Stupid question

What is the difference between a sculpty and a prim? Are there prim and scultpy clothing?

A sculpty is a prim that has an additional property applied to it, allowing its visual shape to be molded to something more organic and less geometric in appearance. In most cases, they start as a sphere, though sculpt maps can be applied to other prim shapes as well.

All Sculpties are prims. Not all prims are sculpties.

A sculpted prim can be used, for example, to make a shoe that looks more realistic than one made just of normal prims, and that uses fewer prims to get the same effect.

Sculpted prims are starting to be used in clothing, in avatars, and in a variety of other prim projects, to provide shapes that are impossible with normal prims, or to reduce prim counts. For example, I can replace 12 prim steps in a building with a ramp and a single sculpted prim that *looks* like 12 steps, but is phantom.

The down side of sculpted prims is that they are really a hack to introduce something sort of like a mesh object, without really supporting mesh objects. As far as the Client is concerned, their actual shape is still a sphere, or whatever, with the same bounding box that would be there if the sculpt map was not applied to it. While a talented sculpty creator can do some things to alter that bounding box, the surface of a sculpty is virtually never where it visually appears to be. So you can't usually walk on a sculpted mountain ridge, or on sculpted stairs, unless they are phantom, and there is a rough platform of normal prims below it to support you.

Look up "Sculpty" and "Sculpted Prim" in these forums and in the Knowledge Base and in the WIKI, for details.

A good starting point is the sticky post "Sculted Prim Tools & Tutorials" at the top of this forum.

To add to Ceera's excellent post, here's a way to think about sculpties.

Imagine a wireframe sphere. Now imagine that the position of each of the sphere's points is recorded in a table. These values are the points' rest positions, or 0,0,0.

Now imagine that you select each point, one by one, and move them, distorting the sphere so that it resembles a different shape...say, a pretty high-heeled pump. We haven't cut the wireframe or eliminated any points, just pushed and pulled them around.

Record the changes in position of each of the points in our position table, which now represents the difference between each point's rest position and its current position.

Now...we have a table of points, each with three values assigned, for X,Y, and Z position. There is another sort of thing that assigns three values to points...a bitmap color image, where each pixel is assigned a value for Red, Blue, and Green. We can display our table of positions as a color picture...where each pixel's RGB value represents the position of a point on our distorted sphere. This is a "sculpt map", a specialized texture that tells a sculptie how it is supposed to appear.

As Ceera said, the sculpt map is applied in the client viewer, not to the in world object. So to you and me, it looks like a sexy shoe. To the SL physics engine, it still looks like a sphere (and until the sculpt map textures download, it looks that way to us, too).

Ok, I understand a little better but can you make clothing out of a sculpty like a skirt, not a looprez skirt but say like a sarong type skirt. I have tried this using a cube shape but everytime I make the texture "soft" it just kind of dissolves and thats the end of it. I know you can use the cone shape for gowns that stand out, Im interested in making something that hangs, a kind of drapy effect. I probably shouldnt be asking the question on this part of the board though. I do that sometimes.

You can create clothing from sculpties. And indeed there are many clothes available by now, which have been made out of sculpties. But your question points more into the direction of "fexible prims". This has nothing to do with sculpted prims at all. You can enable flexibility in the build editor for "normal prims", look under "features -> flexible path".

And in fact, sculpted prims can not be flexible at all (at the moment at least). So, if you plan to use sculpties for hanging/drappy effects, you probably want to look into flexible prims (flexis).

I hope that helps to clearify a bit ?

YEs, it does. Now I have to read about flexi prims. lol I use those making prim skirts I think. Thank you.

This is an idea of the flexi clothing Im talking about.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GnL5QhhyWDA/RoHOEMEKHII/AAAAAAAAAJA/Sb7KfuPeQ1E/s1600-h/blog_newreleaseswim.jpg
I want to make more of a one peice wrap around type skirt but Im thinking I may have to draw it on the avatar. Ive tried a cylinder and a cone to make a wrap around skirt. I even tried to use a box shaped thin and wrap it around the av but with no luck, it slides off.

When you use prims as clothes, whether they are rigid or flexies, you "attach" them to a point on the avatar called an "attachment point".

It's the same as is done to add a suit of armor to an avatar, or make a furry avatar - you attach prims or objects made from groups of linked prims to attachment points.

Once attached, they don't slide off, or at all.