Sculpty mad

Many moons ago, when I was a young editorial assistant, my company bought one of the first big Wang wordprocessors for use by our typing pool, producing technical documents. The typing pool “girls” as they were always referred to, were mostly twenty or thirty years older than I was, and despite being sent on a training course to learn how to use the thing, found the difference between their preferred method of producing documents - an IBM golfball typewriter and industrial quantities of correction fluid - and the new one too hard to bear. They locked themselves in the ladies lavatories and refused to come out.

Young whippersnapper that I was, I read the manual, worked out what the problem was, and informed the manager that it would never in a thousand years do what he required from it as it was producing (at that time) unit-spaced text onscreen and proportionally-spaced text on paper, which was why what-you-saw-wasn’t-what-you-got, and why the typists were on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Some time has passed since I saved the typing pool from mental torture… and I have tried, I really have, to learn how to use 3D programs to make sculpties. The trouble is, my brain seems to run away and lock itself, virtually, in the lavatory whenever I try. I thought my contact with sculpties was going to limited to playing with those others had made and being clever with bodging textures.

Over the weekend I was introduced to two things that could have been made for me, and will allow me to make my own sculpties.

Cel Edman’s Sculptypaint, is a free program that can be downloaded from the sculpty paint website, and it is easy to use and make sculpty textures. It includes a stairs sculpty tool, a flower sculpty tool and an arch sculpty tool. It is under development, and there’s an in-world group (cost $1000 lindens to join) for those who want to keep up-to-date with news and information about latest updates and bugs.

The second item (above) is from Anjin Meili, Skyhighatry Designs. The Snurbo’-matic enables you to make sculpties from objects in world. It’s a bit haphazard for me at present, but I am at the beginning of learning how to use it. It seems to use similar conventions to building in world, using the same colour keys for axes etc. At least it doesn’t put my brain on shutdown and seems to have a good support group too.

It’s a little expensive at $5000 lindens, especially since it is an alpha and beta version which comes in the package, but it’s a cool toy. You place the item you want to make into a sculpty into the middle of the snurbomatic sphere, and then instruct it to put out the nurbs, which appear around the object. You can move them if you want to make the sculpty more accurate, or if you notice a gap, and then using in-world chat, you instruct it to make a texture for you from the positions of the nurbs.

When it’s done that, you can upload it to SL and look at it. My vase with a bulbous bottom looked like a knobbly male attachment, but that was just my first try. I’m sure I will get better. The Snurb-o’-matic group runs training classes on a Sunday, which this week were about creating animated water. Sounds a bit lagorific to me, but I could be wrong.

The important thing is that my head hasn’t exploded, which is what trying to use blender did for me.