Is total sculpt the way to go?

Last weekend I spent exploring the Japanese sims for the first time.
Oh my god did I see see some fabulous builds,Some so good they almost put me off ever building again. I saw masses of sculps with textures that were perfect,although it can take forever to rez which spoils the whole effect.

One particular place that I want to plug,I see as one of the best I have seen and almost completely sculpted.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/EDO%20JAPAN/82/219/27

There are also some fab freebies for both sexes.

I would love to know your comments and views should we all build sculpted!!

This, combined with bounding-box issues, puts me off builds that use loads of sculpts, although I agree they can look fantastic. A few very well made and textured sculpts in a build can lift the whole thing to a new level.

Yes. I think sculpts are the future. I would not build plain old-fashioned builds with a very high prim number. I also like baked in shadows on the textures, but I am not sure how they will look if SL release a viewer with shadows .... "real" moving shadows.

Seconded.

I am really wondering why some sculpt makers can make sculpts that rez so much quicker than other sculpt makers. I wonder if you complain about sculpts when you should complain about the creator?

Let me try to explain: I got a sculpted 1 prim bridge that took "forever" to rez. I got another sculpted 1 prim bridge from another creator, and it rez much, much quicker. Even after I cleared cache manually to recolver some lost inventory, the last creator's items rez much faster.

Not just this example, and I always set up RenderVolumeLodFactor. That should not make a difference from creator to creator.

Just like normal textures, sculpt-maps can be saved and uploaded in different sizes. Big ones are, I assume, useful for detailed objects but overkill if used for simpler shapes. Part of the slow rezzing is undoubtedly due to the use of larger than necessary sculpt-maps, but any sculpty has two textures to load instead of one for a normal prim.

there are a few tricks that sculpty makers use to rez their builds far far quicker...and...yes..some just arent as good as others

the size of the sculpts uv map would effect load times. would even guess that file format could also(.tga vs.png). i have seen 512 uv maps where a 32 would do great. smaller file size should push it up the load priority list.

Bounding boxes are also easy to control, only really becoming an issue with odd or complex shapes.

all that said, a build using only sculpts will look great to people with rockin puters and connys, but not do much to someone with older or slower puter or connection.
i would suggest building to your target audience. ie: office puters get boring prims and low res stuff, gamer puter builds go for awesomes.

I want my SL to look good, and I don't have a "gamer" computer. If my old crap can handle sculpts, I buy sculpts.

I think the idea of "total sculpty" is a bit overkill. There are many cases where normal prims work fine. You can even get fairly complex with a bit of creative cutting.

Sculpties *do* have their place, whether to save prim counts or to achieve very complex or organic shapes. People just need to to exercise common sense in determining when to use sculpties. Well, and you have to be proficient at making sculpties...

IMHO sculpties won't take over until they become much easier to make.

I've been wondering about sculpties, too.

As an SL traveller, I'm put off by beautiful sims that take forever to rez. Instead of experiencing the build by walking into it and exploring, you have to stand and wait while watching it appear piece by piece which really destroys the whole exploring concepts. I sometimes switch to a different window and do something else while waiting for things to load, but that doesn't always work, either.

As a builder, I am wondering if I should spend the time required to learn how to create sculpties (i.e. Blender). Are sculpties the way of the future in SL or are they so bogged down with oversize textures and other issues that people will just come to hate them until they fall out of favour?

Is there anything being done (on LL's or third party viewer developers' part) to improve how sculpties rez inworld?

B.

we've had a few houses that were loaded with sculpts..

the key word there is HAD..
lag monsters..too much is not a good thing..moderation with sculpts is good .but when you start packing one place with them the rezz is worse than regular prims because the engine is working harder to do the math..
they are good is they save on prims..but not if they are just replacing prims..

a sculpt and a cube sitting next to each other ..the sculpt is gonna lag more than the single prim..even if the sculpt is a cube that is made right..

a texture on a prim cube may take longer but the cube shape is there while a cube sculpt is still doing the math to turn into a cube..and you still have to rezz the texture on the sculpt..

I don't think they'll fall out of favour until something better comes along. I have heard rumours that uploadable meshes are on their way, so if that's true I expect sculpties' days are numbered.

Blender looks like a LOT of learning to me, especially if you only want it for this one feature. I have just started to learn Sculpt Studio. It's an inworld modelling tool, which (looking at the work of others) seems to produce some very good results.

Isn't Snowglobe supposed to be much faster at rezzing textures? Would it speed up sculpties as well?

actually the only hard thing about blender is looking at all the stuff it has and eliminating all those things you don't need to use..once that part is figured out it's all down hill..

i've got just about every inworld sculpt tool there is and once i figured blender out it really was faster and easier and you could do soo much more..

sculpt studio is a great tool in world also..but blender in my opinion ..once you understand it ..it has so much more that you can do to make sure your sculpts are the best they can be..

another i hear is z brush..i haven't tried that one yet but i'm getting there soon i hope when my rl schedule calms down some..

