Limits of the possible in portrait sculpture ?

I've seen 2D images (since I don't have either a stereo or holographic monitor, that is all I can see of course, like just about anyone reading this) made as "renders" from 3D modeling programs like Poser that are far more realistic than any statues or busts I've seen in SL.

What factors limit the possible realism and fidelity of portrait sculpture in SL? Are there relevant limitations in SL itself or is it just a matter of how much time and talent is applied?

I'd like to either learn how to make or buy really good portrait sculpture - the kind of thing a museum would gladly display in RL. Of course if creating something like that with pixels takes as much time as creating it with marble it is probably far beyond my budget. But the "3D" graphics I've seen outside of SL suggests it isn't QUITE that difficult, provided SL can import the files without loss of fidelity.

On a distinct but related matter, can anyone tell me how practical it would be to somehow scan a RL sculpture and convert it to a sculpty?

The short of it is that SL sculpties have only 1024 polygons each, if memory serves me. Some wonderful work has been done with them (look at the sculpt gallery thread), but at the end of the day, it's a matter of resolution.

I think that Poser models use something in the neighborhood of 50,000 polygons, and even that is nothing compared to cinematic quality models done in Zbrush or Mudbox, which routinely run into the millions.

Some games out there have relatively low poly characters (3000-ish) that look fairly detailed, but they use such things are normal maps, which aren't supported by Second Life (to be fair, limited bump mapping is, using the brightness/darkness settings)

That said, much can be done using techniques such as making a higher poly version of your eventual model and baking the shading. Search this forum for tutorials on how to do that for the software you're using.

Portrait sculptures of an avatar, or of a real person or real piece of sculpture?

A sculpted prim or normal prim in SL has far less resolution than the head of a Poser model, so to get similar quality would be virtually impossible within SL. Poser figures are not designed to be animated in real-time. They are designed to look stunning in a rendered still image, or animated in a series of rendered still frames. So they support a much better and much more detailed avatar mesh and a much higher resolution skin texture than anything that exists inside SL.

Thanks, Virrginia, Ceera. So, to get a quality sculpture, could you break up a 50,000 polygon object into 50 1000 polygon objects and import them as sculpties? If so, is there software that would make the breaking up fairly easy? Remember, the result doesn't have to move.

To clarify, what I contemplate is recognizable, realistic statues of RL people, colored like marble. Or maybe bronze if that is easier. I realize there are difficulties in texturing sculpties.

I have been able to make a decent looking face on my statues by using a plane sculpty that extends from hairline to Adam's apple roughly. Recognizable? yes I think so. If you are going with stone or marble like textures I would suggest either using an ambient occlusion pass or a carefully lit shading bake. Without it you will loose any detail you have sculpted in the final result as SL's shaders often make a mess of things.

-w

Can it be done? Yes. I've seen some very impressive stuff done by Chosen Few, which used several sculpties to build up the shape of a very complex mechanical "Cylon" figure. How? For that, you'll have to wait for responses from the more experienced Sculpty makers here. But I doubt it will ever be "Easy", nor will the easy-to-use software for muilding and texturing them ever be likely to be inexpensive.

I'd love to see what you end up with. It's a great goal.

It's interesting to note however that with the RenderDeferred mode in testing, we're in the early stages of introducing some real form of normal mapping (in place of the cheap bump rendering layer). If you would like to urge the Lindens on to making real use of this feature, you can vote to be able to upload your own, be it via
– http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1155 – the 8-bit bumpmapping solution, or
– http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3250 – 24-bit normal mapping, (more refined&powerful, while costing more data)

It would seem that the lack of a proper normal map is the biggest thing keeping our sculpted polygons looking as plain as they often do. Excluding perhaps talent.

So, just a thought. I'm not experienced enough to pick one to vote on.

(Oh, odd... I thought this thread was newer than that....)

This fairly easy with blender... Please don't beat me, i do not say, that it is trivial, but it can be done. i recently created 4 planes, joined them to one big squared mesh, sculpted that mesh, ripped the parts apart again and exported them as 4 individual sculpties. In SL i reassembled them and i ended up with a 4-sculptie object equivalent to a 2048*2048 mesh...

But take care about what whyroc Slade mentioned before. You often can get fairly reasonable results using texturing techniques. I often create a high detailed version of my sculpty, texturise it and then bake the texture according to the sculpty. In SL that helps to make sculpties look smoother and it helps faking higher resoution than actually is available.

As someone said recently:

"SL is the art of making more with less"

have fun,
Gaia

Is this the type of thing you're looking for?

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/7866/porcelain.png
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/8895/liquidmetal.png
http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/5581/marble.png
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/9092/jader.png

There's also a skin texture but I can't post pics of it here in case it counts as mature content. The statue can be seen at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ukanipo/29/79/29/

The head/face of that statue is a single sculptue and all of its detail comes from a single 256x256 texture (i.e. the mesh underneath it is actually fairly rough/generic). You'd be surprised how much of a person's face/identity can be gained from just the surface texture rather than the underlying bone structure (in general). More examples of this principle can be seen at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ub%20Yifu%20Sculptures/40/159/29/

All of those heads are derived from a generic mesh that's tweaked (nose/mouth position/shape etc) for each person- what really makes them recognisable is the surface texture.

Yes this is possible but you'll probably find that perfectly matching the edges/seams to each other is impossible. Even if your sculptie is 100% accurate in your modelling package (i.e. vertices for the edges of two parts sharing the same points along a single seam line), when you export the sculptie and bring it into SL you might find that these points have deviated- i.e. where two vertices came together on a single point in your original model, now both vertices have separated and neither are as close to their target point as you'd like. This is because of the 8-bit resolution on Sculpt maps (I think)- they never seem to preserve as much accuracy/detail as you'd like.

TL;DR version: it's never gonna be as perfect as you had it in your modelling program!