Sculpty Animation - Blender

Ok, I started getting brave and decided to try an animated sculpty. No problem I thought. I just add some bones in Blender, bend my sculpty to the positions I want, bake it at those poses, voila!

Nope!

Anyone have any suggestions why this would not work? The mesh is transformed to the shape I want, but when I bake, I end up with a bunch of the same sculpty maps as the original un-posed sculpty.

What am I missing here?

You will need to bake your armature before you bake the texture (the button is either called bake or make permanent, cant remember off the top of my head). If you only move the bones, Blender considers that to be a temporary change that should be ignored when baking textures.

You'll also want to have each "sculptie frame" in the same scene as a seperate object. Select them all before you do the Render - Bake Second Life Sculpties and the bake will give them a common centre and scale. This means you can set the prims scale (see console after baking for the size) and just change the sculpt map in sequence to animate.

Or alternatively you could add a Sculpt Mesh sphere, in the Logic panel change LL_SCULPT_TYPE to 0. This will let the sphere act as an unbaked bounding box, so size it so it's edges are at the max and min X, Y and Z of the animation. When baking each frame select the sculptie and the sphere and the sculptie will take it's size range from the sphere.

This is also how you can do offset sculpties if you wanted to do say a door with the hinge at one edge, in this case the sphere would be double the sculptie size along the X & Y axis so you could position the corner of the door at the centre of the sphere.You'd also need to recentre the door mesh on the same corner.