Sculpted Prim Mountains

Sure SL has wonderful terrain mountains, but any places to see fantastic prim-based mountains? I'm building something LARGE in caledon soon, and would love to see some examples of what can be done!

Well, being as you have yet to get a reply...I made a very simple sculpted rock formation for my floating castle place:

http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=floatingcastleay4.jpg

A 32x32x40 megaprim set to phantom, together with a few 10x10x10 sculpted prims with varying rocky shapes to neaten the edges up.

I think the main problem with 'life size' sculpted mountatins will be lack of resolution on the sculpt textures, they'll look rather rounded and soft, unless you use multiple prims to add a bit of definition.

Well if you want some really big terrain decor then you will need to use huge prims.
Now the word is that huge prims take additional resources depending on who you ask,
however it seems that there is more agreement that Huge Sculpties do take additional resources so if you plan to use them then it is suggested that you use your own sim
or at least have the permission of your estate owner.
The picture below shows a number of mountains however all the ones on the left are the same sculpt map. The huge ones are are using the 40x sphere and the 60x cylinder prims.
Keep in mind you cannot stretch a huge prim. For scale look to the much smaller sculpted
mountains at the foot, those are normal sized prims but Can be stretched and you can use them anywhere. The other one in the back on the right is one I made awhile ago.

Now with that out of the way, you definitely can make some very nice terrains with sculpted prims.


As it happens I was doing a render in Bryce with a mesh I had created in the terrain editor.
While I was waiting for it to render I poked my head in here and saw your post. So I
grabbed the height map and used it to make another mesh in blender, mapped it and baked it and it looks pretty similar as a sculpted prim, here is the Bryce render.


And here is the Sculpt Map, if you need others IM me inworld, I sell em pretty cheap.
Happy Holidays!

assuming you do what the original caledon tests did, and offset the mega to offworld (ie empty space where there isn't a sim) it shouldn't affect sim performance and can be made phantom to quiet the nay-sayers... makes a nice realistic backdrop...

if it's on sim, check with the owner/group...

I haven't played with it yet, but it might be possible to do a simple conversion of a raw file mapped to a planar sculpt... mesh detail is going to be a bit low at that size though I think, and don't forget bounding box issues since sculpts don't match this as accurately as regular prims... but with careful editing they could be made close I think... I haven't tested the limits of map vs bounding box

those are beautiful examples! and thak you for the information!

but i guess what i'm really looking for is not *how* to make giant sculpties- that i have down fairly well.

What i'm hoping to find are places where giant sculpties they've been put to use, especially for such things as hollow mountains, caves, etc.... things you walk in or on...!

Hrm. now that i think about it, perhaps it serves me right for posting this in in 'building tips' !

Just so you know, you can't walk on a sculpty, giant or otherwise. They pysical bounding box of a sculpty is the same of that of a torus with zero hole size (or of a dimpled sphere). For regular sized sculpties, you can walk on the bounding box, but it won't correlate very well, if at all, with the visual shape of the sculpty. As for giant ones, since megaprims have to be phantom in order to ensure they don't cripple the physics engine, you can't walk on them at all, whether they're sculpted or not.

You could certainly make a cave that you could walk into, but you wouldn't be able to stand on top of it. You wouldn't even be able to bump into the walls.

If you really want to be able to collide with the thing, then you'll have to embed a substructure of invisible regular-sized prims to make it look like you're standing on the megaprim, even though you're really not. Obviously, this can get prim-heavy fast with a complex shape if you're trying to follow it closely.