There are a surprisingly large number of folks on SL with inadequate machines, until very recently I used a laptop with integrated Intel graphics a lot of the time. That machine still works with SL at low frame rates, but all-sculptie sims kill it.

So, "total sculpt" builders are missing low-end residents. Perhaps that doesn't matter to builders, but it DOES matter to the residents.
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That.

Goes for malls and store owners, too. ESPECIALLY.

While I very much appreciate a beautiful build that is also a mall - I just hate malls that are simply one box of displays after another - I think a lot of folks don't realize that loading their shops up with huge textures and sculpties makes the place a rezzing nightmare.

I no longer bother with hunts because of this and I've left stores without looking around just because I got tired of waiting for things to appear on my screen. And my computer is pretty decent.

I also dabble with blender ,I like fiddling with new programs, The scultps I seem to handle but the textures I just can,t get my head around and this is putting me off.I keep trying but I would not put anything out yet as they are just not up to scratch.I heard there was a texture tool that might help,so until I find that I will have to keep trying.

I want my SL to look great. I want everybody's SL to look great.

That having been said, though, even if I created the absolute best set of sculpt maps ever, something good enough to qualify a sim as the eighth wonder of the world, if the sculptmaps don't resolve themselves, people see ugly blobs, not the inherent beauty in the sim that they're supposed to see.

For this reason it's a good idea to build for the lowest denominator whenever possible, as long as it doesn't damage the intended goal beyond repair.

No to all-sculpt builds. A very emphatic no from me.

It's a no here. Only use sculpts when necessary for prim count or if the object cannot be made with normal primitives.

The hardest part of making sculpts IS the texturing. Often the texture is stretched in some places and squashed in others. Keeping the mesh faces all square, all over the sculpt solves that but is harder said than done. x1024 textures have more detail and look much better but you cannot use them everywhere. I do my best with 512s mostly and few 1024s. A lot of shapes can use texture repeats, like stairs so a smaller texture can be used.

I would love to make everything in sculpties or mesh but we must think of generic users first. The lowest common denominator as far as PCs go.

Japanese sims are by far some of the most enchanting on the Grid. I've never seen anything quite comparable. Most Japanese sim designers use sculpts and glow particularly well and I'm not a huge fan of either myself.

However, I do build with sculpts and with regular prims, using sculpts where necessary to achieve a certain effect (usually organic).

It's nice to see well made sculpts rez in quickly, but not all sculpt creators and their sculpts are created equal. I'm not a fan of mostly sculpts unless they rez in well.

Interesting, that I spoke with a designer of sculpted grass, walkways and bridges, and told him how pleased I was because his sculpts rez'ed fast, even if I unpacked them on my shitty laptop. He laughed and said how old his computer was.... I was almost falling of my chair in RL.

Maybe that's why, he was forced to learn how to make sculpts rez fast since his computer was old. I always thought SL builders had the newest, fastest computers and it could be a drawback, if they have "simply the best" computers they don't see how it looks for the more mediocre machines.

Sculpts have their problems for ornamentation, but for scripting they're perfectly useless: they just won't *do* anything. Well, you can slide them around and squeeze them and tint them a different color, but they're so limited in geometry parameters that the only way to do anything interesting is to load a new sculptmap (as if that were ever timely enough for a user-interactive surface). If it's an interesting new sculptmap, it will take a whole new surface texture, too, so it's "click... (coffee break)... effect."

That single surface texture is a big limitation. For one thing, to look half-way presentable, a sculpty surface texture is usually much higher resolution than the sum of the face textures on non-sculpted prims because that one texture has to smear across the entire prim surface; what's more, there's (generally) no way of recovering detail with texture repeats.

I'm pretty sure that these limitations will apply to meshes, too, except that the shape itself may load more quickly.

Back when sculpties were new and rare, there was a common trick of pre-loading sculptmaps that would be needed later. The downside, of course, is that those "prospective" sculptmaps slowed down the loading of the initial shape--and every other texture in view. I remember a goofy dolphin (I think it was) that was "animated" by a script that pushed new sculptmaps over and over. I'm not sure I *ever* saw that thing completely rez. There was even talk then of wanting animated sculptmaps, analogous to animated textures, to obviate the need for such running scripts. I'm guessing there's not a lot of call for that sort of thing now that we've gotten more experience with these things.

You can do amazing things with just normal prims but a large build may need more than your land can support. Sculpts do help get around limited prim budgets .

I know *exactly* what you mean. My heart always beats a little quicker when I find a sim like this - and then I stare at the plywood cube I'm struggling with and want to kick it, saying, "why can't you be like that?" lol

Just wish I knew how to find more such places. There must be scads of amazing sims that are listed in other languages, and such. The products are a breath of fresh air to what I'm used to, as well.

(Found a Danish sim and it was...so CLEAN.)