Sculpty Puzzle

I'm trying to replace some regular prim columns in my house with sculpty columns---one on either side of a balcony doorway. But then I place them where they need to go, I can't walk between them out onto the balcony, even though visually there is plenty of space. WTF? Do Sculpties have a secret life I don't know about?

Down the rabbit hole again....

Thanks for your help, clever folk!

The collision bounding box (I think thats what its called) of sculpties often extends well beyond their apparent size. In effect the part of the prim you collide with is bigger than the part you see.

The workaround is to make them phantom.

It sounds like they are poorly made sculpties where the visible part is well inside the prim's bounding box - which you can't walk through unless it's phantom.

[added]
You were too quick for me, Wulfric

WooT! Tis as you say! Problem solved. ty!

OK, Phil, what the heck do you mean? As a recent escapee from Sculpty class, this inquiring mind needs to know. How does one avoid doing that?

the easiest way to understand is imagine making an apple from a sphere... it pretty much fits into what it originally was..
then imagine making an apple core from the same sphere... all the eaten parts are still there ... but because a sculpty is basically an optical illusion... you see only the applecore.
the rest of the apple will still be there..

That's correct for poorly made sculpties as Phil said, and by making them phantom, you can't link them to the rest of your build. I had this problem recently with some columns made by the Moles for the Nautilus City theme. I had to remake them with a corrected collision box.
Aebleskiver, I'll send you a copy inworld of the corrected ones.

So what you are saying is, when making sculpties, say in Wings3D, you should pull faces outward more than pushing inward if possible?

And all this time I've been thinking you had to have an invisible collision prim around them.

I'm not a very experienced maker of sculpties but the way I got round it is by making squashed sculpties that fit perfectly inside a cube, with the intention of stretching the prims in SL, so that they became what I wanted. A column would be squashed down to the height of its diameter, for instance.

Thanks, Calveen! That worked a treat, and it actually fits my little rustic villa better than the column I bought. :/

Thanks again!

Gotcha! Thanks!

I LOVE RA - I had wondered on this a few times, when I visit places and it looks like I should be able to walk somewhere but I cannot. Since I only sometimes encounter this in my travels, I've just never got around to asking anyone about it.

Note that in Wings 3d you can remap the mesh you're working on so that its bounding box is a unit cube just before you export it. That's the easiest way to get an optimal sculpty.

On the other hand, if you're working on a sculpty you're going to apply to a megaprim, you need to keep the sculpty's bounding box proportional to the portion of the megaprim you're going to fill, since you can't resize a megaprim.

The more I learn, the more I realize how damnably little I really know...

I'm pretty sure Einstein once said something similar to that.

dunno.. i use Zbrush so I usually start with an appropriate shape and pull it out...
the bounding boxes of Zbrush sculpts are always very tight around the sculpt..

He was right too....