Sculptie Chairs
First let me state that I adore sculpties. For those of you who do not know what they are, here is the intro on them from Second Life Wiki:
A Sculpted Prim, or sculptie, is a prim whose shape is determined by an array of x, y, z coordinates stored as RGB values in an image file (a Sculpt Texture or Sculpt Map). Sculpted prims can be used to create more complex, organic shapes that were not previously possible with the Second Life prim system.
Now for the lay person, all sculpties mean is that we can do more realistic shapes with less prims, and as we all know, less prims is better!.
But there is an issue with sculpties and it has to do with the amount of time it takes a client to render them correctly. Due to the dynamic nature of Second Life, rendering times increase with prim and textures counts, plus loads of other isssues.
Top – Waiting on sculptie to render / Bottom – Rendered sculptie
As a developer, I love using sculpties, especially for chairs and as a way to soften the look and feel of the build. Or if I have a complex, heavy prim, build concept, the sculptie is wonderful. Except the rendering time makes me reluctant to use many of them.
As shown in the pictures below, the whole look and feel of the Meta Magic Studio kinetic gear display is lost while we wait for the sculptie gears to render. Once render, it looks sweet, but in this world of three second expectation, the thirty seconds of waiting is not acceptable.
