One way is to create a 3D model in an external 3D software package, and then export a SculptMap for uploading to Second Life. Where can I go to obtain or share Sculpt Maps and Textures? By popular demand, an option was added to permit the use of lossless compression when the sculpt texture is uploaded, to preserve the texture detail and the original object shape, at a cost of greater texture storage requirements in the Second Life asset system.
This resulted in an object created with hard edges being softened when uploaded into the world, creating only rough approximations since the upload necessarily discarded some of the texture detail. The original Linden Lab implementation of sculpted prims used a lossy texture compression method to store the shape in Second Life's asset storage system.Another example: it would be easy to have a flash animation generate a sculpted prim - when a Resident touches a spot on its surface, the shape could wiggle and ripple appropriately. When attached to a sculpted prim, the prim would "morph" from one shape to the other. For example, we could create a Quicktime stream which fades from one sculpt texture (sculpt map) to another. Image compression, streaming, progressive loading, and animation are all well-explored problems. An image is just an array of numeric triples, which is what you need for a sculpty, so why not? Also, using image formats to encode shapes comes in very handy because there are many existing tools for handling them.Why use textures (images) to encode shapes? See Sculpted Prims: Under the Hood for details. Sculpt Textures are also very similar to parametric (e.g. They are also similar to displacement maps, but instead of a single scalar distance we have three values - one each for the X, Y, and Z coordinates.Sculpt Textures are similar to so-called " normal maps", but instead of encoding surface normals we encode surface positions. A Sculpt Texture or Sculpt Map is a standard RGB texture where the R (red), G (green) and B (blue) channels are mapped onto X, Y, and Z space.Sculpted prims were originally intended by Linden Lab to support only soft organic shapes with imprecise surface definition, but by popular demand were later extended to support the creation of complex, hard-edged objects with precise surface definition, similar to traditional 3D surface meshes used in other 3D software.You can use sculpted prims to create complex shapes that are not currently possible with Second Life's prim system. These textures are called Sculpt Textures.