Combining sculpties for a more complex object?

I may be way off here - I only understand how sculpties work in the most vague general way, not in practice.

Say I want to make something sculpted and fairly large - building sized, but organic. I know I'm not going to get enough detail with 64x64 resolution and this is what the Wings exporter I have allows. Can I stick more than one scupltie together to get more complex shapes? If so, would it be easier to build the whole object in Wings3d and then split the shapes up into the 64x64 grids and export them separately and then reassemble them in world? Will I have a lot of trouble lining them up if I try this?

Would I be better off globbing a bunch of spheres together and using up a lot of prims like some of the excellent statues I've seen in world?

I hope my question makes sense. I've only played with sculpties a little.

Thanks.

I would say build your structure with multiple objects in Wings . Each object in Wings should be derived from one of the sculpty templates. Don't combine the objects in Wings, or you won't be able to export.

You'll have to export the objects one at a time (using Exported Selected), import them into SL individually, and reassemble them there. It would be nice if the exporter would follow Qarl and Eddie's work for Maya and do all this automatically, but it doesn't (yet, at least.)

Just one thing to add. Be careful how many sculpties you use in a build. Remember, every one of them has 2048 polygons in it. Pile a few hundred of them up, and you're talking hundreds of thousands, or possibly even millions, of polygons. That's enough to lag the hell out of almost everyone in visual range.

By contrast, a few hundred prims is usually measurable in the tens of thousands of polys, an entire order of magnitude or two less than the sculpties. By average usage, it takes somewhere between 10 and 20 regular prims to equal the performance hit of one sculpty.

So be careful. Just as with large textures, heavy scripts, etc., sculpties must be managed with due caution.

Combining that useful advice...

have you looked at various sculptures build *without* using scupties? They can be pretty good, if you know what you are doing (god knows I don't).

So, you might rough out your large organic thing using smushed spheres, tori, etc. Then make a few special purpose sculpties for the pieces that you feel need to be refined.

Also, be sure you have investigated the wonderful variants on all the usual prims.

I was hoping I can do what I'm trying to do with no more than 6 sculpties. I've been surrounded by more than that before without noticeable lag - at least not noticeable to me, but that was in a relatively quiet unpopulated sim. I suppose it depends on what else is going on. I don't want to be a resource polluter for the sim, so I will experiment with using regular prims whenever possible.

Thanks for the advice - it works much the way I had imagined then.

Don't worry if it's just a handful. No one's framerate will be made or broken by the presence of absence of sixsculpties. Or even 60 sculpties. Take it into the hundreds, though, and you'd have a problem.

I wasn't trying to say sculpties automatically equal lag. I was just saying their number needs to be kept reasonable, which is exactly what you're doing anyway. So there's no problem.

The only other potential pitfall I'll point out is physics. A sculpty's collision shape is the same as that of a torus, or dimpled sphere, no matter what the apparent visual shape of the geometry. So, if you want people to be able to bump into your building, or walk on it, etc., you'll have to get creative. Often, the best thing to do is to make the sculpties themselves phantom, and then use invisible prims to block out an approximation of the physical shape.