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<videoflash>EEAM1GCzk74</videoflash> Sculpted prims made simple

The following are different text transcripts of the above video tutorial. These weren't edited, and there are typos. You're most welcome to correct them — your help is appreciated! — and let Torley know if you find this useful and/or want to help transcribe in the future (it's currently being done experimentally via MTurk).

Version 1 - A25BX98VLXDOZS

Friendly greetings! It's Torley Linden, and I love to teach you cool new things to empower, and make your Second Life a happier one.

Today we're going to look at sculpted prims. You may have seen all sorts of neat objects in-world, and wondered how they were made when someone told you it's sculpty.

Well, what we're looking at right now, this is a program called Sculptypaint, and it's by a resident of Second Life named Cel Edman. It's available for free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux! And, of course he appreciates donations, but it's neat and fun that he's made this available.

It's both a great way to get acquainted with sculpties, and... See, I'm just clicking on this to rotate it. And, I was saying, it has more advanced tools, too, if you need to get into them.

So, we're not going to explore everything. And we're going to do what's proverbially called scratching the surface, the tip of the iceberg, but it should be enough to really energize you, and get you very, very intrigued to do more, and express yourself creatively.

First of all, let's look right here. There's different kinds of tools, for creating different kinds of sculpty prims. And right here we have the resolution. Now, 32 by 32 approximates closely what you'll see in Second Life. So, although it's a lower resolution, let's click that, so we can be a little more accurate. And right here we can see the model in different ways. Right now we just have a sphere. And we can go from color, to solid mode, to wire frame, and texture if you want to texture map it--you can do that, too.

You can also change the sculptie type, and if you want to have a flatter look, you can turn off the lighting, by clicking this mini light bulb icon. This whole layout here reminds me of some of the video jockey applications I was using way back, demo scene days and all that. But, here--see that?--and you can turn off the grid, too.

Now, let's go to the Flower Tool. This is just a really, really fun thing to do. Click the Flower Tool button here, and what you can easily do next is click on Reset to Flower-form. And this will make a flower! And the colors you see here are the colors of this--of the texture, not the sculpt map texture, and I'll show you the difference between those, but the texture map that's applied on to the sculpted prim.

It's pretty cool because you can randomize the texture, as you see right here, and change the colors of the flower. So I like this, this is very nice. You can randomize the leaves, the texture--text is short for texture there--you can change the root. And you can make the stem, right here, if you want to make the stem a little more curved, you can do that by clicking out here, and notice that the model will also change when you do that. So, just, let's make it more organic. You can change other sorts of shapes, you can add additional leaves, make it a wild one. Yeah that's pretty cool, let's leave it like that. And then what you can do next, is you can use other tools in conjunction. But we'll want to come back here, and I'll show you why.

Next, let's have a look at this Point Tool. With this Point Tool, and notice I'm just clicking and dragging to rotate the model, you can just change the smoothness. So if I want to smooth things out, I can click that once, and you'll see it be smoothed. See, and it has.... This is effective too if you're making a cube and you want to have rounded corners. So let's push that one more time. Alright, that's a little more smooth. And then, let's go over here, to, I believe, it's the Drawing Tool.

The Drawing Tool will let you directly manipulate these points, and you can escrow them, so I'll show you this. It's a good view. As I said if you've never been using a 3D application before, this is just a fun way to really immerse into it. And you can just click these points, and you can click and hold out here, and make it jagged, and you can push them back in, if that's your sort of thing, and they're kind of being pushed out like discs. And, woo! That's pretty fun!

And so now that we have that, we can go back to the Point Tool. You can use these tools in combination with each other: there's even a Stairs Tool, an Arch Tool to make certain geometric constructs, like you can make a single flight of stairs with a single sculpted prim.

And let's move that one more time, and let's prepare this now for export. I'll show you how easy it is to get it into Second Life so you can enjoy and show it off to your friends.

Let's go back now to the Flower Tool. And now that we have all this here, what we can do is we can click here. And the reason why we want to come back to the Flower Tool is because it'll save the sculpt map, it'll save it so you can get that geometry loaded into Second Life, and it'll save the colors on the texture. We can expect to see something similar to this within the in-world experience when we're back here.

