Half Man Half Dog

Posts Tagged ‘Sculpt Studio’

In November 2009 I bought TheBlack Box’s Sculpt Studio after seeing several quite incredible single prim builds in the Sweet Sculpties Flickr group .  Since then I’ve mainly used it for simple little sculpts that would have been impossible in Hexagon (Mechanical parts,hard edges, LOD resistance) but the past weekend I decided to make something a little more ambitious.

Due to my unfortunate habit of making things and generally wanting the place to look nice (I know, I really must stop that) our plots in Nautilus (double prim land) were almost full. Not a problem for a store, but it’s my sandbox too, so I couldn’t rez half the stuff I’ve been working on. When we arrived in the sim we made an enchanted glade at ground level, complete with sculpted trees (mainly from Botanical – they’re beautiful!). As terraforming is impossible in the sim, I made 64m x 64m sculpted ‘ground’ to make at more interesting. With the trees, rocks, logs, mushrooms, shadows, light beams, enchanted well and collision prims for the sculpted terrain , the area took up a little under 300 prims.

Looked lovely but was unseen since we moved the entry point from ground level up to the store at 1000m.

Determined not to make the same mistake again, I decided (well I asked, Tracey agreed on the condition that it looked nice) to make a rustic cabin and fencing, with a few linden trees to match the surrounding landscape. Back up on workshop island I fired up Sculpt Studio and made a rough frame from one sculpted prim.  One of the major strengths of SS is the ability to easily  ‘chop’ sculpted prims up into several parts with the use of  ‘pole’ slices (slices where all the points are in exactly the same place, thereby making the resulting part of the sculpted prim so thin as to be unrendered by the viewer (It’s possible to get 64 distinct parts from one prim!).

Here is the single(!) 256 slice prim that makes up the floor planking, door and shutters set up on the Sculpt Studio ‘mat’. Each plank uses 6 slices; a single pole slice at each end and two normal slices to give the shape a degree of LOD resistance (Level Of Detail – when things are further away in SL, the viewer renders a lower detail version of them).  Due to the inherent precision problems with subdividing a single sculpty into so many parts I had to do a lot of previewing, adjusting individual slices, previewing again and so on.

After a lot of tinkering and some swearing I finished the wooden parts, most of the final adjustment time was to make them slightly irregular and rustic looking. When it came to making the roof, the members of the in world Sweet Sculpties group were very helpful ( In fact, without in world groups I wouldn’t be able to do half of what I can today ) and I decided on a corrugated iron roof for that shanty town look Another 256 slices, setting up the first 8 to form the first two undulations then use of the SS’ Slice Repeater – 10 minutes’ work instead of the hour or so it would have taken to do manually.

The whole thing had to be phantom in order to get inside which meant that it looked nice but didn’t really work as an interactive object. What use is a shack with permanently open door and shutters? Lots of slice manipulation later, I had 4 different sculpt maps for the front of the shack, in various states of window and door openage. Using the llDetectedTouchST function I was able to tell which part of the sculpted prim was being touched, so with a little scripting the door and shutters now open and close when clicked (For those who do a bit of scripting, it’s often possible to discard the x axis float on a 256 slice sculpty as the 4 or 6 slices that make up one ‘plank’ span the whole map). Adding a hollowed transparent cube to provide something solid for the walls with an llSetPrimitiveParams to block/unblock the door makes it very functional, with the added advantage of being able to put the 4 different sculpt maps for the door and shutters on it, cutting down the loading time when the map changes.

In between fiddling around with that, I’ve also made a fully sculpted husky muzzle \o/