Sculpties came -- what to do?

Hey everyone.. a long time ago, I was building an x-wing. I spent maybe 10 or 15 hours on it and got almost nearly done (With the building half of it.)

So I recently came back, and learned that there are sculpties now. It seems I now have a choice to keep this 180 prim build I put so much time into, but have a choppy non-phys vehicle, or redo it in a 3d program.. and have a smooth moving vehicle. I don't know what I should do.

The other problem is that I've never worked with 3d modeling programs much before, and when I've tried it wasn't exactly wonderful. What should I do?

Sounds like for you to take a detailed 180 prim object and convert it to say 31 sculpties, would probably lose a lot of detail depending.... Sculpties are cool, but they can only be so detailed, and sometimes dont look right from far away

If I were you I would go ahead and continue your original project as intended.
And in your spare time learn to work with sculpties and see what your options are there.
IMHO sculpties are still in an evolving stage, there are issues with them that will become apparent as you learn more.

I suspect that as you learn more it will transcend your need for an answer in this thread.
The options of types of 3d programs you may use are large and each has its own attributes
and limitations.
But to name at least one that is common to all in varying degrees is the jpeg compression
and LOD = Level of Detail effect this refers to the detail presented on your viewer, for
normal objects the changes in resolution as you zoom in and out are far less noticeable
than with sculpted objects. What tools are available to you and the effect this may have on your particular project will determine how much this matters to you.
In addition SL treats a sculpted object as a single surface based on a sphere (until the promised new set of scultp object bases arrive) which makes the texturing of sculpted prims
and art form in intself.

So only counting the particular limitations I have briefly mentioned above makes it worthwhile
to treat each project of your X wing Sculpted vs Normal Prim as a separate project.
You will actually probably want to mix sculpted and normal prims in a sculpted prim effort
but there again detailed knowledge is what you will need.

In fact I suspect you will most likely have come across other sculpted prim threads in this forum by the time you see this response, good luck

You think you have a problem? I have built a pagoda that has over 2700 prims, took me 4 months. Guess what? I'm rebuilding it with extensive use of sculpties. I can replace 8 roof beams with 1 sculpty. On the whole structure I'll save over 300 prims just by replacing those roof beams. And I'm only just started. I'll be able to build the whole temple complex in incredible details.
I use Rokuro pro, Photoshop for the textures.

Be careful with the temptation to replace a lot of regular prims with sculpties. While the prim savings are obvious, there are other factors to consider. There's a VERY important question of balance in play between prim counts and poly counts. I'll explain.

Sculpties are extremely vertex-heavy in comparison with most prims. It doesn't take very many sculpties on screen to slow a low end or medium grade graphics card to a crawl. And the unfortunate reality is that there are far more crappy cards in use than good ones. So, just as with anything else in SL, to use sculpties effectively, you need to consider carefully the impact that each one will have on performance.

Every sculpty has 1922 polygons. Compare that with a cube, which has just 108 or a cylinder which has just 192, and you're looking at roughly 10-20 of the most commonly used regular prims to equal the performance hit of one sculpty. Multiply that by the amount of sculpties it would take to make a decently complex build entirely sculpted, and poly counts could get out of hand pretty quickly.

A good example of where prim counts needed to take a back seat to poly counts is a project I'm currently working on, which involves replicating about 35 pieces of RL lab equipment in ultra realistic detail. My first thought, naturally, was to make these things out of sculpties. To sculpt everything would save 3/4 of the prim count. That sounds great, right?

Well, it turns out it's not so great, as it would end up putting nearly 1.2 million extra polygons on screen (roughly 1,750,000 polys for the sculpts vs. 595,000 for the regular prims). Obviously having a million unnecessary polys would be REALLY bad; it would beat the snot out of the majority of video cards in SL. So, in this particular case, the smart thing to do was to shelve the sculpties and build the items entirely from regular prims.

Your situation, Pratyeka, sounds very similar. I'd guess that those 8-prims beams you're talking about are are cubes, right? That means that at 108 polys per cube, you're talking 864 polys for each set. To save 300 prims in total would mean around 43 sets of 8 regular prims becoming 43 single sculpties (ok, that saves 301, not 300, but close enough). The cubes put you at 37,152 polys, while the sculpties add up to more than double that, at 82,646. That's a pretty extreme difference.

And that's before we even get into everything else in your build you might be thinking of replacing besides just the beams. If the ratio stays roughly 8:1 on prim count, and 1:2 on poly count, then if you were to replace all 2700 prims with sculpties, you'd be saving about 2350 prims, but you'd be gaining about 300,000 polygons. That could make the difference between whether your build is usable to everyone or only usable only by those with relatively high end computers.

