Geometric sculpties and edge effects

I do a lot of work with sculpties, mainly using Sculptypaint, but lately I've been trying to learn how to map geometric sculpty shapes directly in Photoshop. I'm interested in producing mineral crystal shapes, using the RGB coordinate system to generate faceted crystal forms.

So far, however, I've been frustrated with the result when rendered in-world. They always seem to rezz with odd edge effects; basically the facet edges meet imprecisely, creating a dislocation or 'seam' where to edges meet. I generate the color maps in PS and they are accurate down to the pixel, in terms of shape and RGB values, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong to get these rough seams.

I imagine this might be a problem with rounding errors in the math of how SL renders shapes from a sculpty map. I've played with using blur in PS or smoothing the sculpties by passing the PS maps into Sculptypaint and smoothing them there. I'm thinking that might work eventually, but it seems to be a tricky balancing act of smoothing just enough not to leave a 'solder' seam, while keeping the edges crisp.

Does anyone have any suggestions or tricks to clean up this issue? I'm interested in constructing geometrically accurate crystal forms, but this edge effect is really getting in the way.

Thanks, and blessed be.

You need to make sure you're uploading your sculpt maps losslessly. To that end you need to be using SLImageUpload until LL fixes lossless uploading in the SL Viewer.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLImageUpload

See this thread for additional caveats:

/8/64/215869/1.html

You might also want to preview your work with SculptySpace

/8/ae/221383/1.html

If it looks fine in SculptySpace, but not in SL, you're likely running into one of the bugs discussed in the thread above.

Cool, thanks! That seemed to help a lot. Using lossless compression, combined with a careful application of smoothing in PS using gaussian blur, the edges are very tight now.