My Sculpties come out weird?

Hi.

I have been trying to make sculpties for 2 days, have tryed 5 diffrent programs in world and out of world. They always come out just not as I wanted, they are not smooth and have just general weird things happend.

Can anyone help?

You'll have to provide a better description than "weird". That could mean literally anything.

That said, my first guess is maybe you're not uploading your sculpt maps losslessly. Make sure the map images are no bigger than 64x64, and make sure lossless upload is turned on.

What viewer are you using ? Some suffer from the LOD bug making sculpties look like garbage. Try the latest RC client seems to be the best for me aside from other problems, the new RC has a number of great sculpty-centric features.

-whyroc

By weird I mean,

The ends are patically not rounded as i want and have odd things in them such as distroted points

Ditto - last week I made some PloppSL shapes - actually two were globular and not very complex. They looked like uneven, half-inflated, rumpled mylar balloons in the world.

It could be the LOD bug that Whyroc mentioned, which is super annoying, or as I said, it could be that you're not uploading your sculpt maps losslessly. If it's not either of those things, then we'll (again) need a better description of the problem. Screenshots would be helpful.

One thing you might want to try is using Cel Edman's Sculptypaint to smooth out the Sculpt Map before importing. The 'Smooth Sculpt' function is an easy way to do it if you want to round edges that come out as sharper sculptys than intended.

I use this on some of the branch models which I first modeled in 3ds Max but came out very weird on first importing. When I imported the sculpt map directly to SL the way Sculpts Map had some sharp edges and many of the smaller curves didnt translate. If you have a vertice or face that doesn't transition smoothly to SL's sculpt mapping in the outside 3d app this can happen alot. If you model for SL in other 3d apps, it takes some importing to get used to how things will look and what fine sculpt details wont translate well.

You may need something like Photoshop to convert between targa and .png formats but sculptypaint can work really well with some models in smoothing out the transition from more complex 3d modeling programs and SL. Sometimes just one Smooth Sculpt with 32x32 on can adjust something to make it it SL sculpty compatible.

Sculpted prims are not perfect translations of a model in another 3d application.
You can think of them as a visual trick not an actual nurbs or UV primitive in a 3d app. The server still reads the sculpted prim as a perfect sphere. The client (our computers) render that sphere based on the sculpt map. Actually now that I think about it, a Sculpted prim is really a Displacement mapping. This is why the common 'stairs problem' occurs sometimes.

In other words, sculpted prims are not 'physically' the actual shape we see them as to the Second Life servers, which is why they cannot be flexible prims for example. While many more interesting effects are certainly possible, this method does not ensure perfect translation from what is possible in 3d modeling apps.

Here is a an example of two sculpts I had saved to show function. The transition used maybe 10-20 Smooth Sculpts so achieving an effect in between is not difficult:

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/566/sculptypaintexampleqi6.png


Oh and Sculptypaint is a free download here:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/sculptpaint/


It may also help to begin using 'scultpy' primitives as base for modeling in 3d apps.

If you use SculptGenMax for 3ds Max, you can import a basic shape (cube, plane, sphere, cylinder) that has a sculpty compatible base, to begin modeling.