Sculpted Columns/Pillars major problem

I have bought some sculpted columns and they look great, but there is a major problem.
When the maps are on the sculpted prim and they take shape, all is good. But when you adjust the size, the columns still look good, except there is a huge box surrounding the column, so when you have a few together it becomes a solid no entry wall.

This box is huge around the column, if I make them phantom yea no problem you can walk in between the columns, but of course you cannot link these to a structure as the whole structure will become phantom.

I have never really noticed this problem on sculpties before, but this as I say is big around the column, if I make the column 4m high x 2m wide this looks about in proportion, but then the box is around 4m surrounding the column. ouch.

Any ideas if this can be overcome.

I don't think there is anything to be done about this unless a] the sculpt is remade, which very likely isn't practical, or b] you make your pillars phantom and set an invisible cylinder on each, which is something of a waste of prims.

Just to explain roughly: sculpties generally distort as the camera moves away from them and this is to do with level of detail (LOD) whereby the object is rendered in progressively less detail to save processing power.

One way of cheating LOD is to make the object much larger, physically, than it actually looks so it holds its shape from a greater distance. The camera 'thinks' it is looking at a much larger object.

This is why the bounding box on the object is much larger when selected because that is its actual size in SL. I imagine the creator of your pillars used this approach because pillars tend to be on the outside of buildings or inside large spaces where they can be viewed from quite a way off.

Another way of cheating LOD but keeping the physical size close to the visible size would be to double, triple or even quadruple the vertices in the object, in other words setting points on top of one another at critical places, so that the camera keeps 'seeing' the same shape as it moves away.

Personally, I would have chosen the second option to make the pillars even though this method can be tricky to texture.

thank you for this explanation, little confused about it.

I did set my LOD higher a few weeks ago as sculpties from a distance wasnt rezzing correctly, only until I moved towards them. my LOD was only at 1.5 so set it to 4 and this corrected that problem

But the "bounding box" on these is far far too much, I have other scultped objects and the box is not as much as these. But hey ho and onward we go.

And yes the texture is harder to render on these pillars.

The problem is caused by making the sculpt map the same relative dimensions as the finished object - the column, in this case. Sculpties have equal dimensions all round, so a column that is made as a column will have a large bounding box of equal dimensions (a cube) with a column in the middle - and you can't move through the bounding box. The way to deal with it is to make the sculpt map as a squashed down column - a cube or close to it - so that it will look right when it's stretched up. That way, the bounding box will fit the column - no extra parts sticking out.

I know that doesn't help you with the columns, but it's the reason for it.

you can make a very effective column with two prims and good texturing, sometimes two prims are really better than just one.

Interesting. I've just finished a doorframe that is exactly the size of its bounding box and the LOD is perfectly consistent from the furthest point I can view it.

If I understand you correctly, the point about sculpties having equal dimensions all around only holds true for square sculpt maps such as a 32 x 32, but we have had oblong sculpties since the last official release viewer.


I think the advantage here is that the OP has not just one, but a number of columns for the prim-cost of a single sculptie.

Now that is something I didn't know - rectangular sculpt maps. Thank you. The problem is, how many people don't use the current viewer, and won't see the sculpty as it's designed to be seen.

What programme do you use to make rectangular sculpt maps?

The LOD problem can be alleviated in the way that the sculpt map is made. I learned about that from an excellent tutorial that was pointed to in one of the forums here.

I guess the question of whether or not to use the new features of mirroring or oblong sculpt maps is a matter of personal preference. In my case I have resisted the temptation to go into business in SL because I take the view that certain features need to be fixed or improved (a better avatar mesh is inevitable) if I am to make it worth my while.

Otherwise I can see the choice is something of a dilemma for content creators: does it matter or not if your sculpts look like crap to residents using out-of-date viewers?


I have been using an in-world tool called Sculpt Studio, which is more than adequate for SL. I would go so far is to say that it is the most appropriate tool for sculpting in SL since it works within the limitations of the environment and makes excellent use of the existing building controls. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure there must be a way of adressing this in applications such as Maya, Wings and Blender.

For instance, this issue of the bounding box can be controlled 'hands-on' because of the way SS works. An 'Edit Box' is set around the slices of the finished sculpt, the default size being 10m x 10m x 10m. Since the 'Edit Box' shows exactly how the physical bounding box of the sculpt will be, this default size would correspond to what you are describing above.

However, the size of the 'Edit Box' can be adjusted manually to fit around the sculpt as with any other prim. Easier still, the 'Edit Box' will be automaticaly fitted to the sculpt slices simply by clicking 'Auto Adjust' on the menu. The sculpt map is generated at the click of a 'Sculptie!' button and a URL is chatted so you can download the targa file.

Taking Nisa's problem as an example, if the creator of the pillars was using SS, I imagine he or she would have doubled the dimensions of the 'Edit Box' around the sculpt slices after clicking 'Auto Adjust' and then requested the sculpt map.


I think this is what I attempted to sketch above with the example of doubling, tripling or quadrupling vertices. I believe an extra vertex has to be added at each critical point on the sculpt for each level of LOD. This is easily managed in SS.

While I can't be sure about other aplications, I think that most are largely over-developed for the limitations of SL. I am only now looking into Maya because I'm planning to work on sculpting outside of SL.

I wouldn't think of using Maya in SL, for instance, unless I already knew the application.

I've never heard of Sculpt Studio. I'll look it up - it sounds good.

I've used AC3D but it has huge limitations so I only used it for the free trial period, although it's great for squashing a piece to deal with the bounding box

I do use the mirror option with one scultp map I made with AC3D. The 2 ends (armchair wing-arm) were a bit different, though they shouldn't have been, and I couldn't just turn one round for the other arm, so I didn't use the sculptie until the mirror option came in. If the mirror doesn't work for everyone, the difference is only small, so it's acceptable to me.

