Fashion and sculpties
You readers might wonder why this blog is called fashion and sculpties. This is not coincidence. Fashion and sculpting are really interconnected. Let me put it this way.. Creating fashion with the standard Secondlife tools has it’s limit. Okay, you can make a nice T-Shirt or even a pair of pants and a jacket when you are great at Photoshop or Gimp… but it gets boring very soon. Adding prims makes it a lot more interesting… Especially when you make jewelery or accessories. The real thing however is using sculpted prims aka sculpties.
For whom is not familiar with building in Second life. Prims are the basic building forms of which any object in the virtual world consists of. Normal prims are limited in form and size. There is a cube, a sphere, an torus etc… You can stretch them in 3 directions and put a nice texture on it. Basically everything consists of a number of prims glued (linked) together. Texturing is the first step to make things look a bit real. Take a picture in real life and wrap it on a prim.
Sculpted prims however are not limited to basic forms. Compare them to clay. You can give each prim its own 3D form. It takes not much imagination to see that this extends the building possibilities in Second life a lot. However sculpting prims is not that easy.. for most users it is a bridge too far. Most sculpting is done in off world software tools. Most of them are all that user friendly. You have to import the forms as texture maps into SL and put them on the prim.
But if you get over this hurdle and learn how to properly make sculpted prims the sky is the limit…. well almost….
It would be nice if sculpted prims had no limits.. but they have. Besides that they are not easy to make, have to be uploaded, need more time to rezz and cause some lag. They miss some of the features that normal prims do have. What I personally miss most is flexibility. My customers are mostly designers of fashion who choose not to make their own sculpties. And in fashion flexibility really makes a difference. So if I have one big wish to Santaclaus this year…. please let Linden Labs finally add this functionality to Second life.. They promised! And if they do.. I promise that Second life will get a lot more beautiful.
Off the record: It is often said that it is already possible to make flexible sculpted prims theoretically.. but it would cost way to many server power to run them in world at the moment. If they have made this decision for that reason I can sleep well… because all server power problems are solved by time.
Right… having said that.. don’t be afraid. Anybody can make sculpted prims. But if you choose not to.. call me!
Amon
