Pixel Bunneh

As I talked about previously, using AC3D, I can take any relatively simple object and export it as a sculpted prim.  If you’ve been playing with sculpties you already know how important the UV map is, if you’re new to sculpted prims then this might be more helpful to you.

To explain in more detail, I’ll take two objects and examine the UV maps of both.

Here we have a simple cylinder, created in AC3D.  I didn’t touch the UV map, I simply exported the cylinder as a Second Life Sculpted Prim.

Second Life defaults to a spherical mapping, and even though we can now choose our mapping type, it needs to match how your object was originally mapped.  You can see how the cylinder is kind of squished into one area on the end. (click on pic to get a larger one)

This is what the actual UV map looks like, with the default AC3D mapping, and then with a spherical mapping applied. If I wanted to use spherical mapping, I would need to clean up that UV map, covering the entire area and ensuring that there are no overlaps. For something this simple it’s no big deal, but when you have a complex object it can be maddening.

This is one of the optimized prims that comes with AC3D, a cylinder.

And the UV map. Notice that this map has more surface divisions that the plain cylinder I created above. The more surfaces, the more you can control your sculpty shape. You can add more divisions to get a crisper shape, and that goes for both an optimized and a non optimized object.

Here it is imported into Second Life. As you can see, it’s much smoother and those ends aren’t all warped over to one side.

  While you can work with any object and make it into a sculpted prim, many times it’s vastly easier to use the pre-optimized base prims.  AC3D comes with three SL optimized prims, the box, cylinder, and sphere. I should note here that while the built in smoothing operation in AC3D is nice, I still take many sculpties into Sculptypaint to do a final smooth before I upload them into Second Life.