Many folks had issues with previewing though. My standard answer of "just use Sculpty Paint for preview!" were shot down as hard on the work flow.
So, I took the time to do some research on current 3D toolkits, found an academic product that's feature rich, and free, called JavaView. Then worked on building a bridge to it.
So far, the bridge is only one way. I have code to go the other way, but have not completed any onGrid bits to integrate that. But no worries, there will be a full set of tools im sure to take advantage of the abilities of this viewer.
As many of you know, I have a few sculptie toys out there, most of mine are just that toys. But, since day one, we have worked closely with theBlack Box and his product Sculpt Studio. This product is far more then a toy, and many folks are producing quality products using it exclusively. To fully beta this new bridge, we added the JavaView applet to the Sculpt Studio workflow, so all sculpt maps can be previewed before loading up into SL.
The savings in Lindens alone is huge. But more important, the savings in time. Rather then load up SL, upload the texture, and then find its not quite right, so you have to repeat... You just validate the geometry in the viewer, use the various diagnostic tools to label faces, vertexes, and elements. Or just play with the feature rich environment.
I setup an example of the applet for folks to play with here:
http://re.sculpties.info/fini/anjin/Sculptie.html
The sculpt map is one of those included as a starting model in Sculpt Studio. I made no changes to it, just rezzed it up in world, and asked the tool to render it. But credit for the model, and Sculpt Studio, goes to theBlack Box.
I am still working on getting the UV coord right, but it mostly works today. Again, the only thing I wrote was the little bridge to allow JavaView to read Sculpt textures. The utility itself is free, and supported thru its own path.
The bridge code will be released soon as open source. If you want to work with me on the project, just ping me inworld and I can dump you a copy. I took a quick, but messy path for the bridge today, but I have been working on a more elegant solution. Currently I am enforcing a sphere topology as well, and the release does not support scale. But oblongs should be fully supported.
If you play with the viewer, give the Control dialogs a shot in the Right Click Menu. From there you can find a slew of tools, methods, and reports. Things I found of high interest were the diagnostics for labeling faces, vertexes, etc. These numbers align with the mesh points in the sculpt map.
In the color menu you can apply color from the XYZ, should be obvious when the elements light up. You could use the spherical projection tricks done with POVRay here, but to my opinion, its easier to calculate the final texture then trying to gimmick it up.
As with everything... Hope this new tool adds yet another new brush to slip in your artist tool kit.
http://re.sculpties.info/fini/anjin/Sculptie.html
Cheers
Anjin Meili
http://www.skyhighatry.com