WHY? - Sculpty appearance changes at different distances

Hello.. I'm new to Blender and the more I play with shapes the more questions I seem to find. What I would like to understand most has to do with how the uploaded shape into SL seems to change at different distances. For example when using a ring to make a collar, when placed at the avie neck, when I look at it close it appears one way when I zoom out.. it changes.. I dont understand what causes this.. is there something that can be done so the item appears the same both near and far?

The texture was uploaded into SL as lossless at 64 resolution, in both SL and SL Mono, where in both SL's most of the item part is viewed as grey, in SL Mono, I see some yellow and white parts. Any helpful tips are deeply appreciated.

You can't stop it from happening. It's called LOD(Level of Detail).

There are 4 levels, and the farther you are away, the lower the detail of the visible object. This helps to save resources, as when you zoom out you have more visible, and if everything stays at it's highest quality, it can become quite taxing on your system.

The distance it is to change LOD depends on the size of the object. The bigger it is, the farther away you have to be before it loses detail.

Though you can't stop it from happening, you can design your sculpts with that in mind. Some programs, like Rokuro, have it built in where you can view each level before exporting. Other programs (Like Blender) it's not so simple. Someone (I think it was Chip Midnight, but I could be wrong) released an alignment texture that showed different LOD's somehow, but I've never used it, so am unsure how it works.

I think the sculptyspace sculpty previewer has the capability of showing you each LOD, and I recommend that if it does, you use it to help maximize your sculpts to look best under ALL levels of detail

This is an intrinsic property of sculpts. As the camera distance moves away, it will sample the sculpt at lower poly counts: first is 32x32 polygons, then 16x16, then 8x8, and finally 6x6.

The things that affect LOD distance are: prim size (the larger the prim, the further the LOD distances), and object detail settings in preferences. Part of the challenge of effectively creating sculpts is handling LOD; this can be accomplished by smart modeling using the "key" verts that are sampled at different LOD's, or by scaling the entire mesh down (so it can be scaled back up to push the LOD out).

Unfortunately there is no way to manually set how LOD works with sculpts at present. However, you can vote for a JIRA entry advocating this feature: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7578

It's simple with my scripts.

In Blender's edit mesh button panels, you'll see a tab called Multires and you can change the LOD view of the model while you are working on it by changing between 1, 2 and 3 there.

Leilani , if you watch the UV map in a UV Image Editor window while changing the Multires level, it should help you understand what's going on when the LOD changes.

There is a good tutorial on LOD at: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/04/precision_sculpties_lod/

It is for Blender, but I understand Sculpty Space (available in SL and discussed here) also shows LOD info.

The need to use scripts makes it less simple. I meant some programs have it built in, for perfect LOD checking for SL sculpties.

Blender does not have this built in, and requires know-how and/or scripts, making it less simple.

Either way, long as it gets figured out it works ^-^