Sculpted Prims: is there anything they cannot do?

I haven't really seen any major problems with sculpties in action- considering that I'm running around with a hundred or so attached to me at any given time (I wear my own jewelry and have sculpty boots and usually one or two other gizmos, gadgets, and gear with sculpties too), I've yet to have a messy loading lag problem- usually they're just the last things rezzed and go straight to sculpt.

Then again I don't usually try to force myself into a sim with 60 other people either, so my lag experience is limited to linden sandboxes (oy), some clubbing, and general shopping traffic.

Thats because you have the sculpties cached, as soon as you walk into somewhere new, everyone else just sees the blob lady. (duration dependant on local conditions)

Yep. That's why everybody's own sculpties look great right away (well, depending on the LoD thing--gotta get back to this sometime and try out tweaking the colorspace as suggested above). I think "sculptie lag" is totally confounded with texture lag, because the sculpt map is a texture... so in a texture-rich environment, sculpties take longer to load, competing with all the other textures on their way to the viewer.

The issue about flexi can be kinda worked around, for now, with scripted pushes of new sculpt maps. This of course is horribly inefficient, but gives nice effects like the "swimming dolphins" that change shape over time. If we ever get client-side animation of the sculpt map, this will be extraordinarily cool--much more work than flexi and not appropriate for "natural" stuff that has to respond to wind/gravity, but very cool. (I even heard talk of using the parcel video feed as the sculpt map... not sure where that stands at the moment, though.)

I haven't seen many sculpties in world yet. I made a brass plate with a marrow and tomatoes (large green banana and red apples minus stalks) which I was quite pleased with.

However I haven't seen any sculptie rock formations or soft furnishings - just the occasional vase or urn.

I've been experimenting with using video as the sculpt map. It certainly works and could be put to some very interesting uses. Here's a short video I made of my morphing sculpty called "Sculpted Thoughts".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yrZl01bJOU

As stated, the lag from rendering sculpties is very high. After they are loaded, it's nothing, but the initial load can freeze clients for a second or two.

The need to use a Sphere to make them causes the physics problems. (ie, the prim being at points where you don't see it there). Yes, this can be worked around by going phantom and using invisible "backer" prims, but all in all, this is a limitation.

Personally, I like the sculpties for trimming out some looks where regular prims just won't work, but would have been much happier with a wider varity of regular prim shapes and options.

~Jessy

That's a great video Vlad!

I did notice something a little funny around 1:00 - 1:25, though. I'm sure that the little particle ray is coming from the hand tucked behind your back, but, well, um, it looks like... well... um...

Bad Bad Ava. Looking at the sculpty the entire time i missed that then per your post went back to look... ut-oh um V. you might want to retake that vid.

Vlad, that sculpture is lovely- you should think about selling these!

I wouldn't say there's no lag on sculpties when they're rendered, they're not that efficient when it comes to texture (re)usage. SL already suffers from an overuse of textures and sizes and in a lot of cases each sculpty gets its own seperate texture.

Agreed. The residual lag would depend on your graphics card, vid ram, etc, etc.

I should say that I don't have much after they are initially rendered. Results may vary from client to client.

~Jessy

Nothing on earth can replace plywood cubes. Ever.

A friend and I got some very nice sculpty shoes. I like them, but I did find it disconcerting to look at spheres on her feet for about a minute after we teleported. It's true that the other prims she was wearing at that time were gray. Still, it's something to think about. I might for now wear my sculpty shoes under long gowns and stick to regular prims if I wear shoes with a short skirt.

i own about a quater sim and when it's plastered with sculties the lag is enourmous.

I noticed that in one of the RFL regions as well. It was using a ton of sculpties, an was the only one of those regions to lag me 'til I crashed.

(And yes, most of the sculpties remained spheres the whole time.)

Mari

That is because most of the sculpts in SL are extremely inefficient. You see stuff like a 1024 vert sculpt making a _single rock_. A more efficient way to do such a thing is to use 1 sculpt to make a cluster of 16 rocks, each with 60 verts. Used correctly, scupts can match or beat the _polygon_ efficiency of prims.

What is going to happen is that there are going to be so many tools and techniques to make sculpts that everyone is going to make them. They will be incredibly inefficient and create render lag. Then the populous of SL will realize that the most important thing is vertex efficiency; being able to do similar things for far less polygons, so their friends/neighbors don't use them.

I wonder how long before people start demanding Infinite bandwidth from their ISPs? tap.tap.tap....? mayby if we start now?

but sculpy efficiency LOL you're joking right? one animated sculpty i made uses 15 textures(just for the sculpt shapes, add one for the skin.or the flower with 14 different sculpted shapes.
add in an elephant with 6 textures for the legs movments, 8 for the trunk, one each for the ears the head and body. wait, i was complaining about lag right? oh yeah i forgot. that was sooooooooooooo long ago.

