Sculpted Prim
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Objective
Add variety to Second Life without hurting framerate or significantly increasing bandwidth by using textures to describe mesh objects
Overview
Normal prims are formed by an extrusion of a 2D shape along a path. They are modified in-world by a set of parameters that allow them to be twisted, cut, stretched, etc. Sculpties differ in that they are prims whose three dimensional shape is derived from the color values in a texture, the sculpt texture. The red, green, blue color values of a pixel on the sculpt texture are translated into the x, y, z coordinates of a corresponding mesh element of a standard object (typically a sphere).
Basically, the standard sphere gets distorted by the information in the sculpt texture. All of this processing is done in the viewer. To the simulator, sculpties are just spheres. This means that sculpties will not promote server lag. The only down side is that the physics engine runs on the simulator, so this means that for collision detection sculpties, no matter what they look like, behave like spheres.
Sculpted Prims or "Sculpties" launched in May, 2007. Even before launch residents were strutting their Sculpty stuff on the beta grid. The two months after launch saw the flowering of sculpties (literally, actually -- several residents have made sculpty flowers). Sculpted objects, furniture, vehicles, hair, clothing attachments (especially hats) have appeared over the grid. There are even sculpty avatars, and sculpty water.
For more information please visit the amazing resident-created documentation: Sculpted Prims
Project details
Sculpties are a project of Linden Lab's Studio Shiny. Qarl Linden is the creator, designer, and developer for Sculpties. Periapse Linden does some PM stuff like wrangling JIRA issues and, um, writing this. Of course all development at Linden Lab is strongly collaborative, and Sculpties would never have been rezzed without the work from other groups, especially QA, Community, and Resident Experience.
Roadmap
23 May 2007 -- Sculpties launched
Current focus: Bug fixing and other maintenance tasks.
Issues we are working on or have completed:
- MISC-367: Changing param freezes sculpty
- VWR-1699: Inaccurate preview
- VWR-1709: Sculpt texture from media
- MISC-333: Problems with animated sculpties
- VWR-1059: Don't display sculpt map for no copy sculpties.
- VWR-666: LSL gives torus params for sculpty
- MISC-259 VWR-866 MISC-236: Compression artifacts
- VWR-876: Sculpt texture low priority
- VWR-883: Graphical textures missing from library
- VWR-827: Torus problems after sculpty
- VWR-858 VWR-1110 VWR-1111: Importers requested for various filetypes
Sculpty Phase 2 consists of the following three items, some of which may be built by resident developers:
- VWR-1452 linkset capture to sculpted prim
- VWR-866 adjust jpeg compression to improve sculpty accuracy
- VWR-1335 improve sculpty degenerate surface detection
Possible future enhancements to sculpties
