Hiding sculpty texture

I was browsing some forum and followed a link explaining how to hide a sculpty map by, I believe, adding the alpha channel and using it to obscure the view in the editor, as the sculpty only needs the RGB values and ignores the rest. I thought I had saved the link in my favs but cannot find it, and searches on various forums and Google have been fruitless. Does anyone know what I am talking about and where I can find these instructions again? Thanks :^)

Yes, it's really easy to do...

You bring it into photoshop and add an alpha channel via the channels palette, just do 'add channel' and you'll get one named alpha channel and make sure it's black. Then save it as 32 bit. The sculptie texture will then be transparent to anyone that looks at it, yet the sculptie prim ignores the alpha channel.

If you really wanna get fancy and leave your mark, add some white to the alpha channel, like a copyright mark or your logo, so you see part of the sculptie texture but it's still very much protected from lifting via screen capture.

I used my signature flame...

Cute trick on the logo!

Maybe this is not widely known , Just one thing to be aware of, it is very possible that the Alpha channel will be used to create flexi-sculpties. It is far from certain at the moment, but it seems to be one of the leading (and probably easiest/quickest) ideas for enabling flexi.

...Update...
Qarl has said that using the alpha channel for cloaking the scupltie is a "cute trick" (21 August 2007), so we have an official answer. Go for it...

Thanks so much. I remembered it using the alpha channel but forgot coloring it black. Very cute idea with the sig. :^)

Abyssin,

While I think your intentions are good, you should understand that the Wiki article talks about using an alpha channel WITH specific data to create the flexi (e.g. use a gradient to determine the level of flexibility). So that means ALL sculpties currently with or without alpha channels will need to be re-uploaded if they are to include flexi features. And don't worry about sculpties with weird alphas "behaving badly." There is always the option of turning flexi off entirely! Who would want a flexi-jello-sculptie chair anyhow?

Besides, that article was written by wishful thinkers, and while they're darn near brilliant for working through the logic of flexi-sculptie objects, Qarl stated that such a feature is a long way down the road. Plus, using alpha channels does present a good number of fundamental flaws (i.e. even the world's most powerful computer might have trouble computing flexi-sculpties).

So please everybody!!! Protect your sculpt maps from theft! I believe that not correcting this interface issue is a grave error by LL. All of us sculptors know how time consuming it is to create unique sculpted objects.

This is a great trick for protecting sculpty textures, thanks Blaze! But has anyone some experience with sculpty textures that are taken from screenshots? Is it really a threat or is the quality so poor that we don't have to be worried about it?

i dunno. flexi-jello-sculptie chair does sound good!

OhGODS! ME! I would KILL to have a jello chair! Mmmmm... jello!

For a demonstration I "stole" a sculptie from myself. See the result in the "steal 001.jpg" attachment. The hat to the left side is the original, the hat to the right the steal.
And I may add I didnt take much care in the steal process. You just resize the window showing the sculptie texture to your full screen view, take a screen shot (not an sl snapshot) and then import it into say Gimp, cut out the sculptie map and resize it down to 64x64,save it again and you have your steal. You could do a better job than that. But even so it resembles the original way too much.
So using the alpha channel to protect your rights is a very nice idea. Thanks a lot.

Too funny, guys!

I should have know that the jello-sculptie comment would get quoted! Now that I think about it, a jello chair would be tame compared to some of the creative stuff we see all over SL...

Anyway, for those who haven't seen the wiki discussion, I thought I'd post that the Lindens are as of now refusing to correct this sculptie texture "bug." They argue that anyone can steal primitive shapes by copying the dimensions in the edit window, so in order to keep consistent, anyone should be allowed to view the contents of a sculptie's edit window.

That's a shame, but I really like the idea of protecting sculpt maps with a cool personal logo. Such a personal signature is a kick in the rear for all those folks out there desiring to steal others' creations. I can just hear them grumbling now...

Thanks alot, Blaze that's a great workaround.

I don't worry about the alpha channel being used for flexible sculpties. I totally fail to understand LL's arguments of keeping sculpties consistent with other prims. It comes down to "It can be stolen anyway with some effort, so let's make stealing as easy as possible". In this case, a simply copy protection would be effortless for LL, they'd just have to remove a totally unneeded preview window, unneeded for both the object creator as well as the end user. It can only be used for stealing. To change the sculpt map, a simple "load texture" button would be sufficient.
If they force us to take copy protection into our own hands, they can hardly break our content later.

It's effortless for the creator, too. Make the prim no-mod, and nobody else will see the sculpt map displayed.

Of course, a lot of things (for example, anything meant to attach to an avatar, such as hats or clothing parts) become effectively worthless without mod permission.

Hmmm. Although it resembles the original pretty good, you can clearly see some artifacts. Of course they can be repaired in any photo program, but I doubt if copycats will try to do it and put much time in it. Thanks for posting Sho.