Rounded Corners - Wouldn't it be lovely ?

A bit of history to backup the arguments ...

When looking back to the birth of sculpted prims about 2 years ago, it was realy hard to get hands on them. I remember there was a very long period until the first realy good sculpted objects turned up. E.g. i think, it was more than a year of learning period for the 3D artists to get a realy good looking sculpted shoe to market, which looked better than one made out of prims. For me "Black swan" was realy the very first site which prooved that sculpted prims where able to create amazing environments. And it took about 10 months from birth of sculpty to the birth of that site! Whether the creator is a pro or not doesn't bother me at all! And thank you, whoever you are for the kick you gave me after visiting this environment for the first time...

So by then i decided it was high time to lower the barrier. Since i can not program efficiently, but i seem to be able to teach, eventually i ended up in making video tutorials. Others have added better software support since then. More tutorials where created by many individuals, the general knowledge about sculpted prims spread around and grew, progress wherever you looked at. Today indeed the barrier has been lowered to "create your first sculpty in 5 minutes" thanks to the progress of many enthusiasts and some amazing tools from "easy to use" up to "almost as unintuitive as it can be" so something for everybody's taste available...

But still sculpty making is complex and burries tons of pitfalls in it. I even think, that it is one of the most ununderstood issues within SL, at least from all the questions popping up and been answered hundreds of times..

Another viewpoint

Maybe take a look at the sculpties and Prims from another perspective. This is what i tell people when they happen to ask me about building with prims and sculpties in Second life:

prims are building blocks which can be manipulated by using a set of parameters, which are only indirectly coupled to their underlaying mesh. The number of possible modifications is rather limited, but there is plenty of room for creativity when combining them. From a builders point of view (ok, my point of view...) prims can be very quickly taken into operation. And creating something out of prims is a low barrier thing. But creating something extraordinary out of prims is damn complicated and you (ok i) can often not tell in advance, what results you get when modifying parameter sets... Other constraints like Prim alignment, prim sizes, prim linking, hight dependencies, even texturing of prims... Everything is technically easy, but needs a good bunch of high end skills to end up in extraordinary end products.

Sculpties are built on meshes and to be honest i can not think of a less primitive mesh object than a sculpty (Hey it is a simple plane! Always!! Just bended in 3D...) The only problem with sculpties is, that (at least for standard sculpties) the builder is faced with the problem to manipulate 1024 faces in a meaningfull way. And although this is a very primitive task on a micro level, it demands a high level of 3D visualising skills to get successfull, something that you usually don't get for free but that needs endless practicing... (and it obviously is tool independent!!!)

So now we compare the prims as parametric building blocks versus the truly primitive planar mesh with all its 3D facettes not to forget its very abstract transport medium, the sculptmap plus this damn axis dependent spacial resolution issue... No wonder, that this is a polarising theme


And honestly i doubt, that the majority of people participating in the recent "history of making sculpted prims" where professional 3D artists and i believe that is, because Second Life didn't look like an interesting market at all for "the pros". But for the "little man on the streat" SL was one of the first environments where it was possible to express one self using 3D art and publish it to the world. So it was taken and evolved...

One final note about market diversification... Although it may look like a bad thing to be faced with tens of sculpty tools nowadays, you at least have the chance to select what fits best to you in terms of skills, money and taste. What would be the world if that would NOT happen? Only 1 brand of CD player, "the one and only TV box", Volkswagen, nothing else available (and all are colored in shiny pink, because other colors are out)...

And since evolution is a principle of nature, the same is even true with the in world building tool at the end... How many different SL clients are there available today ? And how do they differ in their building capabilities... Just a question...

So maybe it is time now to get back to rounded corners and how they can be implemented at the end using "parametric Prims" ? A question having gone out of sight ?

Well, I know what is or is not available, and sculpted objects never come with sculpt maps. They are not editable, in-world or out, except by bypassing the SL protection system.



What huge barrier to learning? That's not my point, quit attributing it to me. The huge barrier is the cost of the professional apps. There's only one app I'd consider having a "huge barrier to learning", and that's Blender. I've used lots of 3d graphics programs all the way back to Sculpt 3d on the Amiga, I took to Wings 3d even with its cruft workflow fine. Blender is something completely different.

