to rez at all unless I try to edit it. I'm usually on a newish nVidia card (8500 GT) that I take to be sort of mid-range, a 5Mb/s internet connection, etc., but it's a Linux box, so that probably doesn't help.

Truthfully, I couldn't make half the things I do in SecondLife without sculpties. I made horses pre-sculpt, and frankly, they always had a "stuffed animal" look to them that wasn't exactly what I was looking for. Not that it can't be done well, but there will always be that distinctive "primmy" look. Sculpts allow me to make organic shapes smoothly, and with far fewer prims. For animation, a single prim leg is MUCH smoother than a multiple prim leg, and uses one script where before one would use eight or more (my old leg prim count)

I recently made a wandering antelope with all of 12 prims. I mean, honestly, perhaps better builders than I could do something like this with just regular prims, but I doubt they would do it with less than three times as many prims:


Note that I *do* use regular prims there where I can, but I challenge someone to make a leg with tendons and muscles without going overboard on prim count. Yes, sculpts have quite a few vertices, but if you are not coming out ahead if you are using bunches of cut toruses to create curves where one sculpt would have done the trick.

I am not trying to hold my antelope up as some example of wonderful 3D modeling--trust me, I've met RL pros here. But it is a good example of what someone with average building skills can do with sculpted prims. (as an aside, it was a commission for Caledon, and not for sale)

There are tricks to using sculpts, and none of them are huge trade secrets. Where you need detail (such as the hocks and hooves on the antelope), move your vertices there. Don't waste them on flat stretches. Try not to stretch textures--in the areas you have to, try for simple textures that won't show the stretch. Hide your poles. Don't use a sculptmap any larger than you have to. Try importing it as lossless first, as those maps seem to load faster.

I could go on, but really, if you wish to make sculpts, spend some time perusing the building forum. There are some amazing helpful people over there, and lots of stickied threads with heaps of information.

Happy building!

It's the genitalia which bother me most. Until it all rezzes it looks like this big grey blobby growth on your front-bottom.

I like the shoes though.

Well done sculpties look good - it's when people try to push them beyond their capabilities that they look awkward.

Sorry, double post caused by error message!

are sculpties harder to make than prims and if so is that why some sculpty shoes cost so much?

Sculpties have to be designed with third party software. For the most part, the sculptmaps will be created offline, although there are a few in world devices that allow sculpt creation

Here's the a list of programs you can use:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_3d_Software_Guide
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_Resident-made_Tools

For more information, look at the stickies at the top of the Building Forum here.

In fact both sculpties and toruses have 2048 triangles at the highest LOD. So you are VERY far ahead.

LOL -- really, the only part I needed that explains why they start as blobs while rezzing is:


Thanks for what seems to be a really good explanation, though it is mostly lost on me. 'll bet there are plenty that actually understood it. I'll just chalk it up to another cool thing about you.

It is a viewer problem, VWR-5785. That is one of the things that seems to be fixed in 1.21. Up through RC1 that's been replaced by a problem where *other* textures have had a tendency to stall out, but with the short time I've had to tool around in RC2 it looks like they may have found the right mix =)

Sculpties have their problems but they allow us to do things that wouldn't be possible at all without them. Despite their flaws I think they're the best feature added to SL since uploadable animations. People are making some really amazing looking things with them. Who cares if they take a minute or two to load?

The misshapen thing at a distance is caused by the LOD (level of detail) handling in the viewer. In a close view a sculpty has 32x32 control points; each point describes the distance of that location of the sculpted object from the center. At a larger distance that is decreased to 16x16, and that's when the ugliness can happen. It's worse if the designer really tries to use the full 32x32 to define the shape of the object, rather than basically designing a 16x16 object and then using the additional points to refine it a bit. LL is in the process of adding support for non-square sculpt maps, such as 64x16 or 128x8 -- any combination of powers to two that multiply to 1024 -- but you're not likely to encounter products using those right now.

In theory detail should only be lost when things are too far away for you to notice, but in practice the viewer is sometimes too aggressive. You can improve the situation somewhat by moving the Object Detail slider toward the right (more detail); that makes the LOD culling happen at a larger distance.

Great description of LOD, Shirley.

Just wanted to add, for those that don't know - LOD happens on all objects in SL, not just sculpties. It is more noticeable on many sculpties because normal prims have a very regular, geometric configuration that has a better chance to withstand this reduction of detail.

If we're talking more than 400-500L, those sculpty shoes cost that much due to sheer arrogance.

sculpt shoes (some) cost so much because the creator is trying to either get as much as they can, or trying to recoup costs

some shoe makers create their own sculpt maps and charge a RL type fee (which I think is wrong, after all sell more for less, once made there are no additional costs for that item) not counting land and such

OR

some shoe makers buy premade sculpt maps and try to recoup the costs again by charging too much


I make shoes and buy my sculpt maps, and I price what I think is a fair price, not because I had to buy the sculpt maps, but because I feel it is a fair price for the item


there are some sculpt shoes I would love to have the map textures for, I get lots of ideas for them but can not it without the textures heh

agreed

was trying to think of a tactful way to say, those who charge more than even 250 for a single pair of shoes are greedy bastards!

but I could not think of a tactful way to say it, so I didn't

I was taking boots into consideration too.

I find the biggest problems with sculpties, is the lack of imagination. After looking around for new furniture, over the past two weeks, 90% of furniture looks the same. Same shapes, same textures.

That being said, I applaud those that can make a decent looking, and textured, sculpty, my efforts have been rather poor, to say the least.

The only things I don't like about sculpties are:

1. Most designers don't know how to prevent LOD from turning a sculptie into patchwork.
2. They try to compensate for it by using needlessly big textures for sculpties which load too slowly and fail anyway.
3. They aren't milking sculpties for all the prim saving they could bring.

One prim sculpted staircase. Not two. One, not phantom and works ideally anyway. One prim bathroom sink that shines of very realistic porcelain. One prim armchair. And none of it suffers when you zoom out. Sculpted trees. It took me days to find these things, but they do exist.

Notice that a sculptie really does contain the same number of polygons as a ball, and a box only contains a little less polygons than a ball. (Long story why, but yes, that's how it works.) A single prim really is the most reasonable unit of computing power in SL. Proper usage of sculpties incurs tremendous savings for everybody.

Hmmm.... I've started using sculpties in moderation for jewelry. Most of the prims I use are regular prims but a few sculpties can make a big difference. I tried my hardest to make a double-terminated hexagonal crystal shape from prims, and I did succeed but aligning all the edges was difficult. I finally decided to try to make a sculptie in the same shape (not hard to do with the right program) and it was a much more elegant solution and looks much cleaner. 1 prim vs. about 10 prims, and straight geometric lines too. Oh... and sculptie gems? Nice.....

Sorry, but I love sculpties.

I have two pairs of wedgies that are both sculpted. Both very cute designs. But one bleeds the foot through unless you are up close while the other looks fine at almost any distance. Even resizing the bleeding one so it's bigger makes no difference. I've often wondered what causes this. I asked the shoemaker and she just said it's a problem with sculpties in general.