Sculpty - mania

After a couple of days, and the very tedious process of learning all shortcuts in Blender, the UV mappings started working. You have to read the few pages about making sculpties with Blender with extreme care. Simply overlooking one small button (Five forgot to put the texture on ADD, instead of MIX) makes your sculpty picture unusable.
Also you have to learn to work with the special but beautiful tool in Blender called ….very appropriate “Sculpt Mode”. In this mode, you can work on a model as if it is clay, adding and deleting material. Smoothing it again makes the shape beautifully organic. Then you have to get used to the way Blender throws this grids on the UV mapping which is without doubt very logical, but can be a bit strange too.


After saving the image, it is often inside out, and you have to deal with a negative texture color. Lately the UV image was saved at an angle of 90 degrees, so Five had to turn it back in Photoshop. You have to learn looking at the UV maps produced by Blender and know, if it is about right.


But well who cares, if the results are really fun!
First of all, Five March made the human shape, the torso. Then Five tried to pull out the arms as far as possible (discovering the in between tool for the grid steered by the mouse wheel – oh boy!), but the long arms were only partially represented in the shape of the torso inworld. Maybe the 3D centre can be arranged in a better way?
Then a mouse shape was sculpted, you can sculpt in a symmetrical way, so both sides are done at once, for two sided animals and humans a quick way to get a basic shape.
And how about these shapes, what a difference now with the ingenious but primitive shapes of many, many prims….what will all be possible? Indeed a lot! Not possible are shapes with holes, but then simple use two sculpties…
Five’s first try-outs look stupid now…..
All these try-outs can be found in the DevShed, on Virgin Island2.
The most beautiful sculpty, indeed it has got the first prize in the sculpty contest of a few months ago is of course the horse of Nomasha Syaka.
Below an image, which shows the sculpty-textures on the shapes. This is of course not necessary.
This horse even can be seen galloping around, but the sculpties take a long time to render so, sometimes balloons are seen instead of legs…..

Five guesses that the possibilities of the sculpties will really change the whole look of SL, an end of an era!