Making it more direct makes it easier. Same reason working with real lego blocks is easier than working with a Lego program, which is in turn easier than planning a Lego build on construction paper.

I earned my first income in SL the first day I was in-world, with a scripted barstool using the inner saddle curve of a torus as the leg and base and an ellipsoid as the cushion. It was a copy of a bar stool that this guy wanted a better script for.

Not because I'm a savant, but because working in-world with your avatar right there and being able to make a change and screw around and fiddle with things and see the result immediately... not after several minutes and another L$10 upload fee. And because I could see what I was copying in the same interface and same program, and see HOW it was made.

If it was made of meshes and I could do the same thing in-world, it would be just the same experience. I'm not dissing meshes, I'm dissing sculpties:

* The workflow sucks.
* They're not modifiable.
* You can't learn by looking at how they're made.
* The cost of entry is enormous.

Fix those, put the workflow in-world, let us edit sculpties the way we can edit regular prims, and everything changes.

Well, if there's no huge barrier to learning, then why do you keep saying it's so hard? There are tons of free and inexpensive apps to chose from that will all do the job. So if expense is your primary gripe, it's a moot point.




That's hardly a fair analogy. Having an object in-world, in your avatar's grasp, is not comparable with having a physical object in your own hand, not in any way, shape, or form. An on-screen representation of an object is an on-screen representation. Whether it happens to be in the same window as your avatar makes no difference. I can't imagine why you feel it does.

If I really have to make a comparison, then I'd say, if anything, it's a heck of a lot easier to be able to use a standard 4-up view in a traditional modeling app, with three orthographs and one perstpective camera, than to have to zoom around all over the place with SL's one single camera all the time. This is by far the number one complaint experienced 3D artists tend to have about SL.

And I wholeheartedly disagree that planning a build on paper is harder than just doing it. I'm not sure how your mind works, but in mine, planning something out in advance almost always saves countless hours over just trying to wing it.

But in any case, if you want to believe inworld automatically equals easy, that's up to you. I know plenty of 3D artists who would strongly disagree, myself included, but it's all just opinion, of course. You're certainly entitled to yours.




OK, so you were able to see how something was made, and replicate it on your first day. Great. Yeah, I was doing that sort of thing, too. I think every builder probably was.

But I still kind of doubt it was in your first few minutes. It takes longer than that just to plod through the interface to find that "make torus" button the first time, let alone determine how to hollow it and chop it up to form a table leg.

Forgive me if I'm mistaken, and you really are so incredibly gifted that the secrets of SL's building tools were immediately obvious to you from the second you arrived. But even if that did happen (and my hat's off to you if it did), surely you must understand that that's absolutely not the norm. For almost everyone, it's at least a few hours, if not several days, or even several weeks, before they figure things out at even a basic level of competence.

In any case, there's absolutely zero reason you couldn't have done the same had the object been made of sculpties, and had you then had any rudimentary understanding of how they work. It sounds like prims, for whatever reason, speak your language, and sculpties again for whatever reason, just don't. If that's the case, then it's all about how you yourself are wired, not about which one is inherently better than the other in any way.

Since I'm in a quoting mood today, shall I go with a little Shakespeare? "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves." Or should I say, "The fault, dear Argent, is not in our sculpties but in ourselves."

If you truly meant what you said about there not being a barrier to learning, you should have no problem accepting that if you personally cannot immediately interpret how sculpties are put together, that's all you, not the sculpties.




A scultpy IS a mesh, and yes, you can do the exact same thing. Hit ctrl-shift-R, and you can see how every single sculpty in the world is put together. It's only a 32x32 grid. It's not hard to see where all the lines are.

In any case, if you're really unable to tell how a sculpty was made just by looking at the wireframe, how on Earth do you expect to be able to interpret an arbitrary mesh? At least with a sculpty, you've got some frame of reference. You know it's always unfoldable to a grid. With an arbitrary mesh, it's entirely open ended.

