Prims to >> sculpted prims

I'm trying to make a vehicle in SL. I have finished the shape of it using regular prims. After doing some reading I found that it needed to be lower than 31 prims to be able to sit in the vehicle.

I want take each part and make a sculpt map out of it so my 200 prim model could be cut up and made into only afew sculpted prims each.

I tried to use an in world software called sculptcrafter, the limitations of this are that it only uses 10 prims in the demo and these must made from a limited shape.

Is there any in world software like scuptcrafter which will take a snapshot of my prims so I can make them into a sculpt map using some code or out of world software?

I wouldn't recommend making a vehicle entirely out of sculpties. Sculpties can have seemingly weird physics, since their physical shape has nothing to do with their visual shape. If you do this, I'd recommend enveloping the whole car with a large transparent cube. That will make the physics a bit more reasonable.

Also, remember SL is all about doing more with less. It's almost impossible to imagine a car that would require 200 prims worth of geometric detail. Good texturing goes a long way. Generally speaking, a properly textured model can have anywhere from 60-95% less prims in it than an untextured one, and look just as convincing.

As for the question you asked about some sort of in-world/out-world hybrid sculpty maker, I have no idea. If you want to do this right, and you're on a budget, how about just getting a free 3D modeling program like Blender or Wings, and making sculpties you know you can control, rather than letting some automated system approximate a non-sculpty build?

I know you probably feel you've already invested a lot of time into building that car, and you probably don't want to feel like that time was wasted, but really, if you can do it once, you can do it again. I rebuild stuff all the time, for any number of reasons. We all do. The second go at anything usually takes less than a tenth of the time of the original, no matter what it is, since you've already solved all the geometric problems in your head.

My advice: consider the original build a dry run. Use the rebuild as your vehicle (no pun intended) to learn how to make sculpties from scratch.

There are tools to pull a mesh out of your OpenGL video card.

http://ogle.eyebeamresearch.org/