Let's go ahead and click Save 128*128 Sculpt Image PNG, and then it'll tell us that it's saved. Okay, great, it's saved into that folder. So I'm going to flip over to Windows, now. And I'm just going to open that window where it was saved. So here we have two files. Ok, this is the Sculpypaint install folder, it saves it right wherever you installed it. And here's the sculpt map--they often look like rainbowey sorts of things. And here is the texture, like it says the texture map, which will be applied onto the Sculpt map so it can create the colors you see.

Next! Let's head into Second Life, and get the show on the road!

We're back on the beach and these crabs are nipping at my toes! But that's all right because we're in Second Life and ooh! We're going to upload sculpties! So, here's how you do it.

Remember that we have a sculpt map and a texture map that gets applied to that, and here's how it all works. You go to the File menu, and you select Bulk upload. I know there's just two, it's not really bulk, but it makes it faster nonetheless. So, remember the directory where you saved them, right here in Sculptypaint. Now I'll click this, and I'll click the other one while holding the Shift key. It selects both of them. And now, I'll click Open.

Ooh, crabs! Give me a break.

Okay, I paid 10 Lindens to upload one, and there we go, to upload both of them. So what we have here now, the sculpt map and the texture map. Let's close both of these, and let's go to our inventory, into the textures folder. They are these ones at the top here. And we're going to create a new cube at first, so right click and Create! A new cube has been born. Rise into the world!

Let's make it a big object, however. Under the Object tab, let's change it to 10 by 10 by 10, because we want a really grand flower. Something awesomely big!

Right click it again, Edit, and lift it off the ground, so it's just touching the ground. And then change the Building Block Type here to Sculpted. And you'll notice by default it looks like a sphere and it has this rainbowey sculpt map. A good question that often asks is, it's kind of like an apple there, that often gets asked, is: how do you know the difference between what's meant to be applied as a sculpt texture there?

Well, aside from simple experimentation, currently they have the same icon, so it's difficult to differentiate. However, if you look at it, it'll often look kind of rainbowey, like that, with a color gradient representing the depth and coordinates of how it'll be defined in-world.

To make better visual sense of that, let's have a quick look in the Library. So I go down here into the Library folder, in our inventory, and then go to Textures. So we have some sample sculpt textures in here. And then you'll notice, okay these are the sculpt textures, and these are the surface textures, that get applied as texture maps. And then we can open one. So for example, something that would be an apple, would look like--and it doesn't look much like an apple when it's there, but it's got this kind of rainbowy look. And depending on what you choose, but it'll usually look very psychedelic. I like that one. Haha! I like the colors of that one!

So, let's just close those out, and let's apply the one we have, which is the one without the word texture in it, so it's just Sculpt 1--it has a very cryptic sort of name at first. So let's click and drag that on. Okay, and release that, and you'll notice that it starts as a sphere, but as it reads this then it'll form into the shape that we expected. The flower, remember? It's starting to look more like it.

We're also going to want to rotate this, so click this and rotate here, in-world, so it stands upright, as most flowers do. Let's raise it a little, so back to Position, and let's get it off the ground. Or maybe we'll just squash the crabs! Haha! For all they've done!

Now, go to the Texture tab, and--see right here?--now drag... This is the texture map, the surface texture map, to be precise. So I can drag this and then we'll apply it onto the surface of the Sculpted prim.

Ooooh! Look at that! Look what we've got! It's pink at the top, remember how the colors looked in Sculptypaint and compare it. It's not exactly the same, but it's similar. And like with other prim types, you can, of course, you can stretch, you can resize it if you so wish, more advanced.... Ooh, it's like an accordion flower! Doo, doo! Doo, doo!

You can, I mean you can't edit some of the more esoteric parameters, because those are done in other modeling apps. And I should also mention that if you're familiar with other 3D modelers, like Maya, Modo, Blender, or even Wings 3D, that Sculptypaint can export, it can save to OBJ files. So you can conceivably, and there are a few problems I think with it, it's still in alpha phase, but you can try to use it as part of your rendering and your work flow pipeline.

So what you can also do now, of course, is well you can tint it, and you can really... Oh! That's too

green. And I think it's fine the way it is. One really cool thing is shiny with sculpties! So let's set the shininess to Medium, and see how cool that looks? It gets even cooler if you combine it with the power of Winlight! World menu, Environment Settings, and Sunset, to give us a really beachy feel, and look at that!

Let me just close this clutter, and can you look at the beauty of that? Can you see that this is not an infomercial, but it looks freaking awesome! No, this is not a home shopping channel, either. But we've just made a flower in like what, ten minutes or so? And you can do this too!

