a request for a new sticky thread about sculpties

Sculpties used to be a simple thing: one shape, one size, etc.

Now they are multiple shapes, multiple sizes, and so on. And lets not forget those incredible viewer bugs that mess up the sculpt maps.

So, could we plus have a sticky thread, oh wonderful moderators?

If so, could it explain:

What shapes are supported (e.g. sphere, torus, etc.)

What size sculpt maps are supported by the most recent viewers (and what viewer versions are being mentioned would be good)?

What size sculpt maps the supported viewer(s) will actually upload correctly.

And what to do when the viewer doesn't upload it right, so that you can upload it correctly...

And maybe links offsite to the various pages where the tools for the 3D apps reside?

I'd love an answer to most of this, personally, because I have some grand plans for oblong sculpties, but I'm not about to waste my time if I can't upload them and people can't see them

An example thread, of how to get-it-right for us content creators, is Chosen Few's marvelous and wonderful thread on texture sizes.

Thanks in advance!

To answer your questions, which are asked often enough to warrant a sticky imo:

64x64, 32x128, 16x256 and 8x512 are the optimal map upload sizes from regular through the range of oblong meshes. Planes, spheres (or cubes or cylinders you like, they're all the same mesh) and toruses are the main supported shapes.

Sculpties should universally look the same for all viewers assuming it's not a pre-oblong release of a viewer which thankfully is increasingly rare these days with Snowglobe and other such low-resource clients around.

I wouldn't worry about people that are running heavily outated clients as they're increasingly in the minority and reducing the quality of your overall work to cater for a few stragglers shouldn't even be a consideration.

A great start, thanks

Also, what about the upload issue... Anyone?

And are there solutions to the upload issue at all? I really want to start using oblongs...

Moderators? We have moderators? I don't think so ........

I heard if you say their name three times in the mirror, they'll appear.

No upload issues. Just mind you've checked the lossless box and you stick to the dimensions above.

The only issue you might come across would be more to do with the program you use than the viewer.

Although smaller meshes are supported in principle, you will face severe upload issues due to bugs in the SL viewer and probably also in the server. For more infos see


http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8551

Hence you better use Ponk's suggested mesh sizes

Yeah, but I'm Rapunzel and they all have secret names like Rumplestiltskin......

Oh, they are there but they are very silent But whenever i ask them (very politely of course) to help me changing something on a thread (like the title for instance) they just do it without hustle... Once i talked to one. She tolf me that most active moderators are just volunteers with limited permissions. So maybe ... one of us users could ask for volunteering and help to shape this forum to the builder's needs ?

I didn't mention them because they're pretty crap. I'm surprised that hasn't been fixed yet actually, I was hoping to use a few of those in an upcoming job.

I didn't mention them because they're pretty crap and a bit confusing when you're starting out.. I'm surprised that hasn't been fixed yet actually, I was hoping to use a few of those in an upcoming job.

So far so good, and I greatly appreciate your help, y'all

It took a sec to figure out how to translate the image sizes into Gaia's blender tools "faces per axis", so maybe having that info in the proposed sticky thread would be good too

And I did some testing with the 32x128 mesh, and it works marvelously

So whose name do I need to say 3 times to get a sticky thread created?

I know I'm really really going to regret asking this, but here goes

What's an oblong sculptie.

I'm assuming it's not just a oblong sculptie, otherwise why would you need a viewer change to make sure you see if ok.

Could someone perhaps (one you have told me it's sculptie that's oblong!) explain a little more what actually one is (and what makes it diferent to a regular sculptie that's just oblong in shape?

According to wikipedia an oblong is a non square rectangle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblong

And according to SL an oblong is a sculpty with a non square mesh regarding x,y facecount.

so in unit of facecounts these are "regular sculpties"

32*32
16*16
8*8
4*4

and these are oblongs:

256*4
128*8
128*4
64*16
64*8
64*4
16*64
16*32
16*8
16*4
8*128
8*64
8*32
8*16
8*4
4*256
4*128
4*64
4*32
4*16
4*8

I am not sure if others do exist. Domino once told me that SL only supports Power of 2 images, hence i don't see that other meshes are supported. Yet people are talking about "odd numbered" meshes. I never was able to create an "odd numbered mesh". So what's that ?

Regarding the shape of a sculpty, i never heard people talk about oblongs just when the sculpty shape happens to be stretched along one axis but the mesh itself was a regular squared mesh...

