Anyway to get over the problem of linking real and phantom items for sculpties

You know the situation, make a sculptie but due to whatever reason (resizing inworld?) The bounding box (I think that's the right term) is a bit big, so you made the sculptie phantom.

Great, fixed that.

But now you can walk thru it.

Ok, eazy fix. I'll just make a normal prim inside the sculptie (it's rough shape) and make it 100% transparant, so you won't see it, but now the sculptie appears to be solid in the right places and I can walk on it too

Right, well obviously will need to link both of them (esp it wanting to sell)

But oh, you can't link a phantom and a normal item together without them both being either phantom or non phantom.

That's messed my idea up

Any trick round this?

How about just remake the sculpty with a smaller bounding box?

Unfortunately the problem is a little more difficult. Assume you had created a sculpted bow for a door. If you place this sculpty into the wall and not make it phantom, then your avatar will constantly hit the invisible bounding box. The only way to get the path-through to work properly is to make the sculpty phantom. Now your avatar can pass through the portal, but you get stuck with the phantom/no phantom limitation of linked sets as Piggie complains.

One idea which could work for selling is to create the building by using a "rezz-box" (is that the name?) thus you do not necessarily have to prepare a complete link set...

It's also a problem for those of us who don't make our own sculpties, but just use ready made ones as components in our builds.

Apart from the rezz-box idea (Rezz-Faux is the one I use, but there are many others) or selling the item as a coalesced object, I don't think there is a way round it.

To me that sounds like a quote from "Q" on Star Trek Next Gen.

But the laws of physics, make this impossible.
So "Q" says, simple, just change the laws of physics then.



Seriously, I have no idea about how to do that.
I create a sculpt, use the export facility in whatever program, load into SL and that's it.

If you can simply explain how to change the size of a bounding box to fit snuggly about a sculptie (without changing the laws of physics!) then I (and I'm sure others) would love to know.

I'm not at my SL PC right now, but do I assume that, you put this script in the sculptie, and then link the two (or more) items.

Take them

Then when you rez the linked set it unlinks the sculptie and makes it phantom?

Yes, it may be an acceptable workaround. It needn't be triggered by the on_rez event. The touch_start is there to make it easier to expriment. You may want to put in an llRemoveInventory (llGetScriptName ()) call after the llSetStatus call unless you want to be able to relink the phantom sculptie using llCreateLink later.

That script looks like it might be a great help. It's been really annoying me that I have builds that have to be put in rezz-boxes because a couple of prims need to be phantom. Thanks.

[EDIT]Disregard this post. It was full of incorrect information. That's what I get for trying to post one minute after waking up, and two minutes before needing to head out the door to an appointment. Sorry for any confusion. [/EDIT]

Have you tried this or is it just in theory? As far as I know, there is no way to have any of the sculpt mesh outside of the primitives bounding box.

Thanks, Domino. I was wrong. I've removed the post.

Whoa there....

You didn't need to remove ALL you post did you?

There was some interesting MAYA settings you commented on that I wanted to make a note of. (how to set bounding box size etc etc)

Piggie, I'll return to this subject when I've had a little more time to work out what seems to be going wrong. I've made sculpts with small bounding boxes before, but not in a while. And now it doesn't seem to be working. Whatever settings I use, the map keeps coming out exactly the same. I can't even break it if I try, which is weird.

Either my memory is extremely faulty, or something has changed. I'll let you know what I figure out.

Sure there is. The *physical* bounding box of a sculpty is a 50% sphere. You can push the whole visible portion of the sculpt to the 25% of the *visible* bounding box that's outside the physical one, at a 4:1 loss in resolution on whatever axis you try this on (say, Z, if you're making an arch that's going to hide the physical bounding box underground).

I'd have called that the collision mesh. I thought that was a torus with 0.5 radius for sculpties, so it comes to rest on the top or bottom when physical rather than just rolling.

Whatever you call it (and yes, I agree, collision mesh is correct) you can put the visible part of the sculpty outside it and bury it underground.

Do you have a reference for the 50% sphere? I was under the impression it's a 100% torus, and I think it worked out that the "safe zone" for outside the collision mesh was around 5% of the total sculptie size. So while possible, it's too limited for serious use. I've not done any building this year though, so if things have changed I wouldn't know (and I'd need to tick off the Primstar users for not telling me ).

As far as I know, it is a torus. That's what Qarl said way back when sculpties first came out, and I've never seen any reason to suspect there's been any change. The idea was to have it be something SL already knew how to make, that was as round as possible, but also had a flat top and bottom so it wouldn't fall over if made physical. I suppose a dimpled sphere would have worked, too. But the torus is what was picked.

I guess I was ascribing too much common sense to LL... I assumed they would make the default sculpt map match the collision envelope. It would sure make building easier.

Argent,
Is there a detailed guide how to do this anywhere? Sounds like something which could be useful in the extreme for both little old beginner me and even a lot of much more experienced sculpt creators.
If not, can you possible summarise the process to give me an idea where I should be experimenting to achieve the result you say is possible, please?

Thanks
Carbon

For the OP: Linking 2 prims while 1one of them is phantom and the other is solid IS possible.

You need to use a trick.

The trick is, to make the one you want to be phantom FLEXI.

Flexible prims characteristics are by default phantom but CAN be linked with a non-phantom prim. The non-phantom prim will block avatars from walking through it and the flexu prim WILL be phantom.

You will have to play with the flexi settings to get it as rigid as possible (because you dont need it to be flexible, you are just using that to make it act a s a phantom prim)

I will drop an example on the OP.

=> Mandy, presently you can't make sculpties flexi, and it's the sculpty in this case that needs to be phantom

I'm confused here. The building interface allows us to choose Sphere, Torus, Plane and Cylinder stitching types for sculpted primitives. Does the bounding box of the object change according to the stitching type or is it that all building block types use the sphere bounding box regardless of stitching type?

Anyway, I would advise the OP that a reduction in the size of the bounding box will negatively affect the object's LOD. In which case he should compensate by doubling up vertices where appropriate but only if the resultant hard edges do not ruin the shape.

There's 3 separate things to consider here.

1) The sculpties mesh
2) The sculpties bounding box
3) The sculpties collision mesh

The bounding box is always a cube and the mesh is always fully contained within that cube. The X, Y and Z co-ordinates within the bounding box are what the RGB of the sculpt map represent.

The collision mesh is always a torus that is contained within the bounding box. This is used by the physics engine. I think torus was used as it's the lowest CPU using shape that will come to rest on the bottom when physical.

The mesh can have different stiching types, this only affects how the sculptie looks, it has no effect on the collision mesh or the bounding box.