Sculpted?

The recent craze in SecondLife seems to be sculpted prims. After all, what used to require lots of prims and even more prim torturing can now be accomplished with ONE single prim. But then, unless you have experience working with 3D software, it may be easier to stick with simple prims, rather than try to make the same thing out of a sculpted prim.

Just what are sculpted prims? Basically, instead of the standard cubes and spheres, sculpted prims loads in a texture map that you create. If you make a texture map of your avatar (using the OBJ files that SecondLife provides for free on their download page), you can even make a sculpted prim of yourself (or at least, the basic avatar in SecondLife). With a bit of imagination, you can even make a 3D mannequin out of sculpted prims! But that is a challenge best left for the experienced 3D artist.

With no prior knowledge of 3D programs, I am still finding my way around with regards to sculpted prims. My first creation should be a simple katana, which is currently what I am trying to do. I am using Blender, though it is VERY hard to use. But once you get used to it, things get slightly better. Wings3D seems like a simple enough program to use too, but while it looks like a simple program, the interface is not easy to get used to. And if you are thinking about creating textures to use on your sculpted prims, you will probably need UVMapper to create a texture template of your sculpted prim, so that you can use it to paint a texture using your favourite paint program (GIMP, Photoshop, Paint, etc.)

Watch out for my first sculpted prim!