The Application of Sculpties

I have had no experience of 3D modelling until last week. I have now sucsessfully imported sculpties onto the beta grid and can see the potential is huge. How do you see scupties being used?

Personally I can see furniture, avatar accessories and other smaller objects being composed entirerly of sculpties, however I am not so sure about larger objects such as buildings. As a prefab creator, I still envisage using the basic prim set in addition to using sculpties in the creation of buildings. Do you agree or do your see Sculpties killing the basic prim set entirely?

If you are a builder that has 3D moddeling experience, do you plan to focus only on creating sculpted prim composed content or do you see your self combining the 2 types of prims?

Guess I am looking for the input of 3D modellers here, as although I can see the massive potential for sculpties both within content creation with increasing overal grid performace, i am still having trouble predicting specifically how this will affect my own prefab business and the various industries within SL as a whole.

Is today the beginning of the end of the 'standard prim' or will it still have a plac ein SL 12 months from now?

Thanks for your thoughts - Porky

I expect that there will be "packs" of generally useful sculpties available for either purchase or as freebies and people will incorporate them into builds. Beyond that, the difference between the "top" builders and everyone else will grow.

For Early Scuplty adopters -
I predict some new merchandise at places that sell prim parts.


After a while - I think/hope? - It will lead to better hair and shoes.

I see things where I needed like 20+ prims before to now use 2 sculpties and still have the original prims as fillers for the shapes sculpties cant do. What I am working on as the grid is down is seeing if I can get sculpties to start out in hexagon which is what I use to model then into wings for the exporter and see how that goes. Sculpties will also be quite useful in the organic shape area, which is I wonder how long after the grid goes up tonight will the first prim attachment sculptie be availible?

I do not see it affecting hair until a while longer, though when that floaty(like underwater) hair some people wear(we have all seen it) where the person walks into the room and the frames per second goes into single digits, I can not wait for that sort of hair to be relegated to the dustbin of SL obsolesence.

Yeah, hair which doesn't have such a performance hit.
Shoes which don't rely on invisiprims and so don't get all messed up on transparent surfaces.
Cars which don't look like the primary materials used in their creation were scissors, an empty box of corn flakes and some PVA glue.
Staircases which don't take up half your land's prim allowance.

But I don't think regular prims are going away (in terms of use, I mean). The reason the regular prims are the way they are is -because- they're the most commonly used shapes - and they still will be, I would think.

I can see a lot of uses for this in architecture and in furnitire making. Imagine making a Queen Anne style table leg from just one prim, with no invisiprims... Or a chair leg with a ball and claw foot that is actually scuplted! Or colimns for a house that actually have fluted surfaces and Corinthian style capitals....

I can see a lot of use for them in avatar making as well. A Furry avatar head made with 3 prims, instead of 40... A tail made with one prim instead d 12...

Let's not even discuss what it will offer for the adult prim parts market. *smirk*

Eventually there will be an in-world editor for shaping these things. Until there is, and even after that, there will be a huge market for parts that are pre-shaped.

Unfortunately, a large part of the SL population won't have a clue how to make or modify sculpties, unless the in-world editor is far better than the stand-alone tools that I have seen for such modeling. Normal prims will remain very useful for quite a while, especially in building.

i mostly use wings 3D and blender to do 3D models when not on sl but i cant wait until they
make something that blender can use to import models into sl and use the sculpties
cuz i have many low-poly models that i created in blender that i
would like to see in second life.

What i am looking forward to, is being able to make 'ground' above the ground.

currently there is NO way to make 'unflat' ground anywhere but on the ground

this will allow skybox's to have nice texture flowing ground like the real ground

Floating Island in the middle of a Floating Ocean


i can't wait for my floating oceanfront property dreams to come true.

Wouldn't it be possible to make trees and flowers without making them the way they are now: pasted on several rotated clear prims? I think the gardening and landscaping level will be changed in a very big way.

Knowing that sculpties don't make sharp edges very well, I would not use them for structures where I want the edges to be sharp. Nothing like a good ol' cube for that. For typical buildings, then, I would not use sculpties except for limited circumstances. For atypical shapes, then yes, they would have greater application.

I agree - now Linden trees won't be the only 1-prim landscaping in town.

Porky, What program do you use to make your scuplites and import them with?

Maja, want a solution to your problem? Just turn off flexi in your client menu!

The lag caused by flexi is client-side lag. Of course, part of the problem might be that some hairs have way too many prims. Unfortunatley, there's no simple solution to that problem, other than SL limiting the number of prims that can be linked together, or attached, or something like that.