To all builders, managing poly counts is just like managing texture sizes or script functions or physics or any other common sources of lag. If you're on your own island, and you don't mind that half your visitors may have severe lag problems when the come by, then by all means, go as nutty with sculpties as you want. If you're on the mainland though, please take balance into consideration, and make responsible decisions.

Whoops. I didn't realize I was logged in with my alt when I posted the above. Klingon Warrior is me, if anyone was wondering. Since my main account is STILL broken, I have to log in as Klingon to view attachments. I usually remember to log out and back in as Chosen before posting. Oops.

Ah I thought I recognized the style and panache.

Doh! Your secrets out!


So Chosen, scupties really don't save your performance, and only just cheat the sim/prim count? I thought they were more optimized, allowed for better performance, and that is why LL let's us use sculpties which counter the alloted prim count...

Make sense?

Well it seems clear that sculpties are more efficient when used in place of a series of prims that would have been necessary to form the same complicated shape.

The trouble, if I've interpreted it right, is that even the simplest sculpted prim still contains the exact same amount of vertices as the most complicated sculpty, which has about the same polygon count as the most poly-heavy primitive. Maybe it's even a bit worse than that, I'm not sure.

Sculpties can be fantastically efficient when used just right, but quite laggy client-side when used all wrong. It's a significant issue Qarl has recently been trying to address.

It makes sense, Michael, sure, but unfortunately it's not true. There's currently a debate going on about how to handle "sculpty lag". LL's first attempt has been to try to use LOD to solve the problem, by severely limiting the distance at which sculpties can appear at full detail. This obviously has pissed off a lot of builders, including me.

I keep saying the solution has to be social, not technical, which is why I respond to threads like this one. People just need to be educated on the balance concerns, and they'll make appropriate decisions; nothing needs to be force-fed. Everyone hates lag equally, regardless of their current level of understanding of what creates it. I'm 100% certain that once it's explained to people, almost no one will ever opt to make their build twice as laggy just to save a few prims.

As I said, managing sculpties is just like managing anything else. Putting a few hundred 1024x1024 textures on-screen at the same time would lag the viewer, just like putting up a few hundred sculpties would. Nobody has ever tried to forcibly down-size anyone's 1024's though. People have always been given the chance to learn for themselves what is and isn't responsible when it comes to sizing their textures properly.

The same thing needs to happen with sculpties. They're new, so everyone (including present master builders) is still figuring out their advantages and their limitations. People need to be given the chance to learn how to use them responsibly. Once some sort of unwritten community standard has had a chance to evolve for sculpty usage, akin to the standards that currently exist for what you should and shouldn't do with textures or scripts or anything else, those who abuse sculpties will learn of their mistakes via community reaction, just like those who abuse textures and scripts learn now.

Will it work in every case? Of course not. But I think it will work for the majority, and that's good enough.


You have indeed interpreted right. All sculpties have the same poly count, 1922. Whether one is shaped into a simple cube or into a complex organic form, it's still the same amount of polygons always.

That's obviously a problem. Many of us have been asking for the addition lower poly options for sculpties, which would lighten the load, and for non-square sculpties which allow the load to be more efficiently distributed.

For the latter, imagine what you could do with 16x64 mesh or an 8x128 instead having keep everything at a square 32x32. At 8x128, those sculpted roof beams we were just talking about could replace potentially 4 times as many cubes, which would actually make them more poly-efficient than the regular prims instead of less.


Well said.

In my experience, sculpties are better suited for organic shapes. They really shine for plants and animals. It is challenging to get precise smooth planes and edges. The x wing may be a complex design, but the original is based on primative forms: cylandars, spheres and cones. Might as well use cylanders, spheres and cones to recreate it.

Hehe, our resident graphics genius is a secret Klingon. Thats so cute.

I don't see any difference in performance in the sim I'm building the temple in (Crystal Colony). I don't have a super dooper grafic card either. From experience, I get more lag issues living next to a stupid mega mall with zillions of vendors and camping chairs.

That said, I need to have this done to bring the prim usage to a minimum, so I'm taking this route of combining multiple simple prims into one complex sculpty. There are 4000~ prims available on my land, so if I run into major performance problems after 2000~ sculpties, then I'll revise my plans.

Thanks for the infos.

It depends what software you use, I think. I get fantastic results making an 8 steps stair sculpty with Rokuro pro. The steps are square with sharp edges.. As for the wood beams, they look great with minimal wavering along the lenght, which makes them look like rough wood beams, exactly the effect I wanted.

