!!!We gotta have smoother animated sculpties!

The only way we can have a smooth animated sculptie right now is you make it into a streaming movie on land. Thats not good enough! We should be able to move around anywhere and have a smooth animated sculptie. I want to have 3d wings that flap, not flat flexie wings. It feels like i've got paper wings.

All we need is llSetSculptAnim (ANIM_ON | LOOP, ALL_SIDES, 10, 4, 0, 0, 20.0);

We could create many wonderful things with this.

How about we need better animation solution than using sculpties maps?

Could one wear part of an alt? then animate that part using bvh? i guess that would require the alt changing , and if one could, say, change arms into wings, one wouldnt need the alt..
at least bvh allows realistic animation.

Perhaps using an alt tiny? i have no idea..

i havent looked into avatar animation in depth.. but i cant say ive seen anyone using them is such way..
ie wearing hands alone, away from the body.. attaching wing membranes... or some combination...

sculptie animation sucks... ive touched the subject many times.. and everytime i come to the same conclusion, 2D still wins right now.

this feature would open up a whole new window of creation. i would think this would be very easy input into SL since we already do the same with animated textures. We could make little animated creatures or like a realistic lava lamp!

Is there a jira proposal on this to vote for?

What about interpolation between different sculptie map changes ? That's what already powers avatar animation.

you can do interpolation between different sculptie in any 2d graphics editor that allows percentage blending of 2 images (usefull in a pinch info i know but what choice do we have?).

How about animated GIF's ? that would solve the prob till we finaly get animated meshes.

I like the idea of animated .gif as scuplty maps, but then you run into the problem of poor image quality showing up in the actual mesh of an object. Maybe something like a standard of .tga files but sectioned off... well, I can't explain if very well, but remember the days before animated gifs where itw as done if Java using a tall gif file that the applet would read in sections... again, not making any sense am I? Okay, lemme try this... let's say you wanted a 256X256 scuplty map.But you wanted it to be animated, let's say 4 frames... so you'd make the map be 256x1024... the fist 256x256 chunk would be frame 1, then next 256x256 chunk down would be frame 2... etc etc... Even something like that would be fairly easy to do. Upload the image, make an object, apply the map, let SL know that it's going to be 4 frames, and then let the program do the rest.

Of course most of us would really like some more object creation beyond the simple prims and sculpties.. but to be honest, I'm REALLY happy with sculpties now... been waiting years for something like them to come along... I wish there was an easy all in one program out there, but for now I'm pretty happy with the way things are.

Unless they wanted to allow .dxf or .obj imports... but again, for now, I'm happy.

I think the best solution is the original suggestion. Simple, effective, and similar to existing features.

The main pitfall is that these moving sculpties might be bad for lag -- much more so than mere animated textures. There's the related physics issue too. Currently sculptie physics is very rough (circular collision boundary, IIRC), but there's talk of improving that. If they did, it would probably be fine to disallow sculpty animation for physical objects.

And 8 32x32 textures getting llSculpMap()ed every 1/4 of a second isn't laggier?

*32x32 because that's the max size the scuplt mesh recognises.

if you can use 1 texture to animate a sculpty it would not be laggier than 10 textures being loaded everytime it changes. Plus its a lot cheaper to upload.

I believe that is exactly my point.
1 larger texture (loads at the same time instead of "sphere", "klunky thing", "nice", "sphere"...)
No script calling a texture changing function ever 1/10 sec.

There's no way a single texture will cause as much lag as the current version.

Of course. The current method has script-induced lag in addition to the server physics and display lag, which would be the same in either case.

I wasn't against the suggestion, just pointing out the drawbacks to encouraging animated sculpties. However, LL has proven time and again that making things work clunkily doesn't quite deter folks from doing it.

I think it's a great suggestion, and the OP's idea is the simplest and best.

Regardless of method, moving scultpies might be bad for lag. That's all I meant.