The bandwidth is not so much of an issue. A sculpt map has around 16 KB only. It's the client that has to deal with the high polygon count.

oh nononononono! put SL on your hard drive like so many games are where your polygon count looks way better than SL does now. the whole difference is how many polys get pushed through the bottleneck. Its why we buy polygons in the form of prims rather than using meshes, to controll the 'p' count.

That said, i'm not implying that the current local systems can render in realtime everything we might concievably throw at them (concievable dos not equal reasonable) . just that we sould push fo higher BW on general principles : )

This is very very true, and relevant... and probably a big part of the reason why people shy away from sculpties in many situations. I've dealt with a lot of scupties in my time, and honestly the lag loading them varies greatly. Some pop in and out and you'd swear they weren't sculptie to begin with. Some (like that RfL sim, I know *exactly* which one you're talking about Marianne) make your computer choke in it's own blood. There are so many places to go wrong.

Using higher than optimal initial texturing is just bad. People uploading 1024x1024 sculptie textures make me cry. The scuptlies in my jewelry use, at most, 32x32.

Also using a ton of *different* sculptie textures in one place, especially if they've also got different rendered textures. Load it once, and it's cached and can be reused quickly and easily. Loading 30 different sculptie textures and their 30 different cover textures at once is bad on the lag. Loading 2 sculptie textures and a shared single render texture that's then used for 300 identical prims is actually much less work for the computer for 10times the number of prims.... and that's not even counting the potential differences in optimized vs unoptimized sculptie maps.

Which is why I think sculptie jewelry really does have a home on grid- especially if jewelers use optimized sculptie textures, minimal *varieties* of sculpties and are very light handed with cover textures.

Sure it's a blob when loading. But honestly if we're judging the difference before loading is finished there are a lot of hideous things going on during the initial loading, but you don't see people walking around as Ruth to shrink the amount of "ew ugly" loading. No, we just stop and wait patiently (or impatiently!) for our custom skins, custom clothes, 200 prim hairs, 50 prim shoes, AOs, and other assorted junk we run around with. What's a few spheres compared to the horror of the look of my skin melting off that I get while loading.

I guess with non sculptie pieces you can at least look fashionably melted?

When it comes to sculptys i am a noob but one thing i cant seem to get is a simple L shaped prim. I try to mak an L with the legs about 1 meter long and the width about .5 m and thickness about .1m and the 2 ends of the L strech out at some wierd angle to touch tip to tip..dont know why...can barley explain it but would sure like to know why it happens

Great! So how about sharing your techniques with the rest of us? ^.^

Indy you know you can make an L shaped prim using a flattened cube with a square hole and 50% path cut? It does have angled ends though.

The biggest drawback of sculpties I've found is the resolution of the mesh point grid resulting from using 3 x 8 bit colour pixels. When I use Blender it means that the results are always approximate, and you can't really get reliable sharp positioning because the position of mesh points are always rounded to the nearest of the 256 coordinate positions you have. I have however made a few nice sculpties in blender: particularly I made a nice old style bath tap out of 4 prims. It does help to split up any composite shape you're making so if you look at the x, y or z axis of a sculptie within it the detail is never focused in one small section of the total x, y or z extent.

I'm very impressed Aminom that you've managed to get around create a 56 step staircase prim - how on earth did you manage the mesh so that once you'd got the vertices in the right positions there weren't a load of nasty mesh faces in the wrong places? I have enough trouble making a Y shaped pipe.

The solution Aminom gives for solving the LOD problem (sculptie shape changing as you get further from it) is interesting but the cost is you lower the mesh point resolution even more. The more obvious way of solving it is to use a 16 x 16 point mesh - this is what the viewer does when you get further from the sculptie - in this way both levels of detail look the same.

It is a lot of work at the moment to make a geometrical sculptie with reliable sharp edges because basically you have to use some means to set each colour point individually. I've written a bit of code to do this but then I'm a programmer. But there's no user interface.

Anyone got any good techniques for producing the surface texture for sculpties? It seems to me the more you push the limitations of the sculpt mesh, the more complex it becomes making a sensible surface texture. If one mesh face winds up very large and a lot of others very small you could require a huge resolution surface texture to put any texture detail on that face at all.

I usually save the sculpty as an OBJ file, open it in Lith Unwrap (a freeware tool) and save the UV map as a BMP texture template.

You can even optimize the UV map in this tool by pulling the vertices around, prior to exporting the sculpt map. That way you can decide which areas need more details... just select some vertices, stretch or squeeze them, and stretch the whole map again to fill out the space.

Take a head, for example. Squeeze the UV map mesh used for the backside, stretch the whole map and the face area becomes larger and therefore more detailed, on the sculpt map as well as the texture template.

As far as I understood it, only the sculpt map is sent to the client, and the client creates the mesh itself from the texture. But I could be wrong, I'm no techie

Other online games don't have this problem at all. All meshes are stored on your local PC and the server only transmits position data.