Pick it up, and you're going to want to learn more about sculpties, I guarantee, after getting... dipping your toes into this great ocean. So also visit our wiki. There's a lot of really, really excellent, savvy, smart, helpful residents who have put together information about how to use and make sculpted prims to import into Second Life with more advanced 3D applications. But Sculptypaint is just so nice and fun to get started with.

Now I'm going to fly to the top of my flower, and admire the world.

Enjoy your Second Life and make a sculpty paint! Send it to me!

Version 2 - AS9AOZ7GOAUPQ

Friendly Greetings! Its Torley Linden and I love to teach you cool new things to empower and make your Second Life a happier one. Today we are going to look at Sculpted prims, we have seen all sorts of neat objects ??? and wondered how they were made when someone told you it was "Sculpties" Well what we are looking at right now is a program called Sculptypaint and its by resident of Second Life name Cell Edman. Its available for free download for windows, MAc and Lunix. And of course,he appreciates donations but its easy and fun that he's made this available. Its both a great way to get aquainted with "Sculpies" and (I'm just clicking on this to rotate it) and I was saying: It has more advanced tools too, if you need to get into them. So we are not going to explore everything, we are going to do what is preverbaly called scratching the surface, the tip of the iceberg (chuckle) but it should be enough to energize you and get you very very intrigued to do more and express yourself creatively.

First of all, lets look right here. There are different kinds of tools for creating different kinds of Sculpty prims, and right here we have the resolution. Now 32 by 32 approximates closely what you'll see in Second Life. So although its a lower resolution (lets click that) so we can be a little more acurate, and right here we can see the model in different ways. Right now we just have a sphere (chuckle) and we can go from color to solid mode, to wire, frame and texture. If you want to texture map you can do that too. You can also change the Sculpy type and if you want to have a flatter look you can turn off the lighting by clicking this Mini lightbulb icon. This whole layout here reminds me of the video jockey applications I was using way back in Demo scene days, and all that. See that and you can turn off the grid too.

Now lets go to the flower tool, this is just a really really fun thing to do, click the flower tool button here and what you can easily do next is click on reset to flower form and this will make a flower. And the colors you see here are the colors of the texture not the Sculped map texture, and I'll show you the difference between those, but the texture map thats applied onto the Sculped prim. Thats pretty cool because you can randomize the texture as you see right here and you can change the colors of the flower, so I like this (it is very nice) you can randomize the leaves texture. (Text is short for texture) you can change the root, and you can make the stem (right here) if you want to make the stem a little more curved, you can do that, by clicking out here and notice that the model will also change when you do that, i'll just make it more organic. You can change other sorts of shapes, you can add additional leaves make a wild one, yeah thats pretty cool, lets leave it like that. And then what you can do next is you can use other tools in conjunction, but we want to come back here, and I'll show you why.

Next lets have a look at this point tool. With this point tool, and notice I'm just clicking to rotate the model, you can just change the smoothness, so if I want to smooth things out I can click that once and you'll see it be smoothed see and it has. This is effective too if you are making a cube and you want to have rounded corners, so lets push that one more time. Alright thats a little more smooth. And then lets go over here to, I believe, its the drawing tool. The drawing tool will let you directly manipulate these points and you can extrud them, I'll show you this its a good view. As I said if you've never been using a 3D application before, this is just a fun way to really emerse into it and you can just click these points and you can click and hold out here, and make them jaggered and you can push them back in if thats your sort of thing and they are kind of being pushed out like discs and woo thats pretty fun. And so now that we have that we can go back to the point tool. You can use these tools in combination with each other there is even a stairs tool and arch tool to make certain geometric constructs, like if you wanted to make a single flight of stairs with a single sculpted prim. Then lets smooth that one more time and lets prepare this now for export, I'll show you how easily it is to get it into Second Life so that you can enjoy and show it off to your friends.

Lets go back now to the Flower tool, and now that we have all this here what we can do is we can click here and the reason why we want to come back to the flower tool is because it saved the sculped map, it will save it so that you can get that GEOMETRY LOADED INTO SECOND LIFE, and it will save the colors on the texture. We can expect to see something similar to this within the inworld experience when we're back there.

Lets go ahead and click save 128 by 128 sculpt image png and then it will tell us that its saved, Ok great its saved to that folder. So I'm going to flip over to Windows now, I'm just going to open that Window where it was saved. So here we have two files, this is the sculpting paint install folder, it saves it right wherever you installed it. And here's the sculpt map, they often look like rainbowy sorts of things, and here is the texture like it says the texture map, which will be applied onto the sculpt map so it can create the colors you see.

