Attention: Sculpt content creators

Before you invest lots of time and effort in content created with sculpt prims, be aware that your content can easily be stolen if it has modify permissions, like body attachments for example. When a sculpt prim with mod perm is edited, the sculpt map is shown in the Edit window. Larger than needed, almost 128 pixels, so the prim owner can easily take a screenshot and re-upload without any loss of quality or details.

I'm aware that everything can somehow be copied, but I don't see why it's made easier than it has to be. In this case it would be a minor adjustment to remove a texture preview that is not even needed by the creator and shouldn't be there to begin with. What's the use of that preview? Either the map works or not, no sense in staring at pretty rainbow colors. Please complain, exploit report, send emails and whatnot until LL changes it. Somehow I doubt that they'll listen to a single voice, or that they gonna consider it an exploit at all.

ouch, this is bad; good on you for bringing it up.

before everyone gets too excited - this is on my list to fix on tuesday. not sure when it will reach the main grid, but yes, it will in fact be addressed sometime soon.


K.

Thank you very much.

This has *always* been the case for objects with modify permission. If modify permission is set, the prim settings appear in the Build window (they have to, in order to modify them) and can be copied. The sculpt texture appearing is logical since it's the sculptie equivalent of prim settings.

While giving sculpted prims what is essentially extra protection might seem like a good idea, it leads to a nightmare scenario where content is built using all sculpted prims - the regular prims are no longer used at all - because sculpties have better protection. Which in turn means lower performance. It will also eliminate any chance of the in-world sculptie editor, when it eventually comes along, being compatible with external 3D tools (because for it to be compatible there would have to be some way of exporting the sculpt texture)

Thank you for bringing up this issue. To an extent, I think the sculpties should serve to help content makers further protect their creations, since its virtually impossible to recreate the exact same sculpt texture (whereas you could always enter the same parameters for duplicating regular prims).

I've been investing a lot of time in making sculpties, but I'm hesitant to sell any modifiable sculpties aside from some very basic shapes. I hope LL does something about this soon.

Qarl, thank you for responding so quickly! Is there a way to put a big, ugly watermark over the sculpt texture when it pops up on screen?

~Quinlan Quimby

Wow!! A Linden posting in the forums again. This is exciting! not to mention reassuring! ;^)

I dont know about anyone else, but when Lindens randomly post to the forums it seems a little creepy. It's like "Yes, we really ARE here, we're just ignoring you 98% of the time".

So a modifiable sculpty would be modifiable in that you can replace the shape bitmap with something entirely different, but not be able to make small changes to the existing shape since you'll be denied access to the shape bitmap?

Thanks alot Qarl. But why are you waiting until tuesday if this is a known issue? I remember times when the grid went down immediately in case of permission problems.

Well, it doesn't make much sense to copy-protect a sphere or cylinder imho. I can create a skyscraper with a single prim; if someone copies it, they have a plywood box, not a skyscraper. It completely depends on the texture. Sculpties often don't even need a texture, since wrinkles and other surface details can be carved into the mesh, which is even more work than texturing (at least for me). It's the mesh that needs to be protected here.



I don't think that the use of more sculpt prims would lead to performance issues. Each sculptie can replace 3 or more regular prims, and the needed maps are tiny. I also don't know why not displaying the sculpt map in the edit window should make an inworld editor impossible (btw, it reminds me that we don't have an inworld paint program, animation designer or sound editor). An inworld editor could look like this and place the sculpt map in your inventory from where it can be downloaded the same way as any other texture. There's no reason why the map should be displayed in the prim properties in addition.

Uhm... on which tuesday exactly? It's been over a week, and sculpt maps can still be stolen. There used to be a time when LL reacted much faster to fix exploit holes.

Again, I'm not sure how it's an "exploit" when prim settings on modify-ok objects have always been public. It seems to be asking for extra protection because of the extra work involved in making sculpties, which is fair enough, but I don't think LL would consider it an exploit.

I understand people's views here, especially that with sculpties if you really want someone to modify them you can give them the sculpt texture separately, which you can't do for a regular prim. But I'd still like to know from folks what they think about:

a) if and when sculpties can be edited in-world, what should the "modify" permission give you the ability to do?
b) if the "two tier modify" was brought in, how can you prevent unscrupulous businesses using it to exploit people? ("Yes I know we charged you extra for modify permission on the build.. well, it's 100% sculpties, you didn't say we shouldn't use sculpted prims.. and you didn't say you wanted the sculpt textures either, that'll be an extra L$20000..."

just because i can modify a skin that doesnt mean the skin texture is displayed at hi rez so i can screenshot it though. i think thats the issue ppl are on about.