Or you could just update to the latest version of Primstar. It displays a lot of information about the map size, LODs and whether the modeling sculpt mesh fits the sculpt map or not.

Image from http://dominodesigns.info/node/141

They are talking about the modeling "sculpt mesh" rather than the final sculptie. Settings X Faces to 7 in the dialog above would give an odd numbered sculpt mesh, but the final sculptie would still have 8 faces at LOD1. With Clean LODs on, those 7 faces would be arranged to align with the final 8 faces, with one of them being double sized. With Clean LODs off the 7 faces are equally sized across the sculpt map, so the final 8 faces won't correspond - the Clean LODs checkbox will light up to show when there is a mismatch between the sculpt mesh and the sculptie.

PS: Some of the oblongs give unusual face counts. A 64 x 128 map is the most obvious. Use 23 x 11 with 1 subdivision and clean lods off for this.

So, is an oblong sculptie just a dead flat mesh with (if you like) a X and Y axis but no Z axis. (like a flat sheet of paper) and you have to wrap this sheet into a shape?

Actually, all sculpties, oblong or not, are a flat sheet wrapped into a 3D shape. They're all unfoldable into a rectangular grid. The difference between oblong ones and regular ones is that with oblongs, the X and Y dimensions are not equal, and with regulars they are.

It starts with the sculpt map. An oblong sculpty is one whose sculpt map is longer along one axis than the other. When such a map is read in the SL viewer, the resulting mesh likewise will have more polygons in that same longer dimension, and fewer in the shorter dimension.

For example, a regular sculpty will typically have 64x64px in its sculpt map, which will define 32x32 quads in its mesh. In an oblong, those same 1024 quads can be redistributed as 16x64, or 8x128, or even 4x256, as defined by sculpt maps with sizes of 32x128, 16x256, and 8x512, respectively.

The reason you MIGHT need a viewer change in order to see oblongs is because those mesh forms were not initially supported. All sculpties were regular (32x32 quads) at first. Oblongs were added later. At this point, all officially supported viewers are capable of displaying oblongs. The only people who might not be able to see them are those forcibly using very old LL viewers that are no longer supported, or else third party viewers that aren't up to date with their sculpty code. I would guess those people probably account for less than 1% of the population right now. So I wouldn't worry about it.

When i first read this it confused me totally. But after a while i guess that i understood what's going on here. And maybe i even understood where non power of 2 meshes come from... So maybe this will help others:

Rule: The mesh size can never extend 1024 faces. And because of this, sculptmaps which would lead to bigger meshes will be downscaled to fit the 1024 max facecount rule. Hence the sculptmap will be downscaled somewhere between:

22*44 = 968 faces
23*46 = 1058 faces

When introducing a small derivation from the ration 1/2, the optimal facecount would be: 22*46=1012 faces which is slightly below the maximum facecount and thus a possible (and even the biggest possible) mesh for this sculptmap.

Now turning the argumentation head over foot (is that the correct wording?):

- A mesh of size 22x,46y is the optimal mesh for the 64*128 image size.
- As primstar supports LOD the optimal mesh will be achieved by defining a sculptmap of 11*23 faces with a subdivision of 1, hence 22*46 faces.

The only point i still do not understand to 100% is about what clean LOD does. Domino, you have tried to explain this to me several times and i always thought i got it, but it looks like this little secret has still not found its way into my brain

What i noticed by experiment: If you keep "clean LOD ON" then the sculptmap will use a non uniform mapping. If "clean LOD OFF" then the UV-mapping is uniform. I guess the "clean LOD" has to do with the way how LOD is calculated for non power of 2 meshes.

Thanks for the excellent explanation.

Basically it just sculpties as normal, but now we can have more planes/faces (whatever the correct term is!) in one direction than the other which may suit some things you wish to build.

Take that a step further and examine how the mapping relates to the LOD map (Image - Bake Sculptie LOD) and you should get it.

Say we had 4 faces on 8 pixels. The used pixels would be 0, 2, 4, 6 and 7 for the five vertex points. With 3 faces on 8 pixels evenly spaced faces don't align with the used pixels. So turn on Clean LODs and now you get something like 0, 2, 4, 7 as the pixels the map aligns with.

So it's as though we added 4 faces and then used loop cut to remove one column of vertex points, leaving 3 faces with one of them being double sized.