Sculpties, a way to share and some new things in my blog

Sculpted prims (sculpties) are one of the latest creation tools in Second Life, they are quite useful and nice, the only problem is they are a bit difficult to create. There is no a building tool for sculpties inside the  Second Life client, so we have to use 3D creation applications to create them, export them in a sculpted texture or sculpted map in a .tga format 256 x 256 and upload them to the grid. Anyway the results worth the work most of the times:

All images by Torley Linden shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

I use a simple 3D builder application created by Cel Edman, the name is SculptyPaint, is specially made for Second Life and you can download the Windows, Mac or Linux versions and the tutorials here. Requires Java Runtime Engine 1.6 or higher installed on your system. Anyway you can find more Resident-made Tools available here. Don’t forget to donate some L$ (inside your possibilities) to the tool-maker if you download some of the applications.

I know to work Sculpted Textures can be a bit difficult (i’m still learning) so i’d like to share some of the sculpted textures i’m creating. Here’s is a link to my Shared Folder in Box. Here you will find three sculpted textures to make “stairs” (with 3, 6 or 12 steps each to fit different needs). I saw stairs made with sculpties are a good way to save prims (and we all worry about prim-saving ), we just need 2 prims to make a nice stair. “Why two prims?” someone said, well, is important to know the form of a sculpty doesn’t match its “physical” form, that’s because the “collision map” of the sculpted prim is still a sphere even the appearance of the prim is other. The SLwiki says about this question:

Q. How do sculpted prims work in the physics engine?
At present, sculpted prims are approximated by a lopsided sphere that is roughly the same size as the sculpted prim.
If you stand or sit on one, you might sink in, or you might levitate. In the future, a more exact representation to the physics engine may be provided, thereby offering more realistic movement/collisions for sculpted prims.

So the best way to make your sculpted stair work is to set as “phantom” the stair prim and to add a box prim as a ramp in the same position as the steps and make it invisible with an Alpha texture (remember you can’t link a “phantom” prim with a “normal” one).

If you prefer you can use the “widget” of Box i have in the right side of this page, over my “Latest Flickr photos”widget. This widget will remain there as a easy way to share more sculpted textures, pdf’s, textures, documents and all kind of stuff that may be useful to you (right now, as well as that sculpted stairs textures, you will find a .zip with some other “normal” free textures for Second Life).

The rest of the new things in the blog are widgets also. Below the “Latest Flickr photos” widget there is “My SL del.icio.us” with some interesting links and my Vod:Pod widget, with my machinima movies (just two for the moment, but soon more, specially now i won a Machinima Cam in the SL Bloggers party photo contest ).