You must be a lot older than you look then. Reincarnation?

Not extra protection, but the removal or downsizing of a high quality preview. Imagine you buy clothes, and the edit window gives you a preview of all textures in 512 x 512. With a separate preview for the alpha channel. Anyone could take a screenshot, re-upload it and get exactly the same high-quality result as the original designer, only with full permissions. That would be clearly an exploit option, and that's currently the case for sculpties.

The sculpt map is not a prim setting, it's additional information like a texture or a script, which are protected in SL even if the prim itself has modify permissions. What a sculpt map shows is a blotch of rainbow colors that no one but SL's sculpt prims can make any sense of. It depicts a 3D object rolled out onto a 2D map, with RGB colors representing the height and angle of the vertices, with different information in all 3 color channels. No one would attempt to modify it in Photoshop.

The modify permission on sculpties is given for the same reason as the mod perm on other prim objects. The customer might want to resize a linkset, to adjust the position of a poseball inside the linkset, to re-color an object or even to add a new texture (regular texture, not sculpt map). But I can't imagine anyone wanting to paint dots and lines onto the sculpt map in an attempt to modify the shape; the result would look like a fourdimensional hedgehog designed by M.C. Escher (lots of intersecting spikes in all directions, defying all 3D logic).

I have sculpted textures with full permissions to help others and save there money.
Truthfully I have only was able to give few a way for 0 or 10l for upload cost. Not many really seem that interested. If they want to sell my noobie sculptie textures and get rich doing this more power to them. I had wonder about modify with objects I guess I will have to be careful with that but anyone who has little experience could recreate there own or even copy my creations if they really wanted. Its not like I am expecting a liveable wage here so it doesn't bother me that someone did it but I seriously doubt they could make very many lindens nor copy everything I create because I am constantly creating most of my things are never seen nor sold. I have seen few times people who I know were around similar creations I made and improved them who weren't friends. I have no problem with that personally. It does bother me sometimes but there isn't much I can do about it. In long run they know what they are doing and have to live with it if they are doing something wrong. Sometimes copying is important tool to learn most artist copy other more experienced artist work to learn.

For mod clothing, the viewer actually has an option where it will give you the UUID of the texture used, which can then be applied to a prim and snapshotted at any size.
Use the open source viewer and you could probably make a new item with just the original texture key and get a non-degraded perfect copy.

When it comes to sculpties, the same thing applies, and the UUID is actually more valuable because it represents the original texture. Any snapshotting and cutting/pasting/reuploading would degrade the quality of the texture map.

You can not ever protect textures, least of all with an open-source viewer.

A sculpt map is no texture; technically it is, but it can't be applied when you only have the UUID. It's all about a single preview field that no one needs. The sculpt map is only needed to generate the mesh of the sculpt prim. What the client receives is mesh data, not the sculpt map image. The only point where it's transferred to the client is in the prim properties, which is totally unnecessary. Even the creator doesn't need to look at the sculpt map in the prim properties, much less the customer who buys a sculpted object.

Btw, the loophole that allows to copy the UUIDs of regular textures should also not exist. The creator of a texture or owner of a full perm texture can grab the UUID from their inventory. Sometimes I wonder if LL leave such holes intentionally, because some of them like the "free content for all" idea. This exploit could have long been removed.





That's true in some cases (scripting etc.). But what can people learn from a sculpt map? It's just a blotch of rainbow colors. A Blender tutorial would be a lot more helpful for them, and there are hundreds of tutorials on the web, including tutorials to create sculpt maps. A finished sculpt map can't teach people anything, they can just re-use it and will always get the same shape.

But why is it so unreasonable to suggest they might convert it back into an .OBJ file and modify that in a 3D editor?

Modify permission on a prim gives people the right to modify the shape of the prim. For a sculptie the sculpt texture _is_ "the shape of the prim" so naturally they have the right to modify that too. Again, I can understand that you might want to change this for sculpties because they involve a lot of extra work to produce, but that comes at a price - a very definate muddying of the water about what you get when you buy an object with modify permission.

