Sculpty? What the heck is a sculpty?

Okay, okay.......so I lied just a little. I know what a sculpty is......sort of. I've been reading off and on for a year about sculpties.......since they became available to content creaters. At first I thought "how neat"!! Then I downloaded and tried Blender........hahaha. Got lost immediately and gave up the idea till some later date. Well that date is now so I'm giving it a shot again. The reason? I got a copy of SL'ang Life (the real paper one you get in snail mail) and read a tutorial by Ayumi Cassini using Cel Edman's SculptyPaint (v.0.91) available free at http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/sculptpaint/. I know it's a pretty basic program but I need to start off crawling instead of running. I think I'm beginning to grasp the concept by playing around with it.......actually I'm trying to make a bell just to see what it looks like when I apply it inworld. So now to my question(s).

My main reason for wanting to make sculpties at the moment is that I make prim skirts for myself (and friends if they want them) and hate (I mean really hate) glitch pants. I've been using both a torus and hollowed cylinder for waist bands to attach my panels to. But, as you all know the contours of the avatar waist can not be followed closely using either of those prims......the waist is just not round or oval or egg shaped. It has changing radius contours around the belly, hips and buttocks. I'm thinking a sculpy would work if I can figure it out. I know the ratio of my front to back and side to side measurements for cylinders and toruses so I can get those with SculptyPaint and approximate the the contours of the belly and butt. But I have no referrence to size. Once you apply the sculpted map to the prim is the sizing of the prim the same as a regular prim? I mean if the map I upload is tiny or huge can I resize the prim I applied it to to fit my avatar? I would think I could but I'm not sure the sculpty prim reacts the same way as a regular prim.

And one more question for now. Applying textures to a sculpty. Do I do it same way as any other prim? Do the repeats and offsets work the same? What about planar mapping?

Thanks for any help.

Peggy.

might i suggest you forget sculptypaint and go to wings3D its much more better for actually making a sculpty after you install the Import/Export plugin.

basicly the shape you make will come out all blocky but if you follow my little tut on how to smooth your sculpts which as you said you have used sculpty paint so you should know the smooth sculpt option quite well.

basicly heres how this will work.

install wings3D then its plugin for sculptys
then open one of the "quad" files i recommend 16x15 as a start
work your shape in there and export it as a .obj file first then export as a .bmp
locate the .bmp and resave as a .png and upload into sculptypaint and smooth the sucker out untill desired and then export as a 64x63 texture and wala you have a super smooth sculpt.

be sure to sculptyspace to preview it so you know it looks right.

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http://halfpastnull.com/?cat=35

Regarding the nuts and bolts of how sculpties work:


The brief idea, is a sculpty is just origami. You're given a sheet of paper, often rolled up as a tube or sphere, that you can fold roughly 32 times on each side.

Those "folds" are then captured as a texture, where XYZ becomes RGB.


You CANNOT simply add "repeats" or rotation to the texture in the editor, per se. The reason for this is if you were to repeat the texture, you would get exactly the same shape multiple times in the same location. Ditto for rotation... but that tends to get a bit weird.



There are lots (and lots, and lots!) of offline tools to play with that support sculpties.

I personally have tried making mine as close to editing in SL as I could, and include a couple bells and whistles not often found in other tools (mirroring support, saving and importing sets of prims, and the ability to include regular prims).

Most other tools rely heavily on import and export scripts, or create tools geared toward specific tasks. So far the Wings version appears to be the most popular.