2 questions about sculpt maps.

hi..
i have 2 questions about sculpt maps that i am hoping someone can help me with please..


1. how do i make a sculpt map so that it can make nano sculpts? (i know how to make maps, and have tools to do it, i jsut dont know how to make it so the maps go nano size (for jewllery).

2. what is the best (and easiest to use) tool to use to make baked textures please?

hopefully someone can help me with these.. ty xx

I'm thinking that you cannot make anything go smaller than the .01 limit. Cut and tortured prims can of course. Maybe the nano sizes are made by leaving parts of the map i.e. vertices outside the object which are made not visible so it looks as if the sculpt is smaller. i.e. faking it.

Can only vouch for Blender but the latest PhotoShop can do that [baking], I think. Otherwise no idea on that one. None are easy or simple.

Sculpties bite for jewelry because of LOD issues.

I could never do my face in sculpties as it would look like crap.

The answer to your first question will vary, depending on what software you're using. The trick to it is to keep the object's physical size larger then 1cm, while reducing the distance between the vertices that make up its apparent visual shape. You can do this in a 3D modeling program like Maya or Blender, or you can edit the map directly in a 2D raster editor like Photoshop or GIMP. I can't offer specific instructions without knowing what you're using.

In any case, I'm inclined to agree with Briana that sculpties are not the best choice for things like jewelry. Not only do you have LOD issues to contend with, but also you're spending a huge amount of polygons on a very tiny area. That's just not a practical use of resources. Take your cues from professional video game artists. In how many games do you see items as small (and arguably trivial to the scene) as jewelry made out of more than just a handful of polygons? It's practically unheard of. It's much more practical to spend those polys on things that are more likely to fill the screen.

That said, I do realize there's an almost fanatical quest among SL jewelers to find ways to make ever more realistic items, even though almost no one will ever look at it up close besides other jewelers. Far be it from me to question that kind of perfectionism. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I do respect it. I don't respect the blingtards who insist on laggging everyone within a 2-sim radius by showing up at a party wearing 4 million polygons worth of little diamonds, but that's another subject, I guess.


As for your second question, there's no single answer. Creating good textures requires a variety of tools. I primarily use a combination of Photoshop and Maya to create my materials and source textures, then I use Maya with the Turtle renderer to do the baking, and finally I'll go back to Photoshop to take care of any post process editing if necessary. Those are the best tools on the market, in my opinion. I'm sure others will offer a variety of additional/alternative suggestions. There's really no wrong answer.

Whatever you're using, keep in mind that it's exceedingly difficult to bake textures for crystalline structures like jewels in any convincing manner. The appearance of crystals comes largely from how they refract light, not just how they reflect it. As such, surface textures don't really do the trick. You can make it kind of sort of look OK if you really know what you're doing, but don't expect it to be really convincing.


Your request for "easiest to use" is a little misguided, by the way. I can't think of any tool that is necessarily easy to use right off the bat. All take learning and practice. There's no way around that.

You can make sculpts go smaller in-world by reducing the contrast of the sculpt map in an image editor. (Which will make the sculpt map more grey.) There's a limit to how much smaller you can go, but it probably won't restrict you anyway. I've tested this myself in-world and you can make prims go insanely tiny. You'll inevitably lose some detail as well, but again, this won't be a problem since you're working with such small prims.

You'd be surprised though at how small sculpts can go even without altering the sculpt map. Sculpted prims are considered cubes, dimension-wise. In other words, if you have a long thin sculpt, SL will let you make it smaller until the long side is at the 0.01 m limit, but meanwhile the thin side has gone a lot smaller still.