You will start feeling the pain after just a few hundred sculpties. You won't get anywhere near 2000 before you start to notice a considerable drop in FPS.

While I can appreciate your desire to lower your prim count, please take other people's enjoyment of SL into consideration. 2000 sculpties is almost 4 million polygons. There aren't many graphics cards on this planet that will be able to handle that in a real time environment like SL without problems.

To give you an idea, much of what sparked the heated debate over what to do about "sculpty lag" was reaction to a 300-sculpty tree in Luskwood, which is lagging the hell out of everyone who can see it. What you're proposing is almost 7 times as bad.






It's not so much a question of the software as of your modeling technique. Polygons are polygons, no matter from where they originated.

That said, certain programs do tend to favor certain techniques over others, so it can probably seem like the software is what's making the difference.

Don't forget that you could make an attachment vehicle from your 180 prim build, if it's simply the non-phys vs phys decision. The vehicle itself being the basic frame / collision model with your script.

Hi Chosen,

Your being somewhat of a resident expert in this area, is there anything in the works that you have privy knowledge of, that will eventually incorporate sculpty building tools into the current SL prim building tool.

I would love to be able to begin enjoying building with sculpties. Unfortunately, I am not very good with these outside programs like Wings3D/Bender/ Maya, and frankly all of this importer/exporter and technical talk is giving me a big headache.

It would be nice if us "computer technically illiterate" types could also begin enjoying the benefits of building with sculpties as easily as we can now open the current SL tools and rez a prim.

I was wanting to ask Adrian Eisenberg this question in his other thread (and I still may being the curious type that I am), especially now that he is a Linden, but it seems that since becoming a Linden, he has not been posting as much as he did in the past (He has forgotten about us little people now ).

Anyways, can you tell us what you know about the probability that sculpty building might be incorporated into the current SL building tool.

It would be nice if Adrian could also respond to this question. Thank you.

Thanks for the compliment, Cheyenne, but I'm afraid I don't have any specific knowledge of anything in the works for eventual in-world sculpting tools. All I know is that when sculpties first came out, LL said the plan was to start with external modeling programs, and then add in-world capability later on. I suspect that it will be MUCH later on, if it ever happens at all.

While I agree with you that it would be beneficial for tons of people if sculpting could be done in-world, I don't think it would be the life-saver you seem to be hoping for. I can't imagine that pushing vertexes around inside SL would be any easier for anyone than doing the same thing in any other program (would probably be a lot clumsier, actually). It would save the step of having to upload a map, of course, but that's pretty minor.

For now, sculpting is just like texturing or animation. If you want to do it, you need to learn how to use a suitable program.

That's not a bad thing, by the way. If SL is truly to be a platform, the next evolution of the Internet, and all that jazz, it will need to work in conjunction with lots of other applications, far more than it does now. It shouldn't try to do every last thing all by itself or it will never get where it needs to go.

I see SL client software much like I see a web browser. With a browser, you can create limited, simple content for the Internet, the posts on this forum being an easy example. But if you want to make something more complex, you'll put the browser aside for a while and pull out a dedicated creation program like Dreamweaver or Flash. By the same token, you can use the SL viewer by itself to make limited content in SL, like avatar shapes and untextured prims. But if you want to do more than that, you need step away from the viewer and grab things like Photoshop or Poser or Maya.

As the type of content that SL can utilize grows more and more sophisticated and broad-ranging, I suspect that the relative amount of that content you'll be able to make with just the viewer will become less and less. That of course means the relative amount of people making stuff will go down as well, but that's not a bad thing either. The actual number of creators will likely remain the same; it's just that we'll finally get everyone else in here too. We'll have all those billions of other people who, unlike us early adopters, won't have much interest in the creative part. They'll be here for other reasons.

So, if you want to stay in the content business, I'd suggest using this time to learn a bit more about how to utilize the different tools that are at your disposal, rather than waiting for LL or anyone else just to throw more stuff into the viewer. Sculpties, I think, are just the very tiny sliver of the smallest edge of the littlest tip of an iceburg so huge it defies description. There's an awful lot of stuff we'll be able to make in the future, and there's just no way that one little viewer will ever be able to do it all.

This is all just my own opinion, of course. Obviously much of what I'm saying here is highly speculative. I could be completely wrong.

Thank you for your response, Chosen. And you make all of the sense in the world. I suppose I'd better download Maya and start playing with it. Even though it will be like reading Chinese and trying to understand what it all means.

