Champagne!

Five March needed a bottle of champagne to celebrate the first big project in Second Life. But unfortunately the search engine was down at that moment. So Five gathered some drinks from the Moulin Rouge of the sim of Paris 1900. Some drinks have texts included and when finished won’t show up again!
At the same time Five researched about the so called sculpted prims, or sculpties.
Documentation is available, and the software is free.
Here pages are given where to find software and documentation.

http://iramblesorry.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love_28.html

http://slnatalia.blogspot.com/2007/06/sculpted-prims-sculpties-second-life.html

http://amandalevitsky.googlepages.com/sculptedprims

ROKURO.exe is a very easy prog, giving a possibility of producing an axial symmetric shape, like a bottle. So the first bottle was made, just putting an image of a champagne bottle found on the web behind the points of the drawing section of this prog, and putting the points on the outline of the bottle. But then the real difficulty presented itself. The shape was appearing in the world of Second Life all right, but how to put the image on the bottle, the green color, the label, what kind of image is needed?
Putting a checkerboard pattern on the sculpty showed the way the texture is folded around the bottle. From seeing the pattern on the surface of the bottle Five could deduce what is needed and this was not really simple. The bottle had to be flattened out, like a cylinder being cut open along the length. But then there is the problem of the neck of the bottle, this upper part of the bottle, cut open should occupy the same width as the belly of the bottle. This means transforming the shape of the bottle rather radically. But at last the texture was ready and could be projected on the bottle shape. (Well after three tries it was ready….)
With the free program Blender more complicated shapes can be constructed, but this whole prog is much more complicated. Even following detailed descriptions of the way to construct a UV map of the 3D shape, it took several hours before Five could make the right UV image, comparable with the ROKURO prog.
Even long descriptions like the one of Amanda levitsky leave a lot to be guessed. On the other hand, Five discovered that Blender is a absolutely mind boggling program and that it has a lot of very beautiful and breathtaking possibilities.
Far more than only producing sculpties.
Blender can make for instance chairs. So complicated shapes of one prim are possible. Of course, even not thinking of the texture on this shape, you need to program the sit position and rotation!
This was not without trial and error either:









On the one hand sculpties are an enrichment of the possibilities of the prims in Second Life, on the other hand the possibilities are restricted. But for bottles, bananas, the sculpties are fine.
Sculpties and scripting examples of Five March can be found in the DevShed, a developers Hang Out.