I made the tool which protects your sculpted prim from the stealing by screenshot.

I released a tool, HANKO.

HANKO is a tool which adds your signature image to the alpha channel of your Sculpt Map files. It protects your work from the stealing by screenshot. And it supports the aspect rate of a Sculpt Map. HANKO means stamp in a Japanese language.
You can buy it by 1500L$.

Please visit my web page at http://kanae.net/secondlife/hanko.html

interesting...

But aren't all major sculptie creation tools allready supporting alpha masking ?

I am also a bit worried:

Isn't this thread an advertising thread ? I would expect such information somewhere in Xstreet SL Marketplace or similar, but not here ...

And finally since you have posted it here, one more concern:
Isn't 1500 L$ a bit over priced in a world where you can get almost anything
for almost nothing ?

just my 2 cents here.

Ok, I need this explained to me as I don't understand this.

Yes, you could in theory nick a texture by using a screenshot, or if someone had made something flat from prims then I guess, again would could find a screenshot useful sometimes.

But a sculptie is a 3D object and that's the whole idea of them, so what use to anyone would a 2D screenshot be of just 1 viewpoint of a 3D sculptie shape?

Am I missing something here?

Sculpties are made using 2d textures referred to as Sculpt Maps, which are visible on full-perm objects in the Object tab of the build menu. Take a screenshot of that and you could steal that sculpt map and upload it yourself to make it look like you're the creator.

Add transparency to some part/all parts of that image and it's no longer possible to use a screenshot to make a new sculpt of the same thing, as it won't have all of the sculpt map in the image.

(Edited to fix mistake, long after the fact. I said they are 3d textures, while they're 2d. However, I suppose that it could be argued that the multiple channels as they are used could be considered 3 dimensional, so I don't know if it's totally inaccurate. Anyhow, fixed now)

Oh right, but isn't that going to produce only a poor rough copy?

That's just a small image compaired to say the original sculpt map 512x512 perhaps?

Sculpt maps are usually actually 64x64 or smaller, so not at all. They can't currently handle the detail of a 512(Or anything above either a 64 or 32, can never remember which), so that wouldn't even be worth it. Screenshotting the image from the build menu is plenty detailed to create your own sculpty.

Oh right.
Well, that's something new I've learned today.

I also think you can add an alpha channel to the sculpt map with your siggy, so why do I need the tool to do ti?

Not everybody knows how to manipulate transparencies, and so on, or wants to fuss with leaning how. This just streamlines the process, I suppose.

So teaching the basics without fuss should be of highest priority. I tend to add a video tutorial about why one would want to have an alpha channel on sculpties and how that can be achieved using photoshop or paintshop or blender "without fuss"... I ask myself if i have to get payed for it so that people can better see, that plain knowledge is of value ? just kidding

edit: /me thinks of releasing her add on to Domino's sculptie scripts which include usage of alpha masking... Sorry for that, Yuzuru Jewell, but you really make me reflecting about the real value of "free contributions"

have fun
Gaia

It's usually best to not add a logo or anything to the alpha because it just increases the load time of the map.

Saying that, I agree with Gaia, this is just an advertisement for something everyone should know how to do. In case anyone is wondering how, just look up how to create an alpha layer in the texture forum. You should be able to create a macro in PS in about a minute that does the operation from there on with a single keystroke.

Gimp does it for free!

I thought you always wanted to keep alpha out of any textures if you can to avoid the alpha glitch, or does this not apply to sculpties in this manner?

Paint and notepad are also for free.
That doesn't mean that I can make clothes or scripted items.

it is realy time for a tutorial,yes ?

ok, here is a quicky:

- The mesh data for sculpted prims is transported by use of simple image files (png, tga, ..). WE will name these images "sculptie-maps". In detail each coordinate of a mesh point is translated to an RGB color, with 8 bits resolution each. This image information has NOTHING to do with the surface texture of a sculpted prim. If you look at the content of a "sculptie-map" you almost ever see a rainbowish colored surface and never you see anything that looks like a shape or something...

- Since sculpted prims may contain 1024 faces at maximum, this translated to an image size of 32*32 faces aka 33*33 pixels. For some technical reason, the ideal image size for sculpted prims is 64*64 pixels (i won't explain this here again . And so sculptie-maps are very small compared to the huge texture images which are used for texturing the surface of prims. And since the whole sculptie shape is burried inside the sculptie-image you can copy a sculptie by grabbing this (rainbowish) image from the screen. You can see this image when you open the SL editor and go to the object panel. If you change your object type to "SUCLPTED PRIM" you will immediately see the sculptie-map on your screen. And here the bad people can steel your work just by making a screen shot of this map and whooosh they got your shape and can reuse it on their own work.

- Now comes alpha into play
I just mentioned that sculptie images use 24 bits per pixel (3*8 for the RGB color space). For some image formats (like png and tga), there is a fourth byte available, the alpha channel. This byte defines for the pixel in total, how opaque it has to be drawn, aka how much of the background may shine through. But this byte is not at all used nor needed to define a sculptie-shape.

