Dr Dobb’s sculpty day

Yesterday evening I spent some time at the Dr Dobb’s sculpty day, which is part of a week-long summit event in Second Life, for metaverse developers and business builders. For those who haven’t penetrated the world of the sculpty, it’s a special sort of prim which allows the creator to import a coloured texture to make it follow the shape of a mesh, thus making shapes which have been difficult or impossible in SL to date, or saving a lot of prims.

Unfortunately I missed the beginning of the programme, with a presentation from Qarl Linden, but I saw the stupendous presentation by Anjin Meili, inventor of the Snurbomatic sculpty device, where he showed what could be done with converting bump maps into sculpties. The event was pretty crowded, and so the sculpty took a little while to resolve — but when it did! The result was a frieze that looked in SL almost the way it would in real life - it looked substantial and truly 3D, and not at all the same as a flat texture frieze has looked, to date, in world.

That there is a camaraderie between those who specialise in sculpty production in world was evident from the fact that they paid tribute to each other during the talks. Anjin was followed by Cel Edman, developer of sculptypaint, a fantastic free program which I have been using to make sculpties. He explained that he had only been in SL since May this year, but that he is an exceptional SL creator already was clear from his presentation.

We can apparently thank the fact that SL was down and Cel was too new to get into the Beta grid, for the development of Sculptypaint, as he explained. He gave some tips for Sculpty producers, recommending that they pay attention to the LOD (level of detail) rules which means that you see 32 by 32 XYZ up close and 16 by 16 by zooming out. His tip was to make the model 16 by 16 and then put the fine details in 32 by 32.

Cel’s second tip was to use aggressive texturing to make the sculpty look good. Cel was followed by Aminom Marvel, who talked about efficiency in sculpty design, and showed some amazing things. He recommended that creators should look at last-gen games to see how to use meshes in an economical way, and showed some examples of efficient use of sculpty prims.

The sofa shown above is two sculpted prims, which have been used to the maximum effect. The back of the back cushions has not been sculpted, allowing the vertices to be used for the side cushions instead, as it is hidden by the back of the other sculpty prim. He likened the technique to making balloon animals, use the minimum mesh required, then squish off that bit and make the next.

TheBlack Box, next demonstrated an automatic in-world sculpty production system which I had not seen before, and barely understood. It seemed to be good at producing organic shaped sculpties, and is currently for sale for $5000 lindens on SL Exchange. In the listing on SLX, TheBlack Box pays tribute to Cel Edman, Anjin and Elzbiet Meili, and invites others to collaborate to make sculpty-making easier for all. It seems to me that this is the best of SL, collaborating and moving projects forward together, supporting and helping those coming along behind.

The program continued beyond my UK bedtime, but it was obvious that there was an educated and interested audience crammed into the sim convergence on Dr Dobb’s island. The talks seemed to range from the very basics of what sculpties are, to technical approaches to changing the Level of detail which were above my head, and so the speakers appeared to have made an effort to make their talks relevant to every level of attender. I learned that it is possible to see the mesh in SL by pressing control + shift + r, which was an interesting experience! It may not be new to the technically equipped among my readers, but it was new to me.

I was impressed by the range of content, the speakers, and the way the event was handled by Dr Dobb’s staff, who welcomed and introduced each speaker. I have run events like this in SL, and it can be stressful and difficult to make a series of events seamless, but they managed this. I was also impressed with the performance of the sims given the number of people who attended.

Material from the event is going to be set up in the conference centre, but I recommend that you run, don’t walk, to Dr Dobb’s and register for the rest of the week’s programme of events.