A few useful things for making sculpted prims!

OK, I know the building forum AND the wiki have lists, but here are what I use and find easy to use:

Sculptypaint (For rocks, some tree parts, use randomization and smooth to make a natural look)
Wings3d(Really user friendly in my opinion, extremely powerful for a freebie)
Rokuro Pro(Good for any symetrical round objects, as well as some other shapes.. generally best for symmetrical in my opinion)
HM2Sculpt (Height Map to Sculpt, I made my first sculpties with this little program. Made black and white height maps in Photoshop and made them into sculpted mountains ^^)
MoI(Moment of Inspiration, powerful but limited at present in my opinion for sculpties. NURBs only)


So there's that... here's a few tips ^^

For a natural look for any sculpty, if you have the bmp image, import into sculptypain and randomize a bit, then smooth once. It can make it look a lot more natural without much change to the object. Also great because it won't save over the old file!

For texturing, get used to whatever you use to edit images, then use something like Chosen Few's test pattern to figure out where to do what (Check the forums, its there)

For ANY program, make sure you know the limits when it comes to sculpties. Such as in Wings, you can only use a certain number of faces, vertexes, slices, etc. So get used to your program and how to prepare for sculpties. Some don't need any preparation, such as MoI, as it is NURBs.

For anything you want to walk on... it's going to take more than the sculpty. Make the sculpty phantom and add a plane/incline in that is invisible, as sculpted prims dont have the correct physical shape (Make one and try to walk on it, you'll see)

Wings3d has one of the oddest, yet user friendly interfaces I've found. On the bottom left it tells you what each mouse button does at a given time, and most things can be done with just the mouse. Also tells you what other things do, such as keyboard shortcuts. Super easy to figure out if you remember that ^^

Have fun ^^
-Oki