You do realize that when mesh support hits, it's going to be as an import function, right? As far as I know, there are no plans for in-world mesh editing. If you watch the video that was shown at SLCC, what's demonstrated is the importation of an existing model, not the creation of a new one. The importer shown has four file pickers on it, for uploading the four LOD versions that will be required for every mesh brought in.




That's a matter of opinion. For anyone experienced with NURBS modeling, as I was from my school days, it's very, very, very simple. It couldn't be easier, really. But for those used to poly modeling, without any NURBS experience, I could see how the change of habits might be perceived as slightly painful. But that doesn't last long, unless you're determined to keep it so, by convincing yourself it's all bad. Again, a little open mindedness goes a long way in the content creation arena.




Well, they CAN be. If the people making them choose not to let them be, that's another matter.




Excuse me, what? Of course you can. Again, just examine the wireframe, and it becomes immediately obvious how each and every sculpty in the world was made. If you're not able to determine that, perhaps you just need a little more practice.




Again, there are a great many free and inexpensive programs to choose from. Why you keep ignoring that to focusing only on the expensive ones is beyond me.




Yes, everything would change. But not all of it would be for the better.

No they won't. There is only one free program that is good enough, and it is damned hard even for people with decades of experience.


Oh, you've use in-world mesh editing tools and discovered that they didn't help? No, if course not.

I didn't say it was in my first few minutes. I use the word minutes as a contrast to "a few hours of instruction". A few hours of instruction corresponds to weeks of teaching yourself. A few minutes of instruction corresponds to hours of teaching yourself.

No, I'm not "incredibly gifted". It's just not that hard.

If the sculpty tools were in-world, so you could eyeball the mesh and the original as you're working on it, probably not. But they're not.

Then it will have the same problem as sculpties. It's the same half-assed solution. You'll still have to buy expensive software. You'll still be up against the permissions problems. You still won't be able to edit sculpted prims the way you can edit regular ones.

^
THIS
.

That is a good point. But I think I can refute it, if you'll bear with me. This is actually something I often think about when it comes to teaching programs like Photoshop. The latest version of any program has got a ton more features than does a much older version. Photoshop today has a bazillion more nuts, bolts, bells & whistles than it had when I first learned it.

Does that mean I had an easier time with the initial learning than students today do? Do they have more that they have to absorb than I did? Surprising as it may sound, I think the answer is actually no.

Most new features tend to make certain routine tasks much easier and faster, and many even serve to eliminate old methodologies entirely. In other words, it all evens out. While there might be more to learn in terms of shear number of features, there's less to have to know in order to get the job done, if that makes sense. For example, no one needs to waste time learning to preserve document history as embedded layers anymore. We have smart objects, smart filters, and an amazingly well functioning adjustments palette now, which make most of the old preservation techniques completely unnecessary. And nobody needs to bother learning some of the old mask+level adjustment+burn/dodge/sponge techniques anymore, because we now have built-in exposure and vibrance controls. Etc., etc., etc.

Does this same model apply to SL? I believe yes, it does. You see, while you and I tend to view sculpties as something new and somewhat alien, since the SL we grew up in was prims only, to someone brand new, it might well just be, "OK, so that's how it works. Got it."

Think about this. three years ago, if you wanted to make a snake, you'd have to learn how to chop up a torus into sections , how to align those sections with each other to form the undulating body, how to similarly chop up spheres and cylinders to form the head, and how to use the texture repeat & offset settings extensively to make the paintjob fit on the surface properly. That's all a lot of work, just to make a very simplistic looking object. It could well take several hours to do a really good job of it, even for an expert, let alone a newbie. But today, all you'd need to do is spend ten minutes making a single sculpty, and then bake a texture right onto it. For the novice, neither method will be straight forward, of course, but the latter is certainly no more work than the former. It's significantly less, in fact.

So, while yes, there are now two systems to have to learn, which by casual logic would seem to mean twice as much, when you take a step back to consider the actual implementation and associated behaviors, fact is the two systems supplement each other. They're not added one atop the other, but melded together to form a new whole. From that perspective, this may indeed be a case where 1+1=1, not 2.

