Downloads and Support

Au79 said:

My question is: How can I tell if my object is going to become a nice, smooth Sculpt, or a big mess like this one?

What should I put my mind into when creating an object?

It is easy to test how your object will look in SL without spending any money. 

After you generate the sculptmap with SculptGenMax, select "SculptGenMax > Edit Scene > Paste sculptmap into scene" and then click in a viewport to create a new copy of the object from the sculptmap.  This gives a quick preview of how the object will look in SL without having to upload the sculptmap.

Also, I highly recommend running a local copy of OpenSim on your machine, so that you can see exactly what the object will look like in world without any upload costs.  If you are unfamiliar with it, I talk about OpenSim in this post.

To successfully create sculpts, you need to understand what they are.  A sculpt is a very specific type of mesh with vertices arranged in a grid structure of 32 faces by 32 faces.  Except for edges, all verts in a sculpt must have exactly 4 neighboring vertices.  Sculpts must also have a UV map that reflects this same grid structure.

The easiest way to achieve this is to start with a pre-existing sculptie and then reshape it.  You can move vertices, but not weld, extrude, delete, or copy them.

The symmetry modifier can also be problematic.  It can be used, but you have to make sure that the resulting object has a valid topology for a sculpt and a valid UV map.

I think you mean the Beta Grid?  The Main Grid is also running on Mono, but yeah the Beta Grid is another fantastic solution.

I prefer to use OpenSim personally, though I recently ran into a situation where I wish I'd have used the Beta Grid.  OpenSim is an absolutely wonderful way to test builds out for free, but it suffered in the past (and to some extent still does) from extremely horrible texture performance. 

Because I had only tested my build in an older version of OpenSim, and found the texture experience to be so horrible that I immediately abandoned the project altogether, I now wish that I had tested in the Beta Grid before giving up.  OpenSim's poor performance had led me to believe that my build had simply too many textures to ever be worthwhile, and that nobody would ever want to visit a place that was constantly flushing and reloading textures and that took so very long to rez.  I later discovered the 'true' cause, and had I tested that out in Beta I would likely have known that much sooner.

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