Sculptie Stairs

Ok I know sculpties are best used for organic looking things but is there a way to make something very squared off!

One of the biggest prim eatters around are stair cases! Alot of us go with ramps but visually they aren't a great solution....

So...

Can a 12 step one prim stairway be made as a sculptie? Shaped like a right angle triangle with steps up the long side? If so what a gift to the SL world that would be!

Good Idea.
The Sphere-like Physics of a Sculptie will be a bit of a Problem, but no big Deal.
Read this
for a Discussion of Sculptie Stairs Problems.

It has already been done:

http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=251074

You can do it, but there a few catches:

First, collisions. In order for people to walk up the stairs reliably you're gonna need to overlay an invisible ramp on top of the sculptie. Collisions + sculpties = bad combination.

Second, LOD. The number of polygons in a sculptie decreases over distance. So when you look at it from far way, some of your steps might disappear. To combat this, make sure you have lots of overlapping CV's on your NURBS model (which you'll need anyway to make sharp edges with NURBS) or lots of overlapping vertices if you're using starting from a poly model. Have at least 3 CV's or vertices per corner.

Third, the number of steps per sculptie won't be anything as high as 12, at least not if you want them to have sharp edges. For the most reliable results, I'd suggest using no more than three steps per prim. That won't drop our prim count down to just 1, of course, but at least it will trim it by 75%. You can add more steps if you want, but just be prepared for the fact that the visual quality and reliability will go down with every step you add.


Here's a sample of what your sculpt texture might look like. Note that it's a little sloppy, since I made it in Maya in all of about 10 seconds, but it's pretty close. I think I might have snapped a couple of my CV's to the wrong grid points. With all that overlapping, it can get hard to tell what's what unless you're being really careful.



Copy that image, apply it to a prim, and you'll see you end up with a 3-step staircase.


Edit: I hadn't seen that staircase in Darien's link before. Note the huge difference in visual quality between the small version and the larger versions. The biggest one barely has sharp edges at all. I'd be willing to be they'd be almost unrecognizable as steps from a distance. Sharp corners require lots of overlapping CV's and that eats up your allowance pretty quickly.