What do you think about sculpted prims?

[Charlemagne Allen]

Sculpts have really come into their own in the last year. Having been a sculpt designer for a long time, I'm interested in what the community thinks about sculpts, how sculpt designers can improve their work, and what you'd like to see created.

Here's a few questions about sculpted prims. Feel free to answer as many as you'd like, or give any other thoughts on sculpted prims

1) How essential do you think sculpted prims are to SL?

2) In general, what are the biggest problems you see with sculpted prims when using SL? If you avoid purchasing sculpted products, what are the main reasons?

3) If you purchase full-perms sculpt packs, what are the most important features, and what features do you see lacking? Inclusion of high-quality textures, baked ambient and lighting to be used to make your own, numerous variations in shape and style of sculpt components, and ability to be scaled down small are some possible features.

4) What sort of sculpted products in general would you like to see created in SL with extremely high quality and efficiency beyond what you currently see? From your knowledge of using SL, what products do you think could best benefit from being sculpted?

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[Argent Stonecutter]

I think they're still a clever hack that had a lot more potential than ever got implemented, but that's not surprising since Linden Lab screwed up by not extending parametric prims to a full in-world mesh instead.

I haven't noticed anything new in sculpts recently, what have I been missing?

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Sculped prims are important to a lot of high detail items I buy. I admit to not knowing a whole lot about how to actually make and implement them well. I'm willing to bet a lot of the community is in the same boat.

the biggest problem I see with them is they may be related to some performance problems with new PBR viewers. I don't know that for sure, I'm just speculating here. The latest firestorm seems to often have trouble rendering them perfectly consistently.

 

[Beebo Brink]

What year is this?

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Is it 2007 again?

Sculpties were the best we had until mesh came along.
As I sometimes say:

Her hair was once torus twisted, now it's the mesh and the trends.
She knows lots of pretty pretty girls, that she calls friends.
See how they dance in the PBRlight, without any sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.

So I IM'd the host girl, said my "Friendly greetings" line.
She said SL hasn't had that love machine spirit since two-thousand and nine.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I think my answer was meant for mesh.... got all turned around, haha.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

What year is this?

The link is to an archived post in 2009 from Aminom Marvin, the genius who figured out how to make sharp edges with sculpts.

A joke post here today but also an interesting historical.

 

[Khamon]

2) the length of time it takes to download and rez the item, or am I thinking of mesh, or both. Striving for realism drags the world into a black hole. We had more fun being the ruths in the prim-based world. yeah not a popular opinion get a blog so nobody can read it go home khamon

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Sculpts have been dead since mesh arrived in 2011. All things sculpts can do mesh can do way better.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Sculpts have been dead since mesh arrived in 2011. All things sculpts can do mesh can do way better.

Mostly agree, but basic prims are still used a lot for a lot of things... like if you need an invisible floor, or something to sit on!

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Well, dang. I had a fancy-dancy 'sculpti-maker' tool I was working on in SL and gave up because Mesh was introduced. Shame I didn't finish it.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Mostly agree, but basic prims are still used a lot for a lot of things... like if you need an invisible floor, or something to sit on!

Sculpts are not basic prims, they are more advanced than basic prims but less advanced than mesh.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Sculpts are not basic prims, they are more advanced than basic prims but less advanced than mesh.

shows how much I know about building! lol.

 

[Madi Perth]

Some of my favorite boots are sculpts.

 

[Lexxi]

Sculpts have really come into their own in the last year. Having been a sculpt designer for a long time, I'm interested in what the community thinks about sculpts, how sculpt designers can improve their work, and what you'd like to see created.

Here's a few questions about sculpted prims. Feel free to answer as many as you'd like, or give any other thoughts on sculpted prims

1) How essential do you think sculpted prims are to SL?

2) In general, what are the biggest problems you see with sculpted prims when using SL? If you avoid purchasing sculpted products, what are the main reasons?

3) If you purchase full-perms sculpt packs, what are the most important features, and what features do you see lacking? Inclusion of high-quality textures, baked ambient and lighting to be used to make your own, numerous variations in shape and style of sculpt components, and ability to be scaled down small are some possible features.

4) What sort of sculpted products in general would you like to see created in SL with extremely high quality and efficiency beyond what you currently see? From your knowledge of using SL, what products do you think could best benefit from being sculpted?

Second Life Forums Archive - What do you think about sculpted prims? - page 1

forums-archive.secondlife.com

I like sculpted prims with ketchup. Wait, no, that's crinkle fries.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

shows how much I know about building! lol.

Well how to put it... sculpted prims were a crude hacky way to implement meshes without doing meshes and their complexity. It's a basic prim and then a height map texture, which defines the form of the scultped prim. This height map was rather limited in its complexity, so sculpties were as well. Which is also why scultpies, even if just doing basic organic shapes, always had the same impact on rendering due to the texture always doing the same amount of vertices if I remember correct.

So sculpties are something like this nail thingie: for some stuff it works great, for other meh. But it is always limited on the amount of nails and size, there are hard limits baked into it which you cannot overcome. And you can always tell sculpt due to the nails. Mesh on the other hand has not these limitations, since it allows you freely to define whatever shape you desire to create.

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

A have/had a sculpt generator, but the link to get the sculpt is dead so I guess its useless now.
I found sculpts very useful for creating stair sets, and repetitive elements in builds, like columns, pilings, or fence posts.
I still have the sculpt maps I generated, so I'm still getting my moneys worth.

 

[WolfEyes]

2) the length of time it takes to download and rez the item, or am I thinking of mesh, or both. Striving for realism drags the world into a black hole. We had more fun being the ruths in the prim-based world. yeah not a popular opinion get a blog so nobody can read it go home khamon

If only they had skipped sculpts, gone straight for mesh and converted the build objects to mesh. Mesh was already well established at that point so I will never understand why they went down the path they did.

At the time I was happy to have sculpts and was even learning to create them. The one thing I didn't like was when clothing creators would use them as parts of an outfit. It would have been fine if those sculpts had been "flexible". But, as they were, I shied away from any outfits that used them.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

They could have made flexy sculpts but they were afraid of more realistic dongs.