sculpted furniture, is there a downside?

I'm not a furniture maker myself, but I'd recently discovered something in a sculpty sandbox and thought wow this could really be a bit step forward in the furniture department. It was only a demo program and only usable in the sandbox i was using. It was a tool that basically let you link multiple prims to turn them into 1 prim using a bit of an interface system that I think i got the gist of fairly quickly. It basically seemed to take whatever prims fit into a 10 foot cube, as long as all had a face touching another prim. We all know prim counts on land can be precious. I'm wondering why I'm not seeing more of this in world, like in long time furniture makers upgrading their products to this manner of design.

Is there a downside?

The downside for me is the difficulty making textures look right on them. They are good if you are desperate to save every prim, tho.

I use sculpts primarly to make the furniture parts that I can't make as well, if at all, from regular prims, and secondarily to cut prims. Usually it does a bit of both.

Also from what I understand, there are certain limits about the prims you can use.

Some people do know how to make amazing sculpts with one prim but they have advanced 3D skills.

On balance, I don't think there's much of a downside to sculpts so long as the sculpt maps (special textures carrying the shape information) are fairly small - say 32x32 or 64x64 pixels - and that the sculpts are well planned from the outset. Some builders use very large sculpt maps on the grounds that it sharpens detail but I don't see how that makes a blind bit of difference at all.

Also these big sculpt maps can take quite a while to download, leaving the shape unformed as a sphere or badly misshapen until they kick in, which is thoroughly undesirable. So even if they do increase detail eventually, I would say that they are a very bad idea. These things shouldn't take any longer to load than they absolutely have to - like any other texture, which is effectively what they are.

Another thing to consider is that even the simplest sculpt will be very rich in polygons - the basic blocks used to make a 3D object. A scupted cube will be potentially much more complex for the graphics engine to render than a prim cube that looks exactly the same. I say 'potentially' because I recall a discussion about this on these forums but I'm still vague about the actual conclusions. My own home is full of sculpted windows and doors and, even allowing that it's a private and not very busy estate, I have never had any problems with SL performance. These days I average between 30 and 40 FPS, which is just hunky dory, fab and groovy as far as I'm concerned.

There are other issues with sculpts, such as texturing, as Pamela points out, that need careful attention but that's just a matter of planning because it isn't workable to just apply a texture in the normal way you would do to a prim. In general it's a good idea to use a special program or a plug-in for the latest version of Photoshop, if that's what you use, to paint the texture directly onto the sculpted prim.

Personally, I apply a sculpt mesh texture that maps the polygons of the surface to the object and then work over a copy of it on the base of a Photoshop document. This is a less intuitive method of painting a texture but the mesh helps me see potential flaws and problems in the way I have sculpted the object. Often I will rework a sculpt until I am satisfied with the 'hang' of that mesh texture on the object.

Level of Display (LOD) is an important factor in sculpting. This is a system of cancelling out detail in the object as the camera moves further away from it. The rationale is to save computer processing power by eliminating unnecessary information as the object becomes less important to the view. Perhaps this is why the plethora of sculpts in my pad doesn't seem to present a problem: I rarely view all of them at once but I don't honestly know if that matters and I've never had a straight 'yay' or 'nay' on the question.

Anyway, because of LOD, the shape of any sculpt will change at least slightly as the camera moves nearer or further away from it. This is virtually unavoidable but a well-crafted sculpt will show much less distortion. So for this reason a good sculpt will be made with care and attention and that takes time and thought and a good deal of skill. As far as I'm concerned, LOD not texturing is the deciding factor in the quality of a sculpt.

I think SL has a default setting of four levels or at least that's as many as I've observed. A small object such as a piece of jewelry or a tiny detail on a shoe would be ok with a low LOD since it won't require much attention in this respect, whereas an object that is supposed to be clearly visible from 128 metres would need to have a fairly resilient, high LOD. Otherwise the build will look rotten.

The viewer can be adjusted to tolerate higher levels of display but that in turn uses more processing power and consequently slows down performance. Like many forms of lag in SL, it's really a question of the configuration of your computer and the client application and nothing to do with the network or servers or what other residents are doing at all. I know of one or two builders who disregard the issue and whack the LOD settings on their client right up, expecting everyone else to do the same because they don't want to be bothered straining their brains about LOD.

It seems the program the OP describes works on a similar principle to one that I use in-world and there's a trick with that where LOD is increased by making the object progressively smaller than the 10 metre box. This fools the system into 'seeing' a much larger object than the human eye sees on the monitor. The disadvantage is that the object can be physically much larger than it looks. The invisible bounding box SL uses to judge its size can be viewed in 'Edit' when the controls are activated to stretch or shrink it. If the sculpt isn't made phantom, weird things will happen such as your avatar will bump into it when it still appears to be quite a visible distance away.

At the end of the day, the OP will have to decide on the pros and cons of sculpts for himself. As graphics cards get better and better, they will become less of a technical issue, but like everything else in SL: "when it's good, it's really good, and when it's bad I go to pieces".

The OP is talking specifically about the application that can take a 10-prim chair and turn it into a 1 prim sculpted chair. I forget the name of it. The sculpts look okay, but texturing them without 3D texturing skills at a pretty high level does not produce good results.

Thanks for pointing that out. I did in fact take the trouble to read his post and I note he didn't raise the issue of texturing either. I thought it might be useful to chuck in my tuppence-worth on sculpting in general in the hope it might help him evaluate the tool for himself.

The application in question is SculptCrafter, formerly Sculptie-O-Matic. I have pretty extensive experience with it, and although it has its limitations, it works quite well, once you learn to work within them. It is certainly possible to make sculpties with it that texture quite badly, but it is also possible to make them that texture quite well.

Regarding the OP, sculpts do indeed have the pros and cons Ephraim listed. In ANY event, a sculpted prim will take longer to rez than will a normal prim. For someone with a fast computer and connection, it may be so small a difference that they may not notice it, but for someone with a slower computer and/or connection, they may spend minutes waiting for things to rez once they TP to a place, and until they do, the person will be surrounded by vaguely spherical blobs, or in the case of oblong maps, what appear to be jagged piles of randomness.

So, to me, more than just the decision to use sculpts or not, you have to decide what your priorities are for any given build, and which method will have the most pros vs. cons for that build.