On your other note, texture UUIDs are exposed for a reason, too - because they're needed so that scripts can apply textures to objects without needing to have the full perms texture in the scripted object's inventory (being necessary to insert the full perms texture into the scripted object (where the customer of the scripted object could remove it and make copies). But I agree, there are huge issues with general texture permissions that do need fixing

You can most definitely apply a sculpt map to a prim using only its UUID. Scripted "shape morphing" is one of the things some people were excited about being able to do.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetPrimitiveParams

What the client receives is a set of prim parameters, which it then converts into something that can actually be rendered. For normal prims it's based on numbers, for sculpties it's based on the sculpt map.

This was all addressed during the copybot scare. It's not an exploit simply because it doesn't involve the permission system.

If you can turn a no-copy object into a copy object then you have an exploit in the permission system. If you do that for malicious use then LL can step in because the TOS has a section saying you'll abide by the permissions.
If you use copybot to *create* a new object, based on a no-copy object, then you didn't use an exploit, permissions simply don't apply there. It's up to *you* to enforce your IP in this case, which possibly involves the DMCA and a RL court.

Regardless of all of the above, if LL did remove the UUID grabbing "loophole" and the sculpty preview, it would be trivial for someone to copy/paste the code from an earlier version into the new version and get the same functionality back.

You can argue that by default it shouldn't be this easy which is certainly true, but at the same time people shouldn't live under the false presumption that things can't always "easily" be copied. The only thing that can't currently be copied are scripts, and when they open-source the sim side, there won't even be that anymore.

Actual cases of texture stealing and prim copying have been and still are quite rare occurances and will remain so as long as there are far easier ways to dishonestly gain money (ad parcels, scamming, freebie reselling, etc).

Is there really a 3D editor who does that? I don't know of any. People could program such an editor of course.

You are right that modify rights include modifying the shape, to allow resizing or stretching a prim. They can also turn a sphere into a box if they want, or a sculptie into a sphere or box. But I don't have to give the customer permission to modify every aspect of the products. I have the scripts inside modify-protected for example, even if those scripts affect the shape or size of the object. I think every customer is aware that modify rights are only meant to allow resizing, moving single prims within a linkset, re-texturing and color changes.



And therefore we have an easy method to grab the UUID of a texture from our inventory. There's no reason why someone who doesn't own a texture should be able to grab its UUID off a prim.

I wasn't aware of that. It's a nice feature and could be used for a new form of prim animation.



So the client doesn't receive what he actually has to display, but a sculpt map that wouldn't have to be submitted in order to display the mesh? *Sighs* Why can't LL for one time do something with a little thought behind it. Is it that much of a difference if some mesh parameters are sent to the client, or a bitmap that could possibly be 1024 x 1024 pixels large?



I disagree on this (with LL) because a full-perm copy of an object that doesn't have full permissions is always a circumvention of the permission system. But I don't want to start another copybot discussion.



It would be easy for some people with the knowledge to do so. That means, it would be impossible for 80% of the residents (who are usually reluctant to type their passwords into open source clients made by others). That's already a big step forward, imho.



I think that stealing and copying happens a lot more often than we are aware of. This thread: /327/02/187168/1.html is an example of a complete store full of wares ripped off from various content creators. Only one of them noticed it by coincidence. I guess that most content creators simply don't have the time to patrol all shops and malls, looking for copies of their wares; I know that I can't spare the time. Who knows how many shops like this went unnoticed so far.

I can live with the fact (or rather, I have to live with it since it's a fact) that every copy protection can somehow be circumvented by intelligent and inventive people. Luckily there aren't that many intelligent and inventive people, and most of them create own content instead of stealing it. But that's no reason to make it easy enough that a chimpanzee could do it, with two mouseclicks and the Print Screen key. If a minimum of copy protection can be granted by simply removing or resizing an unneeded preview field - why the argument? No one needs that preview. A "Load Texture" button would do the same trick.

The entire point of prim parameters is that they *are* the minimum required to display the mesh. If a sculptie could be displayed with less information than the entire sculpt texture, it wouldn't have the flexibility of a sculptie.

I don't know if this helps, but there was a thread about this. I hope it helps Here is a possible solution:

Yesterday, 05:10 PM #2
Blaze Columbia
on Fire!


Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 251 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...
Attached Images tiesculptiealpha.jpg (50.8 KB, 27 views)