sharp sculpties?

Ok, I've been trying to figure this out since sculpties became availible. What I am trying to do is make various interesting blade shapes for weapons. My problem becomes that the blade itself never looks smooth. Aside from that I can't seem to create an edge very well.. The closest I've come is making a modified cylinder and then flattening it when it gets into game. That works ok, but the blade itself seems distorted.

I am wondering if there is any good way to combat the distortion, not to mention a trick to creating sharp edges. Ideally this weapon would be flat except for the blade edges, but again I'm still not coming up with a decent enough edge to consider selling it.

Any ideas?

I cant say for sure, as im still dealing with sculpties myself, but Everywhere I read, sculpties are defined as being good for "Organic shapes". Which means round-ish and curved things...not sharp blades.

Yeah I realise that, but we aren't supposed to be able to make prims smaller than .01 or larger than 10.0 either.. I think there has to be a way.

From the FAQ > "Prims which are close to the viewer camera have a 32 by 32 grid of vertices, which drops to 16 by 16 as the prim moves away from camera"

With the way sculpties get less complex as you move away, even if you were able to create a sharp edge it would probably only look sharp close up, then become rounded and dull looking if the camera is farther away. Torturing the regular prim shapes is probably still your best option for a sharp edge.

Somewhere there is a thread about sharp edges. One tip was that you need several Edge Loops near the sharp part. I am not going to take the time to draw a picture of what that means right now...so in words

To get a sharp edge, your model needs two or more edges very close together where the sharpness is desired.

The trick in Maya, when you are making/drawing a curve, is to place 3 vertices at the same place where you want a sharp edge. I experimented with it and it looks pretty sharp in-world.

Really sharp edges are currently possible if you do the math in advance and then "draw" the R, G, B channels using photoshop making sure that the corners are on the positions that are always sampled. Most other methods will work somewhat at max detail but will lose quality fast at lower detail.

i'd made a quadrant based color map to see how the color's position "fit" the sculpty.
basicly it was...

|
black | white
-------+----------
|
red | blue

...anyway, this produced VERY sharp edges. A rule of thumb seems to be "Visually sharp contrast in the sculpty texures display as sharp edges in the sculpty".

Zen, Blakkar: Can you guys give some examples because I have no clue what yer talking about here.

Two lines of vertices together are enough to give a sharp line. This is due to the lighting being calculated per vertex based on sun direction. So with a----b-----c where a is facing sun, b is at the midpoint ( say 45 degrees ) and c is at 90 degrees you get two gradients. a ( 0% shadow ) to b ( 25 % shadow ) and b (25 % ) to c ( 50 % shadow ). This gives a continuous gradient from a to c and the line through b will look rounded. By making the line a----bc-----d,

b (30 degrees ) to c ( 60 degrees) is too small to render and so you get the appearance of a sharp edge as the gradient now has a slice missing and a----b looks like a seperate face to c---d

One thing to bear in mind is the LOD, I'd recommend not working above a 16 x 16 face model until you have done the lines if you want it to show from a distance. Subdivide after that and leave the lines alone, just do additional modelling with the vertices added to the larger faces.

You can see the difference here /53/fd/182727/4.html#post1526532

A sharp scullpty and the texture that makes it.