Sculpts (Content Creation)

Revision as of 21:40, 29 May 2023

A sculpts is a form of simplified polylist meshes with most of the parameters preset and only a few crucial ones determined by a sculpt map and three prim parameters. It was implemented in 2008 as a way to create shapes not possible with prims without resorting to (polylist) mesh. At that time the streaming cost of full mesh was regarded as too high for an online virtual world (it arguably still is). Unfortunately the development process was seriously rushed and the viewer code handling sculpts is very inefficient, causing singificant unneccessary load on the client. Because of this, the lack of adequate softwre to create sculpt maps and the LOD and physics issues described below, it is usually not recommended to use sculpts today (although there are some exceptions). All those issues can be fixed but it is very unlikely this will ever happen.

Faces

A sculpt has a single face with a preset UV map. There is a way to create sculpts with up to nine faces but this is a crude hack, not officially supported, requiring a rather complex and often with a rather unpredictable result.

LOD

LOD models are created automatically with simple decimation, for each LOD model every fourth vertice is eliminated. This simplistic approach very rarely gives a satisfactory result.

Physics

On Opensim the physics model is supposed to be identical to the visual model although there is always some differences. This gives a rather high poly model that is hard for the phsyics engine to handle so it's usually recomended to set sculpts to phantom or at least to convex hull.

Links

Documentation

Sculpts (at the OMRG wiki)

• Link: https://omrg.org/w/index.php?title=Sculpts

A more in-depth description of the sculpts standard.

Tools

Wings 3d

• Link: http://www.wings3d.com/ (confirmed 2023-05-28)
• Type: Program
• Use: Mesh models (and to some degree sculpts)
• OS: Windows, MacOS, Linux
• License: Open source
• Price: Free

A simpler and less developed free 3D modelling program. This is a good alternative for many since, unlike SketchUp, it offers all the functions you really need to create mesh for opensim and much fewer of the often confusing mass of functions not relevant for our purpose than Blender and the big commercial programs.

Unlike the other 3D modelling programs Wings 3d also has some limited support for sculpts, limited since it only supports 32x32 format sculpt map. This function is a bit compromised though since it requires special templates that can be hard to find.

Content Libraries

Outworldz

• Link: http://www.outworldz.com/Opensim/ (confirmed 2023-05-29)
• Content: All kinds
• License: Various

Collection of textures, meshes, objects, avatars and other items. Licenses vary.

Zadaroo

• Link: https://legacy.zadaroo.com/index.html (confirmed 2023-05-25)
• Content: All kinds
• License: CC0

Zadaroo is perhaps best known for hosting all of Linda Kellie's works after Kellie took down her own website but there is also some good classic content by the siteowner there. Please note that everything from Zadaroo has already been uploaded several times to the hypergrid and it is recommended to use existing uploads whenever possible - there's no need to load the grid servers with more duplicates than necessary.