That's a decent point. Although I doubt that it balances out to 1+1 = 1 in the short term, it probably does if you take the long view. Very few of us know how to handle a horse and buggy, spin our own wool, or make soap from scratch. Progress takes to relieve us of some tasks as it replaces them with others. In the short term, I'm not so sure. Except for those who are true futurists, most of us can't help living in the present and anticipating changes that are ahead. We can't afford to give up skills we need now, even if they will be obsolete tomorrow. Therefore, in the short term, we DO have to learn both the old and the new skill set. 1 + 1 may not be 2, but it's certainly more than 1. That can be a scary inertia barrier for the timid souls among us, and there are plenty of them out there.

SL's primitives aren't necessarily any easier to learn than an external modeling tool.

What we have in SL is a situation where amateurs feel that they've mastered primitives but at the same time they're frustrated by their limitatons. But if LL were to keep adding more features to primitives then they'd eventually become incredibly convoluted and difficult to master for all the newcomers to SL. Even the professional Maya modelers would struggle to use SL's primitives.

It's time to let go of the prim.

We all stop playing with lego eventually.

I think that aiming for an in world 3D editor for sculpties has more downsides than upsides.

Of course Argent is right that the workflow of generating sculpties is tedious and time consuming. But i also remember how people where argumenting that adding more complexity to the SL viewer would be of no good and would introduce more and more bugs. IMHO keeping 3D creation with 3D-tools which have already been available was the better decision. Otherwise we would possibly have ended with a half hearted buggy in world tool which half of the world could master and the other half would hate and in the worst case sculpties might have been ended up as a closed and proprietary objects. Equaly bad for "pros" and "amateurs", no ?

I guess that at least the same amount of arguments have been expressed against an in world editor as there have been in favor for such a tool. And i am almost sure that there would have been even more complains if sculpties had been added as propriate in world only thing with no clue how they where implemented at all...

IMHO having them to be created outside of SL has added to diversification and progress. And hey, the process of importing a sculpted prim into SL is not sooo complicated...

I understand to a certain extend why sculpties have been implemented that way, so that they fit as seamless as possible into the already existing infrastructure of Prims. But what i can not understand is, how LL could support one commercial product while keeping hands off from all others including open source tools. And i also can not understand, why LL did such a bad communication job since with the introdution of Sculpted prims they should have also provided comprehensive in depths documentation for third party integrations. And i can not understand, why Sculpted prims have not been implemented with the parametrisation of standard prims in mind. Path cut, slicing, twist, shear all that would have been something more or less usefull in the sense that sculpty creators could create "base sculpties" and let builders use them very much like standard prims... ok, maybe not soo easy to implement that ....

oh, and having to pay for each upload is not an intrinsic property of sculpted prims, but a decision of the owners of SL. So you can not blaim the sculpted prim technique for a political decision, no ? And although it is correct that having to pay for each upload is disgusting, it also helps to keep people from flooding their inventory with lots of lots of crap (erm, i am speaking about myself here )

Need to post more on this topic (turning into a very interesting conversation)

(can't right now as at work)

But on the last point, yes, it's not good at all that "Especially the learning novice) has to struggle to try and learn sculpties and has to pay L$10 just to see that they don't look any good in SL before going back to the 3rd party editor they are using.

That reminds me on that i also can not understand why the preview for sculpties has been created as a "black object on dark blue without lighting and non resizable for inspection popup window" ...

It would be of a certain value if sculpties could be "preimported" such that you can edit them in your viewer and if you like what you see, upload the sculptmap to your inventory. Such a thing would help a lot...

Or maybe better implemented generically as "upload local", which uploads the sculpt map or texture but only displays the items to yourself maybe with a little symbol above them to indicate to myself "others wont see that!" while others would just see a placeholder object until you pay your 10 L$ fee which wooosh will make them "public visible" ... I would like that feature

Expanding the object editor to support dragging mesh nodes around (and that's really all it would take) would not be a large amount of extra complexity.

Requiring that it be exported from the world before it can be edited is a critical failure in the workflow that means people can't modify sculpts.

I worried about this with sculpts in a way, though I joined and learned with them already starting to take a hold.

