Sculpty Painter.

I love sculpty painter but time and time again i come up against the same problem.

I make my shape in the painter prog, then save the texture but when i upload it to sl and apply it to a prim, the shapes lose all the defined edges i make and come out all smooth.

Im trying to make parts for a bot, but its supposed to look man made with sharp defined edges rather than smooth organic looking edges, ive tried loads of different ways to try and fix this but so far nothing works.

If anyone has any ideas id be very grateful.

Yo Sir/Madam,

SL applies a heavy shading to sculpties in order to fool people into thinking that sculpties are smoother than they really are. It's a technique known as gouraud shading. Many people overlook this potential problem and I believe it needs to be highlighted before more innocent people ruin their lives by trying to work with specialized sculpty makers.

The shading method also explains why I have no desire to see an in-world sculpty editor. Raw sculpties are just far too limited. Or rather, they're just plain evil.

Instead the good people of the world need to use traditional modeling programs that support texture baking. Texture baking is nice because after applying your lovely baked texture you can then enable full bright to disable the gouraud shading.

As of this day, anybody caught not using a traditional modeling program will be executed.

G'day

Laying verts from neighboring loops on top of each other interrupts the smoothing calculation and gives the illusion of hard edges. I have no experience with this sculpty painter you speak of, so I don't know if this is an option available to you.

So thats one person that thinks they are evil and another one that speaks in terminology, anyone else out there that can help me ? i know what im trying to do is possible ive seen it with my own eyes.

Look here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prim_Explanation

See that grid type illustration? That represents a section of the in game mesh surface that sculpts are made out of regardless of where and with what your sculpty map was made. The parallel edges are often called "loops." They can loop around the whole mesh, but often do not once you get beyond sphere and toroid topology. They are useful for control of the profile of your sculpty. The area between two neighboring loops is a "ring". The points where the intersecting edges meet are called "vertices", or "verts" for short.

If you make it so two of those loops are right on top of each other with respect to their vertices the surface shading that makes them look all smooth and stuff will be interrupted at that point. If you also change the profile of the sculpty at this point it can give the appearance of a hard edge for as long as the LOD leaves them there.

This IS technical stuff. There is some terminology involved when speaking of these things at higher levels. You will have to come to terms with them at some point if you wanna do things like what you are asking about.

Also: http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/sculptpaint/tuto/xxtips.html they show some options at the bottom in Sculpty Painty terms.