Sculpted, some tricks

The first stage in sculpties is to get to work with BLENDER.
Then you have to struggle with the UV pictures coming out of BLENDER, hey, they do not immediately and always have the right rotation for Second Life. This is boring, sometimes you have to retry several times, mirroring and rotating the picture.
Sometimes looking at other pictures which worked helps, but apparently a picture of a shape has no single UV picture in sculpty land.
Then there is the problem of definition. Sometimes you loose all the rigidity. This is very obvious with sharp exact shapes. 5 of course experimented with the pentagon, this five sides shape is hard to get!
The first tries were really terrible.

Then 5 made a shape and selected out the colors. In Photoshop the UV image was made in a very abstract painting, with 10 colors. 10? Yes, five layers on top of each other, so adding the colors gives 10.
This resulted in a very exact shape, but indeed the corners are not really on top of each other, showing how complex this UV mapping is, how to get these point-colors right. This still has to be found out. Well 5 spend at least 300 L$ on uploading pentagon UV images... :-( Really there should be working viewers outside Second Life! How to make one???

( a PS: this small preview prog (free) can see the problem with the rotation, not the being flipped horizontally ogf the image, but no zooming is possible, only some rotation with the arrow keys....
http://www.jhurliman.org/download/sculptedpreview-1.0.0.zip
)

( ok this is a PPS: Wings 3D, with this plugin installed:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=183764
can also import and preview the UV map, it also shows the rotation mistake, but not the mirror problem (?), Wings #D is also free, and here you can zoom and rotate the shape....but you have to give the UV image another format, from the BLENDER comes .tga, and WIngs asks for .bmp, ooh it will all be so simple in the future.....)


Then 5 saw that to get a better resolution you have to get (in BLENDER) a lot of lines round the corners an as few as possible on flat surfaces. If you know this trick, you can nicely define for instance handles, as shown here.
The old hanging telephone, no soooo obsolete, lol, everyone having his own telephone-computer-digital camera in her pocket is of course not too simple to construct. The casing having between 6 and 12 primitives in normal building had to be reduced. Well it is a bit of work, but it really was worthwhile. Everything has to be done by the cylinder shape of course. You have to take care, and to deliberate where to put your two holes. And don’t forget to add your seams right in the beginning, because afterwards the points to join to the seam might be hard to select!
Of course the horn has to be made in one primitive, then this phone will be 7 prims in total, included the small horn for listening in on a conversation....
So, this stratagem of constructing sculpties is slowly getting 5 to the point where a lot of classical primbuilding can be replaced by the sculpties. Of course to get definition, for instance the human body has to be split up in face, torso, arms, legs, and hands. SO a human body, for the moment consists of 7 prims…..dressing it can demand extra prims. You must not become too sculpty, sometimes the classis prims are a lot easier, and if you have prims to spare…..
But you see, a handle in classic prim building is at least 4 prims, in sculpty it is just one.
Super, but one problem still remains, this is the texturing. How to get your image around the sculpty?
Indeed, when you organize the shape according to the principle of defining corners you can sort of keep the planes in the shape “logical”, so that the image projection becomes somewhat easier. But with the hanging phone, of course the plate with the numbers is still a classic cylinder prim.