Wanted: Sculptor Buddy/Mentor

[JasonClandestino]

Hey there.

I'm looking for a tutor whom I could ask a few basic questions about Sculpts, like making shade maps & that sort of thing.

I asked in the Builders' Brewery group, & members insisted upon Mesh & kept asking me "why" I wanted sculpts, which had not a thing to do with my questions about finding resources to learn how to sculpt, not at all.

1 < 3 Hats.

I looked & looked online, & I finally found that somebody had written a patch for compatibility with the Blender 2.49b plugin for creating & exporting SL Sculpt Maps, & have made various sculpt maps, though I thought to find someone that could give me a few pointers.

"Like Drawing Paper & Colored Pencils, Sculpts are here to stay!!"

Gracias.

[ChinRey]

12 hours ago, JasonClandestino said:

I'm looking for a tutor whom I could ask a few basic questions about Sculpts, like making shade maps & that sort of thing.

Starting with the basics of the sculpt maps themselves:

1. Never ever use oversampled sculpt maps, they are the work of the Devil! A sculpt map must never ever have mroe than 4096 pixels.
2. Use low poly sculpts whenever possible. This is an undocumented feature but it can be really useful for reducing lag.
3. Make sure your sculpts are LoD resistant.
4. Don't bother trying to hide your map with an alpha channel. It doesn't work and it does add a tiny little bit of extra lag.
5. If it can be done with prims, it is better done with prims.

As for shade maps and other texturing issues, it's exactly the same as mesh and rule no. 1 is don't overdo it. An abundance of baked textures creates lag, especially if they are high resolution. Whether they are applied to a mesh or a sculpt makes no difference.