Prims or Sculpties?

I'm trying to learn how to build.

What is the best thing to concentrate on learning right now? Is an indepth knowledge of primitive manipulation and alignment necessary or at least beneficial? Should I drop the old fashioned way of doing things and attempt to master sculpties first? I don't have a lot of free time, so it would be nice to have some opinions about the wizest way to spend it.

I know I'm probably asking people to put on their psychic hats and see into the future, but will everything eventually be sculpties? Will there still be requests or demands for basic prim work?

Personal opinions from everyone (not just experienced builders or employees of the psychic hotline) are welcomed and encouraged.

Thanks for your time,
Hope

Basic prim alignment and such is more important... sculpties are useless if you don't now how to use them, and much you can do without them... I built my 3000m land up with one sculpty shape, from a freebie box, and its just a column. My land looks wonderful in my opinion... I don't use many sculpties when building... and I seem to do fine. I have plenty of freebie ones that I can use if need be though.

So I'd say basic prim tools in-world are better to know, as even if you have a sculpty, you need to know how to properly resize, move, align, texture, all that

Two words: Ivory Tower of Primitives.... ok, three...
Go visit that place, you need to learn about building with prims first. And that is the place to go.

I agree with both of the above posts. Definitely learn to manipulate and build with standard prims first. And, yes, a vist to the Ivory Tower is a must.

As everyone else has said so far, absolutely learn the prim system first. Don't even think about sculpties at all until you've got a really solid mastery of using prims.

If you're wondering, I say this for two main reasons:

1. Doing just about ANYTHING in SL, building wise, requires full understanding and experience with the particulars of the in-world modeling system. Using sculpties can allow you to bypass certain things at certain times, but rarely the same ones twice, and never all of them at once. If you choose to learn sculpties first, you'll just end up with a bunch of sculpted shapes that you have no idea what to do with in-world. Also, the reason for using sculpties in the first place instead of just any old arbitrary mesh only makes sense in the context of the prim system anyway.

2. You should NEVER build everything out of sculpties, so you're going to need to know how to use regular prims no matter what. Sculpties are way too resource intensive. Success in SL is ALWAYS about balancing aesthetics with power consumption.

Consider that every sculpty mesh has 2048 polygons in it. (Yes, I know earlier posts of mine have said 1922, but I was wrong about that. Sorry. It is actually 2048. I counted.) It doesn't take all that many scultpies on-screen before they start to bog down a low-end or midrange grapics card. Compare that with, say, a cube, which has just 108, or a cylinder, which has 192. The difference is huge.

By counting polys in my own models, I've concluded, that "the average prim" by usage has about 188 polygons in it. That means to make one sculpty worthwhile computationally, it has to replace at least 11 regular prims.

Of course, the other side of that is that the single sculpty uses just one texture, whereas the 11 prims might use as many as 40 or 50, so the balance point could actually be lower than 11. But texture management is just another area where people need to learn to be responsible. If someone is boneheaded enough to slap 50 individual textures onto an 11 prim model, they've got a lot more to learn about responsibility and efficiency than just where and when to use sculpties.


Bottom line, to be the best builder you can be, do the following. Learn regular prim modeling before you learn sculpties. Learn to texture well. Develop an understanding not only of how things work visually, but also what's happening "under the hood" technically, and learn to optimize your work to balance both sides of it appropriately. Have fun.

Learn prims to start...when you're comfortable with them in all aspects...then learn sculptie.

Thanks to everyone who answered this post. I had just spent hours in a sandbox trying to make a blasted shoe that looked a little nicer than the freebie clunky platform hooker heels. And all the while I was wondering, am I just wasting my time? Is this method already on the way to becoming obsolete?

So thanks again to everyone who answered. It's nice to know that I didn't just waste a beautiful Sunday morning after all.

Gratefully yours,
Hope

Wow, you're just starting to build and you're trying to make shoes!

Oooohhhhhh. (Lightbulb moment) So that is why I was having so much trouble. Shoes are hard. Whew. I'm not feeling so bad anymore.

Thanks Chas.