Sculpt Deformation scripting?

[Raleda Sun]

I've been out of the game for a few years. Now that I'm back, I'm looking to start sculpting again. I've seen a lot of things like avatar heads where only a portion of the actual prim itself seems to move, rather then work on the "texture rotation" scripting I had grown familiar with?

I'm tempted to say this is a physics deformation, based on what I've seen of physics, but I can't say for sure. How is this sort of thing done? With mesh just around the corner, being able to directly influence the sculpts is important!

[WADE1 Jya]

I really don't think any physical deformation of a sculpty is possible, but someone please correct me if I am wrong.

It is probably either UUID flipping (which Linden Lab don't like to see) or alpha toggling between two sculpties.

Mesh will make sculpties irrelevant so might as well forget about them already. They are just an awkward super-restricted mesh. No worries though, if you can make a sculpty, then you will find making a mesh is a breeze... at least this is how I feel with experience making both.

Depending on what software you are using to make your sculpties, the arrival of mesh might not really be much of a big change for you & just give you more freedom & ease of creation.

[Raleda Sun]

While I can't say for sure (because all the items with the property that I own are "no edit"), Im pretty sure there isn't two prims here, and it's definately not a texture rotation. I could wrong I suppose. In effect, I'm trying to make a character with blinking eyes and facial expressions, which both currently exist on the live server.

What leads me to believe it's deformation is the slight texture stretch at time of animation and the fact that I can click on the things behind said animating object without selecting any invisible prims.

[Void Singer]

uuid flipping is one way, and it can be vastly improved by various methods... one is to have a small full alpha prim with all the maps as texture faces, then when you flip the uuid on the prim being used to display, there is little to no update lag on it, since those textures are already loaded to clients in view. any hidden face works for this.

another one is prim resize where you load alternates on other prims that are shrunken and resize the one you want up and the old one down. for some designs this is also seamless.

the larger the hidden part the more effective, since LOD may prevent smaller prims from loading their texture/sculpt maps to viewers beyond a certain range.

sculpts will still have use after mesh comes out, since they still only count as one prim, whereas meshes have a weighted cost in prim count, and there are some tricks combining all three that could even further lower costs in some cases.

[Qie Niangao]

Not having seen the things under discussion, but from the description alone, it seems as if some of it may be simply scaling a sculpty in one dimension.

To rule out invisible prims, you might try highlighting transparent (Control-Alt-T).

I'd just caution that none of this can beat texture animation for lag avoidance.  Swapping sculptmaps is especially expensive, as object updates go, because it also consumes cache.

Mention of "mesh just around the corner" brings to mind the fact that attached Mesh can be weighted / rigged to the avatar skeleton to deform with the avatar (replacement limbs, Mesh clothing, etc).  Unfortunately there's to be no mechanism for doing any sort of scripted deformations... indeed, no deformations at all for unattached Mesh.