Oct
2008
The Prim Composer 1.02 release focuses on sculpted prims and adds new aspect ratios for sculpties as well as the ability to move the pivot point of a sculptmap. SculptGenMax default settings have also been merged with the Prim Composer preferences dialog.
New Sculpt Aspect Ratios
In the original implementation of sculpted prims, sculptmaps encoded a fixed number of mesh faces (32 x 32) in a 64×64 pixel texture. Larger bitmaps could be used (e.g., 128×128, 256×256, etc.) but they were still limited to 32×32 faces and served no useful purpose after lossless uploading was implemented.
A change is coming! The newest Release Candidate viewer (1.21) adds support for sculptmaps with a variable aspect ratio. As a result, we are no longer limited to 32×32 faces. 16×64, 8×128, and 4×256 faces are now possible by using a non-square texture of 32×128, 16×256, and 8×512 pixels, respectively. These new sculptmap sizes allow a mesh to have a different aspect ratio while maintaining 1024 as the maximum number of faces in the sculpt. By using sculptmaps with different aspect ratios, it is now much easier to model objects that have more detail in a particular dimension, for example, a rope.
