The smalles possible Sculpted prim

Hi all;

I was experimenting with tiny sculpties yesterday and i wondered how small i could make a sculpted prim. Theoretically i would expect, that the smalles sculpted cube i could do would have the dimension of (1/256) cm on all axes. But experimentally i found, that the smallest cube i can create is (6/256) cm (0.0234 cm) on all axes.



The small red dot on the image above is a perfect sculpted cube.

If i reduce the size further, SL reacts in an unexpected way: It simply creates a sphere of diameter 1cm instead of taking care about my sculptmap. (I have not yet checked, if i could create a stick of length 6/256 and thickness of 1/256 ...)

From a discussion yesterday i learned, that LL has added some constraints and enforces a minimum size for sculpties. Are the results of my experiment due to the size limitations, or is there something else behind it (like data loss during upload...) ?

And after thinking over and over again, i now wonder, if the colors in the sculptmap represent positions of vertices or (positions of faces AND directions of the face normals) ...???...

Normals are calculated "on the fly" using either right-hand or left-hand (I don't know which). It a cross product thing.

If you have 3 points, like in a triangle, then you can use any two vectors of the three (or six depending on how you count) to get the normal.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_product

Ah... yes, i was blind folded after the discussion last night So the rgb color values of the sculptie map can not contain a position AND a normal information. So they are indeed vectors and each vector denotes the position of a vertex.

So then i still have the question, why the minimum edge length must be 6/256 cm ?

Is it

- a limitation of the sculptie exporter ?
- a limitation of the SL importer ?
- a limitation of the sculptie renderer ?
- a limitation on the way, how sculpties are constructed ?

I think it's a question of data loss.


edit: Just tried using a 128 photoshopped map, and smaller size I am able to make is 5-256


edit2 : using a 1024 map without lossless 4-256 tried a 3-256 but it's big like the 4-256

Does anyone have more details on this? If we can get more specific information, it should be added to the Limits Page on the Wiki.

I think it happened after people started using 0-sized sculpties to hide naughty scripts in.