Btw, using one of these external programs wouldn't be so difficult if someone was standing over your shoulder explaining the few technical issues that seem so basic to those who have more experience. But when your circle of friends consists of people who would have a problem finding the "on" button on a computer, then you can see how daunting the minor task of uploading a map can be.

map? *sigh*

Anyways, your post contained a wealth of information and was indeed helpful. Thank you

OK, I did a test. At a 1000 meter above my land, with nothing in sight, I get 80fps. My video card cost me around $100, a couple of years ago so it's not that hot. When on the ground and looking at my walkway which contains 500+ prims, of which 225 are sculpties, my fps drops to 15~20. When I double this walkway with a copy, fps drops to 10~12, still plenty to walk around smoothly. I don't feel any pain yet.

I'm used to live in areas where the fps on any given day was around 3. That's where even walking is a pain.

My project is not for commercial purposes, these buildings will never be sold as prefabs. The site will be open to visitors. I'm not worried about people blowing up their video cards while visiting. If I have to, I'll put signs warning people to reduce their draw distance to 64m.

I don't contest your opinion, I just think the end result is worth the lower fps. I'm not building a dance club but a reproduction of a Unesco world heritage site.

Sorry, I missed this when it appeared, or I would have responded earlier.

Anyway, Patryeka, if you don't consider losing 85% of your FPS to be "pain", then I guess there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. However, you can't deny that what I said is true about seeing a considerable drop form just a few hundred sculpties.

If you think about the numbers you reported, having a 225 sculpties on-screen reduces your FPS by 75% (80 dropped to 20). Doubling that amount to 450 drops your FPS by another 75% (20 dropped to 15). I think it's safe to assume, therefore, that you'll continue to experience a 75% reduction for every 225 sculpties that are in front of you. That means that by the time you get to 2000 sculpties, you'll have a max FPS of about 2.

Granted, I didn't throw the non-sculpt prims into my equation, but since 450 regular prims, but the numbers are close enough. Even if removing the regular prims altogether would double your FPS (which it wouldn't), you're still talking a max of 4. If we meet in the middle, we could safely call it 3.


Really? 3 is normal for you? Wow. If that's the case, then I can certainly see why you wouldn't think 10-15 is particularly painful. If you don't mind having 3FPS, then by all means, build your 2000 sculpty building.

Just be aware that other people probably would consider 3 FPS (or even 10) to extraordinarily bad. I notice the sim you say you're building on is part of a large continent. I'm guessing your neighbors probably won't be too happy about what you've got in mind when they see their own FPS slow to a crawl. If you choose to proceed, be prepared for complaints.

If you're okay with lagging everyone else, that's up to you. If it were me though, I wouldn't presume that my prim count is more important than everyone else's FPS. That wouldn't jive with my sense of right and wrong.

One visitor reported a FPS of 45. Guess it's just me.
Not all sculpty prims are visible at the same time.
Occlusion and distance is also a factor.
You make it sound a lot worse than it really is.
Just go take a look and take readings.

I think my "sense of right and wrong" comment may have sounded harsher than I intended, upon re-reading it just now. Sorry if it did. I didn't mean to imply that you were being immoral or anything.

I would be interested in readings, definitely. However, I'm afraid don't have a computer that would be well suited to the task. Mine are just too powerful to reflect what the average user experience is gonna be like. My desktop has dual 768MB GeForce 8800's in it for a total of 1.5GB DDR3 video memory, a 2.67 GHz Core2 Extreme (quad core), and 4GB high performance DDR2 system RAM. Triple digit FPS is not uncommon on this rig. You could fill and entire sim with nothing but sculpties, and the thing wouldn't blink. My laptop isn't quite as ridiculously powerful, but I believe it still beats out the majority of computers in SL (256MB GeForce 8600, 2.6 GHz Core2 Duo, 2GB DDR2 RAM), so it's not really a fair test either.

What I'd be curious to know is how your build affects more average systems than mine. According to one fairly recent survey of over a million PC gamers (http://steampowered.com/status/survey.html), 75% of of people are still using single core processors, more than 99% have less than 2GB of RAM, and the most common video cards (that SL supports) are still GeForce 6 and 7 series cards. That's the kind of system I'd be interested to test with, as I have to assume the average gamer has a similar rig to the average SL user. Any "average joes" out there care to take some readings?

I have an average PC and graphic card.
I went to visit the Dresden museum the other day, I could hardly move because of the number of high rez textures.
Their impact on my average PC's FPS was 10 times worse than anything I've tested on my land.

It's all relative. In any case, I have practically no neighbours and what I'm building is never going to be for sale. Any visitors having difficulties because of inadequate PC will just do as I did about the museum, never come back.