The texturing is hard and almost useless on some shapes with sculpts. To be honest, I think a n00b with Gimp, blender and/or wings will fare better. Plus, if a 'normal' format, like collada or OBJ, is used you may see way more people jump on board than there was sith sculpties!

Why? I think there are is a wider choice of software and way easier to figure out creation, granted the file format and the mesh requirements are easy enough to convert and build with in mind. So I feel as if this will possibly help some sculptie haters totally become great at mesh. While me....well, I tried some regular mesh making and I suck lol. So I will be making an even slower catch up! But I bet there are those out there who take to regular mesh making like a duck to water, even if they never could get sculpties.

After working with sculpties for a while i found myself less working on single mesh points but as slowly as i am i still have started using more and more mesh tools and make them work for me more and more efficiently. Right now i would not get anywhere with a built in "mesh point moving tool". You would want to select, deselect multiple points at least. You would want to rotate selections, shift, scale, add more complex operations... and soon end up in another 3D editor tool. If a built in mesh tool would not support such things, i believe sooner (no immediately) people will start looking for external tools. Isn't that something people are constantly asking even for prims since years ?

Concerning the non modifiability of sculpties, i'd rather like to see a feature where sculpties could be created as "basic building blocks" and then be manipulated inworld with the built in editor just like all other prims. Right now you can scale and rotate them. Implementing more modifiers would be very interesting (path cut, twist...) That would make much sense to me and i am sure it would be immediately recognised as much more usefull feature than directly manipulating the objects on the mesh level. hey you said, that the prims are so successfull, because they are easy to handle in world... Why not aim for something similar for sculpties ? just my weird ideas

Who said anything about single points? The SL building tools already support multiple selection.

If you don't want to manipulate the mesh in-world, you could keep on using external tools and importing a mesh... but having basic sculpt editing in-world would start breaking down the barrier between the mesh and the environment.

That would still require a built in mesh editor. Why? Because sculpties are a mesh, not parametric prims. It's not meaningful to even talk about applying a path or profile cut, or bend or twist, or other parametric deformation, because sculpts aren't created by moving a profile along a path.

that's precisely what I'm asking for. Something similar for sculpties.

There's not much that can be done with a raw inworld sculpty. All the nice sculpties we see have all had lighting and details baked into them. They were all made externally.

I very rarely see a nice model made from raw non baked sculpties.

Maybe i missunderstood you when you said:

It sounded like you aimed for a mesh point editor. Ok, you didn't say "for single points" that's true So it is more like a 3d editor as i described in my previous post what you aim for ? But you said "dragging" and i am afraid, that is not enough even for a "simple 3d editor". BTW how would you control, where your mesh points are dragged too ? And what about the viewpoint ? Since we still have to use 2D views it may be interesting to modify the built in editor to support side views top view, front view split screen view... Maybe we should take a look at blender and add SL viewer capabilities to it. I think Domino mentioned something alike on the sculptor's party last week ? And if you know him, you should take his words seriously (not mine though


And that's why i tried to say it carefully:

I did not say, that this would be an easy to implement thing. I just was thinking about how to make sculpties (or maybe the next generation of sculpties) more versatile with less effort. But after all, Domino has pointed out months ago how path cut and loop cut could make pretty much sense for a majority of sculpted prims.

On the sculpt map I think of U = path, V = profile.. Path and profile cuts make sense then. Not all sculpt maps will work, but take the default apple, with a start and end cut on the path it can become a sliced wedge of apple. It'd also allow easier animated sculpties as multiple maps could be on a single image and the frame changed with the cuts..

I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're making here. The in-world editor is a 3d editing tool. Whether you're moving one point in the mesh or a whole bunch of them, you're editing them in 3d.

Technically there are ways to create analogous editing effects, but they would only be useful for a vanishingly tiny fraction of real sculpts... pretty much only sculpts that were designed deliberately to support them.

Let's say I've got a fox avatar, and I think the muzzle is too short. If it's made of prims, I can edit the shape of the prims in the muzzle and make it pointier. If it's a sculpty and the sculpty editing tools are a weird hybrid parametric mesh subset, I can turn it into a bizarre zombie by cutting out part of the mesh, but I can't stretch the muzzle by itself because I can't grab the points in the muzzle part of the mesh and pull them around independently of the rest of the mesh.