The tutorial I mentioned is for Blender and seeing how the LOD/distance is affected by doing the same thing in different ways was a real eye-opener.

I also made my sculpting debut on AC3D but I didn't get very far with it. I don't think it was the fault of the application but more to do with the basic concepts of sculpting being far to abstruse for me at the time - and this despite the fact I've been a dab hand at Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for years. Like yourself, I never got past the trial stage and the results weren't even worthy of Freebie Island.

It would be great to see how users of Maya and Blender and Wings deal with the bounding box problem (apart from making it phantom and sticking an invisible prim in there for the physics). I'm sure there must be tricks for handling this accurately when outputting the sculpt map.

I never hesitate to promote SS because problems like this have very obvious, intuitive solutions when working in-world. I just wish I'd had the wit to strike a promotional deal with TheBlack Box before I started recommending their product. I think I would have minted a small fortune in linden dollars by now.

Just out of interest, what's the cost of SS?

It was 5,000 lindens on SLX last summer. I can't say what the current price is but I consider it the best purchase I ever made in lindens.

That's cheap enough. I wonder if they do a trial period


Seriously, it would be good to try it in action for one or two sculpt maps before buying. I'd probably buy it if I could just see it working, even for one sculpt map.

Interesting comments, thank you. I aso interested in this Sculpt Studio and wonder if there is a free trial on it.

I do use sculptypaint which is free, but must admit I havent done a lot with it, some basic shapes thats all.

I just looked it up on Xstreet: it is still 4,999 lindens but there is no free trial version available. I would say that if a lug like me can get the hang of it fairly quickly, the chances are quite high that most anybody can.

There are free classes of SS available in-world- I have attended and frankly it escaped me the how-to's - must try again. I do have the Mango one and i understand works in generally the same fashion- one has a prim item rezzed and wraps the sculpt points around it- but again- i have not had success with this although i have not pursued it as well as i should. For myself the issue seems to be visualizing the deisred result- it wd seem then the 'wrapping the points' around shd work like a dream- must try again. The down side on the Mango, and I do not know if it applies to SS - is tht it requires over 500 available prims to work with. I don't care for sandboxes, but is most reasonable option.
I am also the happy owner of Z-Brush... or will be happy once i figure out how to work the damn thing- Intuitive was not in the authors' lexicon.

Ty for the info about the free classes. Do you get to try it out somehow during the classes, or do you have to have bought it first?

LMAO! I like that

It's not that, Ephraim. AC3D is easy to use and very impressive for a while, especially for simple shapes, but the more you use it for the objects you want to create, the more you realise its limitations and you are glad that you didn't pay for it.

The "you" is me, btw

How does one texture the sculpts created by Sculpt Studio? Is that somehow built-in to the application? Not obvious to me how it could be, so... does one load the sculptmap into Blender (or the like) to paint on the textures? I tried to read the XstreetSL reviews, but didn't find an answer in the first few pages.

SS is just for sculpting the object. Texturing is another matter. Personally I prefer the combination of Photoshop and Illustrator for just about any kind of image making so I make my textures that way. For reference, I drop a result mesh onto the object and follow that as a guide against the same result mesh in the background of my Photoshop file, which is easy enough to manage, if a little laborious.

Perhaps here some of the more popular applications come into their own but I still think the advantages of sculpting in-world outweigh the disadvantage of not being able to texture the object in the same application.

Note: I was a little mystified to begin with (in fact I put the thing back in my inventory and didn't look at it for months). Then I found an online series of five tutorials by Ghanie Lane, which takes about two or three hours to complete and you get to make a balloon on a stick. That in itself isn't much to write home about but by the time you're done you will have an excellent grasp of the basic idea and after that it's just a matter of running with the thing. Really it is one of the best idiot's guides to starting something new like this that I have ever read.

Most welcome- and no- but you get to stand there and be amazed

The instructor was very forthcoming with answers and explanations- but honestly I need someone to just wack me over the head with the thing and maybe i will get it thru osmosis.

Painting... the newest release of Avpainter lets u import sculpts and paint on them - I have had limited success but it is possible. What it seems to come down to it is - it ain't easy!

I totally agree. There quite simply is no easy way to sculpt if you want to do it well: it's drawing in three dimensions for a start.

That said, the reason I find SS user-friendly is that, having some facility with knocking shapes together in-world, I find it much more helpful to have something I can use as a template on the spot to make a sculpt.

Nevertheless, a good sculpt will always require a deal of thought about issues like LOD and you will always need to be careful not to squash vertices too close together: there are only so many vertex points that can be rendered in a given space. Texturing the thing is another headache entirely but, as Amaranthim points out, there are freebie applications that can make this easier.

On balance, I found the 20 USD I spent on SS was easily written off against the hours I spent mucking about with other applications. My first sculpt (after the balloon) was a very fine sink that I could easily market along with every thing else I made since.

Thing is, I really like an IM-free screen when I log in to SL. Business isn't for me.

I'm willing to wack you up side the head... errrr... take you by the hand and help you. Although I'm not a great teacher, I am always willing to help those people who are having problems. All I ever ask is that you know how to use the Edit window first. Being able to manipulate standard prims is a necessity for being able to create sculpties with Sculpt Studio. Well, you must at least know how to move, size, and rotate boxes. The more proficient you are at that, the easier it will be to concentrate on learning to use SS.

Are you a user of SS, or are involved with it, Cheree?

Oh ... I am mildly successful with prim attitude adjustment ...

So though I do not have the SS thing yet I will appreciate and keep your offer in mind- thanks so much, Cheree