Preloading Sculpty Textures??

Before the day of the flexy, many of us used a way to make a rexture animation for flags that let us make multiple flag images on one large texture. A good flag might have been 9 frames on a single 512x512 texture and let the program run through it.

I was wondering if the same can be done to more quickly and smoothly animated a sculpty. The way we have now seems to take to long to load each texture to get an onject to quickly load and animated, because each frame loads one at a time before it can start again at the top to run again, but this time with the textures for each movement in the user's local cashe'.

Another thing that would help it to somehow let the client side load the first texture, then load the other frame of movement invisably into the client's cashe without seeing them till they are all done loading the shapes.

Just wondering if anyone has any good/better ideas on this.

-InuYasha Meiji
犬夜叉 めいじ

You can "preload" them by using them as normal textures on prims, since in SL they are not treated differently from other textures. You can't use a part of a texture for a sculpty though, so no loading them in a big grid or anything.

Apparently you can use the media URL for a sculpty shape by setting the sculpty texture to the parcel's media texture. I don't really know more about it than that, though. I can't play with it because I don't have video on Linux. It might perform better than swapping textures by script, since the video frame updates don't have to go through the sim server. Of course, there's the down side of it requiring parcel management permissions, not working on all viewers, requiring the management of external storage/streams, etc.

I was wondering, if it would be possible to upload the SculptyMap to the asset servers and then get the UUID, and script your way to the sculptie, by calling a texture by the UUID.

That way, you would get it as a serverside sculpti, in princip anyways.

That's the way it is ALWAYS done, even if you don't use the texture UUID explicitly in your script. The sculpty texture is stored in the asset server. When a viewer runs into the sculpty in-world, the viewer downloads the texture data so that it can render the object. Same with sculpties, same with textures, same with primitive parameters. If you use a media URL, I believe the only difference is that the viewer is downloading the data continuously from the server identified by the URL, rather than oncefrom LL's data servers for caching.

Darnn another request to LL will never see the light of day.

I would put in some kind of request for LL to make it possible to use a grid like normal textures. But I would rather they fix the bugs in SL then add another feature. (Hint to LL).

Thanks all of you for the responses. If someone comes up with anything let me know. You will be a hero to many in SL.

Argent Stonecutter posted a proposal for just such a feature to the JIRA, head over there and vote for it if you want it =)

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2276

But as said; in the mean-time you can use a transparent prim to preload textures by setting the faces to all the possible sculpt-maps. This way they will be downloaded before they are needed, so switching becomes instantaneous.

It is possible to use a video as the source for the sculptmap shape, although the usual land/video limitations do make this impractical. Here's an example of an morphing sculpty I made that uses video as the sculptmap:

http://www.shiny-life.com/?s=sculpted+thoughts

When you use video as the source the sculpt shape does not update automatically. You must make repeated calls to llSetPrimitveParams to force the sculptmap to update. another limitation that I've been told may be changed in the future.

I've also been tracking down a bug in the newest release ( 1.19.1 (4) ) that makes it nearly impossible to get a smooth, distortion free shape using this technique. The Auto-Align video texture feature is broken for some video resolutions, and when it does work there are some imperfections that effect the sculpted prim shape. I've posted about this bug on the JIRA:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5950

Thanks for the heads up Haravikk. That is a fine feature suggestion. Voted!