We already have a better way of doing that by applying an animated texture to the sculpt surface that only shows a part of the sculpt at a time. Texture animation is client side so it's way more efficient than prim puppeteering with or without sculpts.

Only one that's good enough? Exactly how many of the others have you tried? I know you said you don't happen to like Wings, but that doesn't mean it won't do the job. And how about Hexagon? It delivers a quite good toolset with a very easy interface, for under $150, and it's got sculpty support built right into it. AC3D isn't a bad choice either, for $75, and it likewise has built-in sculpty support (as well as in-world reassembly for prim-based models). And surely you wouldn't try to claim that the industry standard Zbrush isn't good enough, would you? It's relatively inexpensive as well, for what it is, at under $600. Heck, Photoshop costs the same or more than that, depending on the version, and a gigantic percentage of the SL userbase has it.

But in any case, have you watched Gaia's videos? They offer a whole new perspective on Blender. As I said, they completely changed my opinion of its interface. I'm firmly convinced now that the only reason Blender has been so hard to learn for so many is that up until very recently, there simply wasn't any easily absorbable educational material available for it. But now that there is, it's a whole new ballgame.



No, and neither have you, so that argument is more than a little silly, don't you think? You're going off your own assumptions about what it MIGHT be like, same as anyone else.




So you sort of admit you did exaggerate before. That's what I thought. Unfortunately, you seem to be doing it again. A few hours of instruction in no way need correspond to weeks of self teaching, and a few hours of self teaching doesn't necessarily translate into just minutes of instruction. You're totally making those numbers up.

For plenty of people, the exact opposite is true. For example, I learned Paintshop Pro well enough to begin teaching it within the span of an hour or two, because I was able to draw upon my pre-existing Photoshop knowledge, and just hit the mental translator button. But when I teach the program to other people, they usually require hours of instruction, just to get to the basic level of understanding I had with it in the first few minutes (and I really do mean the first few minutes, literally, in this case). I can say the exact same for InDesign, which I learned in less than a day, the first time I needed it for a project, and several other programs as well.

For people like me, self-teaching is very often infinitely faster than receiving instruction from a third party (although third party instruction is still an invaluable resource, which I do try to capitalize on whenever I can). For some others, the two are about even. And for still others, like yourself, by the sound of it, it's much, much slower, which is fine. The relevant point here is never just assume everyone else's learning experience has to be just like yours. Different people learn in different ways.

Again, I'm sorry that you personally find sculpties to be so difficult. But from my experience, you're in the minority. Most people I've ever encountered, who are not invested in defending an argument that it has to be more complicated than it actually is, are able to take to it with relative ease. Some do need a little guidance in the beginning, which was that few hours of instruction I mentioned (and which, I repeat, includes an intro to their software of choice, not just the sculpty process itself), while others can just pick it up on their own. No one needs to spend weeks deciphering it, unless they've already decided to convince themselves it's all just so hopelessly hard that they need all those weeks of struggling in order to justify that hypothesis.




It's a lot harder than your statements have implied, and you know it. You weren't doing this stuff in your first few minutes, as you've now already admitted. That's progress in the discussion. Please don't now step backward into exaggeration again.





Again, I'm sorry that you find this all to be so difficult. But I can promise you, you're the first person I've ever run across who says they know how to make sculpties, but is unable to determine how an existing one was made, simply from examining the wireframe. Once again, I'll submit that you're in the minority if that's really the case.




It's not a half-assed solution at all. It's what's been talked about for the past five years, and it's exactly what it should be. Did you really think "mesh support" meant building a commercial quality 3D modeling package into a viewer that's already riddled with bugs, and for which half the community routinely complains its 20-some megabyte download size is already way too large? If so, I'm sorry you missed so much discussion over the years, and that your expectations were so far from the stated intention.

