Making this necklace

I was wondering on easier ways to make this necklace. I don't think texturing it look nice. The only way I can think of is using small rounded cubes and just rotate them around. Although it'll be hell because of the rotating. So is there an easier way, or another way?

http://www.akatasgrassshack.com/images01/jwlry01/j_010.jpg

Yikes! You'd make that with individual prims? I hope you own a big plot of land to do the building on!

I think my first cut at it would be cylindrical and toroidal segments, with a photographic texture applied

If I counted right, there are around 80 beads on the smaller necklace, and almost 200 on the larger one. On behalf of all users of SL, I'm going to ask you please not to make each individual bead a separate prim. Trust me; if you walk around with 300 little toruses around your neck, in addition to everything else you're wearing, you won't have too many friends when everyone's frame rate drops whenever you wander into view.

Lag considerations aside, you'll need to simplify the thing anyway, if you want to do it as a single attachment. The most prims you can have in one linkset is 256.

I'd go with Lindal's suggestion. Make the necklace out of a few cylindrical or toroidal sections (or better yet, a single sculpty), texture it well to give the illusion that it's beaded, and call it a day.

I'd recommend you use a few sculpty prims to make that. Not a sculpty for each individual bead but for a section of beads. Then you could reuse the same section to form the whole necklace.

Yes, this is one item where the pain of making sculpties would be justified.

Making sculpties is painful? If you say so.

Anyway, the reason I didn't suggest sculpties is not because it would be difficult to do, but because the poly count would be pretty high. In order to keep most of the beads from being killed by LOD culling over distance, the most you'd safely get out of one sculpty is maybe eight beads. Divide that into the ~300 total beads in the piece, and you're talking somewhere around 40 sculpties.

That's over 80,000 polygons, just for a little necklace. Lag city.

Better than 300 toruses though!

yes, given you have to use an external program and know all this hocus-pocus to make what you see in that program look like it does in world, without it becoming lumpy and having bad LOD reactions. When they make an in-world WYSIWYG editor for sculpties, it will cease to be painful.

Darien, please don't equate learning with pain. That's really discouraging, and not fair to newbies who might be turned off from the whole thing by that description. The fact is it's really not very hard if you know what you're doing.

If you don't (yet) know what you need to know in order to do it, then it's just a question of putting in the effort to learn and practice. That effort absolutely does not need to be "painful" in any way. It can be a lot of fun, in fact, if you let it.

If you've been having trouble learning on your own, by all means ask for help. Lots of us will be happy to offer guidance and advice. But don't automatically assume your own challenges will be felt by everyone else. I'm sure a great many people less intelligent and less talented than you have learned to make sculpties without feeling "pain" from it. If they can do it, so can you.

I can assure you there's no "hocus pocus" involved. You just need to know your way around your 3D modeling application of choice, and then accept and understand the (very simple) basic principles behind how sculpties work. If you've already decided it's hard, then it will be. But if you just relax and take it one step at a time like everyone else who's learned it, it doesn't need to be difficult at all.

Is it a little different from common 3D modeling technique? Sure. But so is SL's prim system. Learning the requirements of your target platform is just par for the course in the life of any 3D modeler. They all have different needs and different restrictions. To be effective, you have to remain open to new techniques at all times.

I'm not sure why you feel it's not a WYSIWYG system, by the way. I have yet to make a sculpty that doesn't look the same in my modeling program as it does in-world. If that hasn't been your experience, then you must have been doing something wrong. Whatever that is, I'm sure it can be corrected easily. We'd just need to examine exactly what you've been doing. Chances are there's just something simple you missed somewhere along the line, no big deal.






The fact that there's no built-in creation tool for sculpties in the viewer doesn't make it any more or less "painful" than anything else. I'd invite you to consider that there's likewise no built-in tool for creating textures, or for making sounds, or animations, or Quicktime movies, or Web pages, etc. All of these things are obviously a huge part of the SL experience, and all of them require the use of external programs. But no one goes around insisting that making those things is in any way "painful". Again, it's just a question of learning how to do it.

You have to draw the line somewhere with the viewer's capabilities. As I often say whenever this kind of discussion comes up, in order for SL ever to become truly mainstream, the viewer has to become much simpler than it presently is, not more complex. 90% of all people who join SL quit after 20 minutes and never come back. Most common reason given, "It was too complicated." That's unacceptable.

The Internet became popular when browsers became easy to use. Content creation for the Web is not done in browsers, but in dedicated programs like Dreamweaver, Flash, etc. Browsers can only create very simple content, like the kind we're making right now by typing on this forum. Anything advanced requires other software.

SL follows that same model. The viewer is primarily for viewing, just like a browser is primarily for browsing. Relatively simple content can be created with it (prims, text-based stuff like notes and scripts*, etc.), but anything more complex requires specialty software. This is to be expected, and there's nothing wrong with it.








*Scripters, please don't take that the wrong way. I didn't mean to imply that the art and science of writing scripts is in any way simple. I just meant that scripts themselves are made from text, which is itself a simple thing.

True, but that's a bit like saying getting stabbed is better than getting shot. Either one will ruin your day.

I appreciate what you are saying, but In many ways I don't agree. I think the process for creating sculpties could be *vastly* improved. The plethora of in-world sculptie creation tools illustrate this. However being powered by LSL and limited to what SL permits greatly limits them.

Step 1: Fix the Lossless upload bug. Its frankly ridiculous you have to use a 3rd party program (SLImageUpload) to get acceptable sculptie maps. I noticed with the release of 1.20 they *again* (for like the 3rd time) say it's now fixed. I haven't had a chance yet to see.

Step 2: Create an editor that uses the actual rendering code from the viewer, so the object you are manipulating on screen matches exactly what you will see in world. No editor has this ability yet. The objects shown in most external editors show edges far too sharp, they become dull in world, Flat surfaces become dimpled and lumpy. The poles are puckered and distorted. If these problems were visible at the time of creation, they could likely be dealt with, or even corrected automatically by the software. That's what software is supposed to do, remove the tedium, and leave the creative process unencumbered. (IMHO)

I appreciate the offer of help, If I ever find my time to actually try a sculptie again, I may very well take you up on it.