Downloads and Support

There are several limitations and potential problems that you will encounter.

Prims in Second Life cannot be larger than 10m x 10m x 10m.  That means that a single sculptie can't be larger than 10x10x10 in size. 

You didn't mention what environment you want to export to: Second Life or OpenSim?

OpenSim doesn't have this limitation in most cases. 

Also, there are ways to work around it in Second Life using megaprims.  Google for megaprim or search the SL forums for more information on megaprims.  Prim Composer doesn't natively support megaprims yet, so this has its own set of challenges, but it is possible to make it work.

Prim Composer does have support for composite sculpties which is where you create a large seamless mesh in PrimComposer that gets exported to Second Life or OpenSim as multiple sculpties that connect seamlessly.  Some information on composite sculpties can be found here.

You mentioned that you were extruding faces to create the harbor landscape.  That probably won't work.  A sculptie has to be constructed in a very specific way.  For example, each vertex in a sculptie must have exactly four neighbors.  Also, the UV map on map channel 1 must follow a regular grid-like pattern.  The extrude operation almost always violates one or both of these requirements.

For the most part, you are limited to moving vertices around or applying modifiers that move vertices.  You can sometimes make this easier by creating the SculptShape with a lower than normal LOD.  Make a rough approximation of your sculptie and then apply a Tesselate or MeshSmooth modifier to add more detail.  Move vertices.  Wash, rinse, and repeat until the sculptie has 32x32 faces.

And finally, you can't currently use multi/sub-object materials with different matIDs to texture a sculptie with multiple materials.  I will remove this limitation in a future release.  But for now, you have to use Composite Material Maps along with Custom UV maps to accomplish this.  See Part 2 of the "Apple Pie Sculptie" tutorial on the Video Tutorials page for an example.

I realize that this doesn't really answer your questions, but hopefully it gives you pointers to what some of the issues are.  Please ask followup questions to dig into a subject in more depth.

Post edited 9:41 pm – Jun 26, 2009 by Shack Dougall

Grant said:

So even though you can take the limits off the prims, they will only go through to Second Life as a maximum of 10×10?

Yes, that's correct.  It's disappointing, but true.  Bigger structures in Second Life are made 1 of 2 ways:

1. By putting together lots of 10×10 prims
2. By using megaprims.

Megaprims are a story that is so absurd that it can't possibly be true.  And yet it is.

Megaprims are illegally large prims that were created during a couple of times when there was a bug in Second Life that allowed larger prims to be created.  When people found the bug, they created a bunch of big prims in different sizes.  Then, Linden Lab (LL) fixed the bug, so that it was no longer possible to create prims larger than 10×10. 

But LL decided not to delete the illegally big prims.   So, now it is not possible to create them, but there is a supply of them in various sizes that were created by other people during the bug.  These are the megaprims.

Megaprims can't be created.  All that you can do is to rez megaprims that other people created and that have been given to you.  This means that an object created out of megaprims will never show up as created by you.  It will always look as though it was created by the person who originally created the megaprim.

Megaprims can't be resized, so if a megaprim is 20×20, you have to work with it.

People have gone to great lengths to make this kludge work.  And I guess it sort of does.  For example, there is a free HUD that you can get on Xstreet called SALT.  With this HUD, you can type in the dimensions of the megaprim that you would like to find and it will return a megaprim that has those dimensions or as close as possible.

But megaprims are not supported yet in Prim Composer because they can't be created like other prims.

So, if you want to use megaprims with Prim Composer, or more specifically megasculpties with Prim Composer, you have to upload the sculptmap to SL manually.  Then, use SALT or something like it to find a megaprim that is close to the size you want and change its type to sculptie.  Finally, put the sculptmap on the prim and you have a megasculptie.

Bump.