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

First FAQ! Land and prims!

I originally posted this on the official SL forums, in Resident Answers. Any additions I make there will be made here, and all info will be credited to the person who gave it.

This is an FAQ about whether or not it is possible to increase prims for your land/sim.

Q:Can I increase the prim count for my land?
A:Yes, but only by buying more land within the same Sim. You cannot just 'buy prims' without buying land.

Q:Can I increase the prim count in my Sim?
A:No. 15000 is the maximum for any Sim. There are some special cases, unfortunately you aren't one. If you want more prims for your build, buy a neighboring Sim and spread it out across the two of them (Allowing it to have 30000, though only 15000 in each 'half').

Q:How many prims does my land have if I buy 1024? 2048? 8196?
A:Land is defaulted to 117 prims per 512m. So for each 512m, you will have 117 prims making it:
512-117
1024-234
2048-468
4096-936
and so on. There are some cases where that is not true-read on.

Q:But my friend has 512m with 234 prims!!!!
A:Your friend has land on a 'Private Sim', and its owner has allotted more prims to that parcel. They are allocated from one place in the sim to a different part, so those extra 117 prims aren't really extra. Usually double prim land costs quite a bit more L$ for the privilege. Mainland parcels will always have 117 prims per 512m. No exceptions that I know of.

Q: What about temporary prims!? How can I use those to my advantage!?
A: Don't, generally. Each sim is allowed 500 temporary prims total, across every parcel. They only last a short time, so a building made of them would serve no purpose. They remain only if sat upon or selected(?). So if you don't have the prims for the chairs for a class, make some temporary, and have people sit on them immediately.

Also, temp rezzers (Some cages and other things use this. Click to rez, the item disappears after a short time until clicked again) cause lag in the sim. I don't know how much, but it's generally not friendly, so use sparingly, please.

Q:Can I use sculpted prims to help me save prims?
A:YES!! By all means do... they can look better as well in some situations. The only problem is that a single sculpted prim can cause more lag than around 7-8 normal prims linked. That doesn't mean that you're going to crash the sim with sculpties, just that you shouldn't use them for things that normally take only a couple prims anyway. If it uses 7+ prims and can be done with one sculpty, by all means do it.

-Oki

Welcome to the Blog of Second Lifer Okiphia Rayna!

So... I got bored and decided to start a blog. Within this blog, I will post FAQs, helpful tips on various things (Probably mostly building) and news that I find interesting. All information will be pertaining to Second Life, and you can reach me in Second Life as Okiphia Rayna. IM's are fine for now, I've never had more than 100 while offline.

Keep checking back for useful SL info!

-Oki