Advice Needed

Hi all - I've been building and selling for some time now in SL but have never tried making sculpted prims. The project I'd like to try would involve creating a sculpt map which would represent concave lettering on the surface of a cube or flat side of a cylinder. Think of a bar of soap but with the lettering much deeper or, more specifically in SL terms, a cube 6x6x1 with lettering sinking at least .5 meter (or more) into one of the large surfaces. The number of choices available is a little overwhelming and I'd like to get the best program for this specific job, regardless of the price. I'm willing to put forth a reasonable effort to get this right but am not good with "tech speak" - fair warning. Thanks in advance to anyone who can share their experience. (I have a recent version of Photoshop at my disposal if that's relevant.)

There's one where you can do embossed images with Paint Shop Pro.

From the Second Life Wiki:

Sculpted prims using Paint Shop Pro

I might have found a way to create simple prims using paint shop pro. It doesn’t create complex shapes but with a little bit of understanding you can create embossed planes. It consist in creating a plane by using a horizontal gradient red texture going from black to red and back to black, Red Texture and using a vertical blue texture going from blue to black Blue Texture. Once the plane is created in xy you can separate the channels so you have the red channel and the blue channel, you edit in the green channel and draw on it to twist the plane. This might get tricky, the left half of the green channel is the front section, the right side is the back section, so if you create a low contrast image of what you want and paste it on both sides of the channel Ripled Green Example. Once your satisfied with your picture, you combine the channels (programs like Paint shop pro and photo shop have this kind of abilities) result. Save it upload it enjoy ^^ Rippled Prim --Pamagester Darracq 08:28, 5 May 2007 (PDT)


Another with Blender (free)
"Specifically making a flat/embossed type sculptie one could use for floating terrains with giant prims, licence plates, nifty brass scene covered fireboxes...or whatever else might be handy!"
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_3d_Software_Guide
http://www.treekyomoon.com/blenderInstrux.jpg

For something that simple I would suggest Rokuro.

http://kanae.net/secondlife/

There is a free version that helped me get the basics. This made the joy of discovering the blender UI a fair bit easier.

I know this won't be what you want to hear, Klyks, but I wouldn't recommend what you're trying to do. Sculpties are far less than ideal for the kind of lettering you're talking about.

First, because they're relatively low-poly, it's not possible to carve very many letters into any single sculpty. All you've got to work with is 1024 quads. To see how limiting that really is, take a piece of graph paper, mark off 32x32 squares on it, and see how many letters you can draw by working only with the points that make up those squares. You'll find it won't be very many at all.

For an example, you can see in the image below that I could barely spell the word "polygons" by selecting points on a 32x32-quad plane.



But wait, it gets worse. Now take a look at what happens when I push the points back in 3D space to make the letters concave, as you described:



Can you read that? I barely can, and I already know what it says. Imagine if someone were trying to read it for the first time.

And that was just the first piece of bad news. Here's the second: LOD culling. As your camera moves further and further from a sculpty in SL, the sculpty's level of detail (LOD) gets lowered (culled). The 32x32 quads get reduced to 16x16 pretty quickly. All it takes is a few tens of meters of distance if the object is large, or even less if it's small. Go a little further away, and it halves again, dropping to 8x8. And then go further, and it drops again by even more than half, to just 3x3.

As soon as the first round of culling kicks in, those letters will go from barely legible to completely nonsensical. They won't be letters at all anymore, just random indentations.

Of course, the less letters you use, the better the results will be. If you were to go with something like one letter per sculpty, legibility would likely never be an issue (provided you take the necessary steps to "LOD-proof" your modeling, which takes some understanding of the principles involved). But then you'd have a whole new problem. At 1024 quads per individual letter, anything you write with more than a handful of them will spell one word, lag.

Sculpties just aren't meant for this sort of thing. By all means, give it a try if you really want to, but I think you'll find it's going to be an exercise in frustration. You'd be far better off doing your lettering with texturing than with sculpting.



So you know, even in high end 3D environments, in which poly counts are virtually limitless, this kind of thing would more typically be done with bump mapping, not by actually modeling every single letter.



ETA: I just had a conversation with Klyks in-world about this, and he/she has a really cool idea for what to do with letters made this way. Everything I said in this post still stands, regarding the limitations, but Klyks's idea for implementation is quite clever. I promised I wouldn't spill the beans, but I'll say it's one of the coolest new things I've seen in SL in a while.

is there somewhere I can subscribe to to get an email once that amazing idea can be seen by the public?

First of all, may I just thank all of you for your input and help. I've learned more about sculpted prims in the last few days than in all my previous time in SL. Also, I'd like to say publicly what I said privately (to Chosen) a couple of days ago: Chosen, you ROCK! Is there anyone in SL more generous with their time and knowledge? As it turns out, I might be able to accomplish everything I want using only Photoshop but I am now looking a little more seriously at Blender and Maya. TigroSpottystripes - at this early stage the results are rather crude but if and when I am able to smooth it out to marketable quality then all will be on display at my store (slurl below.) I would note it somewhere and check back in about a month or so. Thanks again everyone! Klyks


http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eastfield/146/70/22