Think about this from a practical perspective for a second. Linden Lab has never been wild about being in the client software business at all. That's been no secret for the past several years. Why do you think they open-sourced the thing in the first place? Their strength is in running the back end, and as such, that's where the bulk of their efforts should be. Client development is at best a distraction from that, one which they'd no doubt be happy to let third parties handle entirely, as soon as it's feasible. If you were in that position yourself, would you really want to tackle increasing the complexity of the client by an order of magnitude or two, which is what it would take to put in any mesh editor worth it's salt, or would you rather just concentrate on the import functionality and related grid stability issues, in keeping with what you know you're best at?

The fact is there are dozens, if not hundreds, of very good mesh editors already in existence, every single one of which will be directly usable for SL, once SL's own import functionality is rolled out. It doesn't take a genius to see the relative illogic in bothering to create another one, just to incorporate into the viewer.

I do get your point about customization of purchased items, but again, I'll remind you that neither textures, animations, sounds, nor even most scripts that are available for sale, are editable in-world, if at all. There's no reason meshes need to be.

That's not exactly the same as being able to have 16 unique frames of a 16 x 16 sculptie on a single 128 x 128 map. Or even 16 different sculpties from that one map which would rez far faster and thus be considered better in some respects.

I didn't say I didn't like Wings. It's probably the best of the lot, actually.

[list of commercial products ignored, though calling something that's 'under $600' inexpensive kind of boggles my mind]

Legally? I use Gimp. I could get a cracked Photoshop, but I don't roll that way. I suspect a lot of people using Photoshop and Maya and the like in-world are using cracked tools. I've certainly been offered cracked copies often enough.

I'm going on 30 years of experience with the difference between fully interactive tools and batch-mode ones. I have never, in any category, found a great batch-mode tool to be as productive as a mediocre real-time interactive one.

The difference in effectiveness for most people between one-on-one guided instruction and self-teaching is orders of magnitude. If anything I've understated the difference. What I'm still boggled by is the idea that it's reasonable to expect people to require a few hours of 1:1 instruction to "get" any kind of competently designed application... even if they're not already category experts.

I "got" wings 3d right away, like I "got" prim building right away. I've also "got" Bryce 3d, Sculpt 3d, and just about every other application I've dabbled in. Blender is a completely different kind of problem. And you seem to agree:

On the other hand, someone who isn't familiar with Photoshop and wanted to make, say, a sign for their store wouldn't take a couple of hours of instruction to get that far. You don't have to understand effects layers and channels to use Photoshop effectively.

On the other hand when Gimp first came out, it took a lot more effort to learn. It just had a really broken user interface in many areas. Later versions of Gim learned from that and they made major changes in the UI, and the current versions are comparable to commercial programs.

Blender hasn't done that. It started out broken, and there's no sign that's going to change.
Where do you keep coming up with this point? I haven't said that. I haven't said anything like that. I've been making sculpties since they first came out. THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME.

I've commented about ONE SPECIFIC APPLICATION as being hard to use... that's not because meshes are hard to work with, that's because *Blender* is hard to work with.
No, but I haven't suggested that. Something with a fraction of the capability of Wings 3d would so... IF it was in-world.

half the community? Now who's exaggerating? Most downloadable games are bigger than 20 MB these days.

Erm, actually, it is almost exactly the same as having 16 frames of a 16x16 sculpty in a single 128x128 map, except in edit mode. Would I prefer a real llAnimateSculptTexture call? Absolutely. But even this is better than having to call llSetPrimitiveParams() for each frame.

Back to the point: things like animations weren't in competition with a previous technology that you could compare it to. So whether they caused a problem or not, you can't see it, you couldn't compare how people were using "old animations" against "new animations". I am personally of the opinion that not having animations editable is a problem, but I can't compare old-editable-anims to new-non-editable-anims. But I can compare old-editable-prims with new-non-editable-prims... and I can see a real problem.

It may be a forlorn hope that LL will ever do something about the problem, but denying that it's a real problem is just nuts. And I've spent enough time explaining why (only to get told I'm not trying hard enough, or it's not as big a problem as you think I think it is) that there's not much point going over that again.

But saying that having sculpties being non-editable isn't a problem is either naivete or wilful blindness.