SL beginners: what is a sculpty?

Some of the terms used in Second Life can be confusing if you have just arrived and haven’t rezzed a prim — that is a basic building block — yet. Second Life is an object-based world. This means that when you want to create something like a chair in Second Life, you use the building blocks (prims) which everyone has access to, to create what you want. You change the shape of the prims by squashing or stretching, cutting, twisting etc. You can change the appearance of the prims by placing textures on them.

The alternative to an object-based world, is one where things have been created in a 3D graphics program, which creates a mesh and rendering for an object or background. That’s a simplistic explanation, as there are lots of ways in which the two approaches overlap.

Until now, it hasn’t been possible to create things in a 3D program and upload them to SL, but a recent change made it possible to make shapes using 3D programs and to upload those to SL for use on a special type of prim — the sculpty.

To get a sculpty, right click the ground, choose create, then left click the ground. That will be a normal box prim, a cube. Right click the cube and choose edit in the pie menu, and then choose the object tab in the edit menu (you may need to drop-down the bottom part of the edit window by clicking “more”). You then need to select the type of prim from the drop down menu — right at the bottom you will find sculpted.

As you will see, when you choose a sculpted prim, most of the object page disappears and a coloured texture appears in a texture window. your prim changes from a box prim, to a sphere, and then to an apple shape, which is the default sculpted prim shape. The reason a coloured texture appears in the window is that sculpties are made using a texture. A simple explanation is that the colours are code for the way the program has to deform the sculpty to make the shape you want. Each colour can be broken down into a proportion of red, green and blue. The number assigned to each proportion is what gives the information about how far from the normal shape the program should change to get the shape that is wanted.

It is now possible to use 3D programs to make shapes, upload them to SL, place them in the Sculpt Texture window and see the shape you want. There are a number of problems for anyone who isn’t used to using a 3D graphics program, not least that it takes some considerable time to get up to speed on any of the programs, let alone to learn how to translate that into something that will look good in SL. There are some free programs which can be used for sculptures, as I wrote about recently.

There are a small number of basic sculpt textures in your library – an apple, banana, plate, stalk. There are free sculpty textures about, which can be used to experiment with, including a small box in my shop on Nemesis (Nemesis 42, 227, 22), which I made with Sculptypaint.  As with all things in SL, the trick is in the texturing. In the case of a complex sculpty, very clever texturing is needed to make the object look right – you soon find that you can’t simply slap on anything but a standard blank texture, without running into problems where the texture is bunched up or stretched in all the wrong places. However, experimentation can lead to some cool results.