Creating Sculpties

    Sculptured prims were introduced to the Second Life world in mid-2007. Sculptured prims are often referred to simply as “sculpties.” Regular prims in Second Life are based on one geometric shape, such as a sphere or a cube. Sculpties can be created in third party programs and can involve more complex shapes than those used for regular prims.

    Sculpties have two considerable advantages over regular prims. First, they allow curves and shapes which are not possible with regular prims. Second, they allow a single prim to be used rather than several smaller regular prims. Before the creation of sculpties, collections of regular prims were often linked together to create the same effect.

    There are a number of third party programs available which can be used to make the shape maps necessary to create sculpties. The program that will be used in this book is a free program called Sculptypaint. Figure 1.11 shows Sculptypaint being used to create a sculpty.

Figure 1.11: Using Sculptypaint

    Once the shape map created by Sculptypaint is uploaded to Second Life, a sculpty can be created using the uploaded map. Figure 1.12 shows a sculpty in the Second Life world.

Figure 1.12: A Sculpted Prim

    Sculpties will be covered in greater detail in Chapter 7, “Understanding Sculpties.”