But I do expect sculpties to cause a significant revolution in hair design, along with darn near everything else. They won't replace normal prims, though, because they aren't flexible in-world; you can't adapt them as needed for each specific application without a lot of 3d graphics work. Tweaking is not simple and quick like it is with normal prims.

Actually it is one individuals hair designs that cause it, I do not wish to miss out on flexi because someone cannot make efficient designs and uses 50million prims. It was amusing one day when this girl came into this tavern with this hair and these elaborate zero gravity silks. I got an SL slideshow then.

shoes, vehicles, well i wanna do it all (as usual) . Here is my problem with second life there are so many things to try and do and play with that I simply dont know which direction to go in first

Probably by the end i will have built just about every major category of thing around

I started by learning scripting I made two games just because, then i started building houses, furniture, gardens, and then I decided I wanted to learn clothes and how to make good textures for use on 3D stuff

I get overwhelmed actualy its kinda funny not because its "scary" or anything but there are so many things to try and I want to do it all now

So i want to try to make good shoes and things with scupties and probably a sofa and a couple of vehicles for sure.

I live in a 10x10 box in the sky where I plot and scheme my new creations I dont anticipate being out of my box anytime soon so much to do..


added after rereading the thread and seeing poopmaster's post add to the list a rowboat !

Unfortunately sculpty prims won't work for that - collision detection is done as though the sculpty prim were in its default, undeformed state, not its compound-curvy sculpted form. You can't use it to make undulating hills over which to walk. You can use it to create scenic areas where you don't expect people to be walking and/or take steps to ensure that they can look at these areas but can't actually go there. Fenced off green strips along walkways come to mind, or steep cliffs. Aerial structures not designed to be walked on would be superb uses of sculpty prims. Your typical tree house will not require you to burn 200 prims just on the tree itself - the might be done in a dozen prims or so instead, yielding a much more natural tree in a fraction of the prims.

Used Wings 3D and the exporter that Omei Turnbull developed. See this thread...

/8/20/183764/1.html

EDIT. Bloody hyperlink never works for me

I think i understand the scuplty part more or less as in i can make one i'm now having an "issue' figuring how to properly texture it

I thought that a UV map would somehow to produced that I could draw on in photoshop or something, but it appears not so at this point I am now lost in how to make a texture that will apply correctly to a sculpted prim withough spending 1,5k on maya (although I am horribly tempted to blow a wad on maya .. )

Now instead of seeing a bunch of guys walking around with their fake looking erect shlongs sticking out, you will see newbs with beautifully sculpted erect shlongs.

re: hyperlink - bbcode is currently off so that "the website can be upgraded".

this will change the whole dynamic of SL

Before their ugly avatars were more realstic than their fake prim part.

Now their fake prim part will be more realisitc than their ugly avatar.

For the love of Code, how can we let this happen?

You know, the more I read the less I see the other prims becoming a thing of the past. There will be some key shapes made that currently take a bunch of prims to make and furniture will be lower prim, but for the most part I think it'll only enhance building instead of replace anything.

I still think they'll be bad ass, I just think a lot of people don't quite understand their limitations yet.

I want to try out Wings 3D because of I have been struggling with blender for ten years and still clueless.
I wonder why the links aren't blue any more?

So far my limited testing of sculpties shows them to be pretty much useless. Not good for anything but playing with to see the pretty shapes. They change position with a changing viewpoint so are useless as part of any kind of build.

I did quite a bit of experimentation with the terrain idea, and you can make some beautiful prim based terrains with them, however due to the physicality
problem
that Kalel mentioned they wont be feasible anytime soon for that application.
You could do a very shallow terrain like sand water grass or dirt as long as you don't mind your feet getting covered up.


For the physicality reason alone sculpties will not be quite the world changer many had envisioned and or feared.
In the second image I am standing on the 'solid' portion of this experimental sculpt shape.

Despite this major drawback there are still thousands of ways people will be able to put these to good use. If you think about it there are many many prims we see and use in various kinds of builds that we do not actually directly interact with. For example a bridge, maybe the bridge surface and the railings are all that would have to be physical.
Never mind that those are all that you would (for SL practicality) need for the bridge, it is a proven and accepted fact that the trappings of gravity make a thing appear to be more convincing and believable to the mind.

So most bridges you see in SL have supports and other things to give us the familiar 'feel' of a bridge. So if you keep this in mind there are many aspects of a build that could be made to look unique and ornate at a low prim cost.

One thing that sculpty terrains could be used for is camouflage a nice looking
hill could have a house or a building inside it.



This pic is a very large sculpt of sand dunes I have a huge flat cylinder jutting out of the side of it so terrain aspects can be incorporated into a build where
av's do not need to walk.