Next, lets head into Second Life and get this show on the road. We're back on the beach and these crabs are nipping at my toes, but thats alright because we're in Second Life boo and we're going to upload Second Life sculpties! So, here's how you do it: (Remember that we have a sculped map and a texture map that gets applied to that) and here's how it all works: You go to the File menu and select Bulk Upload, I know there's just two its not really bulk, but it makes it faster non the less. So remember the directory where you saved them, right here with sculpy paint. I'll click this and click the other one while holding the Shift key (it selects both of them) and now I'll click open. Oooh crabs, give me a break. Ok I paid 10 limits to upload one and there we go to upload both of them, so what we have here now is the sculped map and the texture map. Lets close both of these. And lets go into our Inventory into the Textures folder, they are these ones at the top here. And we're going to create a new cube first, so right click and Create, our new cube has been born resident to the world. Lets make it a big object however, Under the object tab, lets change it to 10 by 10 by 10 because we want a really grand flower, something Awesome! really big. Right-click it again, edit and lift it off the ground so it is touching the ground, and then change the building block type here to: Sculpted and you will notice by default it has a sphere and this rainbowed sculped map. A good question that often asks is (its kind of like an apple there) that often gets asked is How do you know the difference between whats meant to be applied as a sculped texture there? Well aside from simple experimentation, currently they have the same icons so its difficult to differentiate, however, if you look at it, it will often look kinf od rainbowy like that with a colored gradient representing the depth and co-ordinates of how it will be defined in the world. To make better visual sense of that, lets have a quick look in the Library, So I go down here into the Library folder and our inventory and then go to Textures. So we have some sampled, Sculped textures here and then you'll notice these are the Sculped textures and these are the Surface textures that get applied at texture maps and then we can open one, so for example: Something that would be an apple would look like (it doesn't look much like an apple when its there) but its got this kind of rainbowy look. And depending on what you choose but they ususally very psychadellic I like that one, haha, I like the colors of that one.

So lets just close those out and lets apply the one we have, which is: the one without the work texture in there. So its the sculpted one, it has a very cryptic sort of name at first but lets click and drag that on. Ok and release that. And you'll notice it starts with a spere but as it reads this that it will form to the shape that we expected. The Flower remember! Its starting to look more like it. We're also going to want to rotate this so click this and rotate it here around so it stands upright as most flowers do, and lets raise it a little back into position, lets get it off the ground. Maybe we'll just squash the crabs. Ha ha for all they've done. Now, goto the texture tab and see right here, now drag this is the texture map, surface texture map to be precise. Click and drag this and then it will apply it onto the surface of the sculpted prim. Ooo look at that. Look what we've got, its pink at the top, remember how the colors looked in Sculptypaint and compare it. It not exactly the same, but its similar. And like with other prim types, of course, you can stretch and resize it if you so wish. Move advanced,(ooh) its like an accordian flower tuu doo tuu. You can, I mean you can't edit some of the more esoteric paramters because those are done in other modelling apps. And I should also mention that if you are familiar with other 3D modeling prgrams like Miya, Mono, Blender or even Wings 3D that sculpty paint can export, can save to obj files, so you can convievably, and there are a few problems I think with it, its still in alpha phase, but you can try to use it as part of your rendering and your workflow pipeline.

So what you can also do now, of course is or you can tint it, wow thats too green, but I think its fine the way it is. One really cool thing is SHINY with sculpties, so lets set the shinyness to medium and see how cool that looks. It gets even cooler if you combine it with the POWER OF Windlight. Click on World menu, Environments settings and sunset to give us a really beachy feel and look at that. (I'll just close this clutter) And can you look at the beauty, can you see that this is not an infomercial, but it looks freakin' awesome, no this is not a home shopping channel either, but we've just made a flower in like what 10 minutes or so. And you can do this too, pick it up and you're gonna want to learn more about sculpties, I guarantee ya after getting,dipping your toes into this great ocean. So, also visit our Wiki there is alot of really really excellent savy, smart, helpfull residents that will help you put together information about how to use and make sculpted prims to import into Second Life or more advanced 3D applications. But sculpted prim is just so nice and fun to get started with. Now I'm going to fly to the top of my flower and admire the world. ENJOY YOUR Second Life and make a sculpty, hey Send it to me!