Now this is the trick:

- If a sculptie-map would be supplied with an alpha value of 0 for each pixel, the sculptie-map would still work as before, your sculptie would not look different nor behave dirfferent. But when you open the in world editor and look at the sculptie map, now you can't see anything, nor can you grab anything from the screen any more. Hence making a sculptie image 100% transparent effectively stops unwanted copying.

- Now some clever guys have started using the alpha channel to add more information into the image besides the rinbowish RGB values. In principle an additional black/white image is burried right into the alpha channel, the so called alpha-mask.

The idea of adding an alpha mask instead of making the sculptie fully transparent servers 3 purposes:

1.) the creator can put his/her watermark on each sculptie he/she delivers.
2.) The sculptie is effectively "screen grab safe" because the grabbed data no longer contains exact sculptie-shapoe information.
3.) Some information about the content can be placed here. hence it is easier to recognize which sculptie image burries which actual shape.

Domino Marama has done a clever trick in his recent blender scripts. He uses the shape itself (how the sculptie looks like from the front view i think) as the watermark. Hence you can allready know from looking at the sculptie-map, which shape it has (well, a rough guess at least).

ok, again i made many words about a rather unspectacular issue. But i hope i could describe well why alpha channel for the sculptie map is usefull yet does not disturb the viewer at all.

have fun
Gaia

That's the longest way to not say click on the channels palette, click create new layer, invert it and save as a 32 bit tga I've ever seen!

If you want to add a watermark, paste/draw/type it onto that layer before saving.

Unless you're using a program that doesn't have a channels palette, such as Photoshop Elements.

For that one, you have to do some selection saving and so on, it's silly (In my opinion).

I appreciate your opinion.

To Gaia Clary
I thought that adding an original image to the Alpha which is not used as a data of a Sculpt Map had value.
I will study about XStreetSL, because I have not sold by it. Thank you for the advice.
And I appreciate your tutorial about an alpha channel. Your instruction is worthy for me.
And it is helpful to many people.

To Ponk Bing
Probably, my tool will be unnecessary to you, because you have a technique and a tool.

To Keira Wells
Thank you for understanding my tool. Your response is all suitable.
I would like to develop the tools which make a creation process simple.

Instructions to make an alpha logo in gimp:

1. Create your trademark/copyright image the same size as the sculpt map. Make it white on a transparent background and save it as a png. You only need to do this once.
2. To protect a sculpt map, open it in Gimp and also open the trademark image.
3. Click the trademark image and click Ctrl-C to copy the image.
4. Click the sculptmap image window and open the Layers window (Ctrl-L or Dialogs->Layers)
5. Right-click the sculptmap layer in the layers window and click Add Layer Mask. This will open the Add Layer Mask dialog.
6. Select Black (full transparency) and click Add. Your sculptmap will go invisible.
7. Click the sculptmap image window and press Ctrl-V to paste the trademark. You will see your trademark in cool sculptie colours.
8. Click the Anchor button in the layers window to anchor the trademark image you just pasted.
9. Right-click the sculptmap layer in the layers window and untick Edit Layer Mask.
10. Save your sculptmap image.

This is a classic example of a reaction to a poor price point.

If this person had posted this service for $395L; Chances are less likely anyone would have said anything regarding the price or because of the price.

$1500L is steep...

It is an especially steep price when people can basically post the instructions on how to do it yourself in a matter of a couple minutes.

Should have picked a better price point Yuzuru.

I'll say in the original posters defense...

I use some of their products, Tatara is my favorite. The software is pretty nice and I frequently use it when I want to make 1 prim complex objects like ladders or windows. They're not selling junk, it works as advertised.

At the same time I must stress that the poor price point is valid. Yuzuru sells all of his/her programs in micro installments. If you want to chisel things to make reliefs you must buy a different program from him/her. If you want to shrink wrap something to the avatar mesh, that is another couple of thousand lindens.


Would you rather sell to 10 people at 1000 linden, netting 10,000 lindens profit and very little word of mouth. (about 40 dollars, just over.) or sell to 50 people for 500, netting 25,000 (about 100 dollars?) and get MUCH more word of mouth/ free advertising?

As the other users have said, the online shopping sites are a great place for your products... I prefer to use them because it is faster to shop there than it is to teleport from place to place in world, as the majority of products have to be hunted for out of confusing and poorly planned mall settings.

I also wanted to say...

Isn't stamping your sculpts a bad idea? The alpha channel is going to be used to make sculpty 'bones' with flexi sculpts, it might cause some funky errors down the road if you have 'bones' in a sculpt you don't intend to have flex?

Do you know when actually flexible sculpties will come to SL ? And where can i read about the implementation details ? So that we can start thinking how to support flexible sculpties in tools ?

I think Cool Viewer may already support flexible sculpts <i think>.

I can't wait to see a flexi scrotum.

There are only about a dozen ways to "borrow" sculpties that this does nothing to prevent, all of which produce better results than a screenshot, and several of which can be done using an unmodified client in less than five minutes. All this does is make it harder for people building with the sculpty to tell one from another in the texture window.