I am looking for info on sculpted stairs

I have quite a few very nice stair and step textures and would like to know if they will look good on sculpted prims..

Are there any drawbacks to using sculpted prims as stairs?

I am building a large building where some of the floors are 20M tall so the stairs are a major concern when it comes to prim count.

I would also like curved stairways

There are a couple of problems with sculpty stairs.

1 - you have to make them phantom. If you do not, as you approach them, you will hit their bounding box and be stopped. So once they are phantom, you cannot cllimb them. So, you must put an inclined plane in the stairs to walk on. You cannot however, link these together since one must be phantom and one not. I usually make my inclined plane invisible after I get it to where it looks like I am walking up the stairs.

2 - All those stair and step textures will have to be combined into one texture to apply to the sculpty since sculpties only have one face.


Take a look at SculptyPaint. It is free and it makes great stairs. There is usually an in-world class on Friday and Saturday if you are not familiar with it.

As has already been stated, a sculpty used for stairs usually needs to be phantom, with a ramp under it. While there are advanced methods available for resizing the bounding box on the stairs so it can be linked and walked on like a ramp, it's a pretty tricky thing to get that right, and requires the right 3D apps externally to make it work.

Straight sculpty steps are fairly easy to make with Sculptypaint. You can make 6-step and 12-step versions quite easily using some of the default settings. Other step counts can be made as well if you're careful.

Curved stairs? Technically possible, but you'll have to get really good at making sculpties to make it work right. Haven't attempted that yet myself...

Texturing a sculpty can be frustrating. Look in the texture tips forum, and thre is a free texture alignment grid that Chosen Few posted, that is specific to the normal vertex positions for sculpties. You can use that to determine where to copy and paste your textures onto your texture for the stairs.

Be warned, however, that as it uses a single texture to wrap all the way around the prim, even if you use a 1024 x 1024 texture, you're not going to get realy sharp details on a sculpty staircase's treads. The face of each step on a 12-tread stair section is going to be maybe 16 to 32 pixels tall on a 1024 x 1024 texture. I have made carpeted stair tread textures for sculpties, with the wood tread and bullnose edge showing on the top and front surfaces to either side of the carpet strip, but they have never been as sharp as I would like.

Stairs do not need to be phantom. I have a 14-step staircase whose bounding box is tangential to the tips of the steps so that it can be climbed normally. You don't get the bump for each step though, as it is a slope as far as physics is concerned. It has to be stretched correctly, which means the angle is fixed, but I can make any angle. I use a texture that repeats on each step so that resolution is not a problem. However, the same texture is on the edges of the steps, which can look a bit odd unless it's plain wood or stone. Usually cover these with a separate banister. I'll add a picture if and when I can get in to take it!
Sorry. Keep getting error messages trying tu upload attachment. maybe later for picture. You can see it for a bit at Siona 69.85,53 if you don't believe me....until the cactus falls over.