Sculpties and LOD

So many people have asked me about sculptie tricks i have decided to start revealing some...first up Sculpties and LOD!

LOD = Level Of Detail
The Lindens in their infinite wisdom decided to treat sculpties with the same ideals as they do textures... that is to reduce the level of detail on a sculptie with distance. The further you are from a sculptie - the less detail it will have. They do this by reducing the detail in the sculpties mesh. It is calculated by how much area the sculptie takes up on your screen. So a big sculptie will still look ok from a long distance, a small sculptie may look bad from a close distance.
There are two basic ways to counter this issue - people generally call the problem fixes Sculptie LOD or Nano Sculpties. And another that is a fix for your personal viewer but doesn't help others when viewing the same sculpties.

Personal fix: Find the advanced menu in your SL viewer - if it doesn't show at the top of your screen beside the Help menu...press Ctrl + Alt + D simultaneously on your keyboard to activate it. Scroll down the Advanced menu to "Debug settings", enter "renderVolumeLODFactor" and change the value to "4" then close that popup. It may reset each time you relog :/

Sculptie Fix No 1 (for builders): Tricky to do depending on the sculptie shape... but is basically doubling the mesh points at the important places. Move your mesh points/vertices or segment lines so they almost overlap. This can counter the removal of detail by the SL viewer software by leaving mesh points in place when a line of them is removed. Has a bad side effect tho'... texture mapping is very hard. This is not my favourite method but can be useful in some cases.

Sculptie Fix No 2 (RECOMMENDED for builders): This is by far the simplest method - it works by fooling the SL software into thinking the sculptie is larger on screen than it appears visually. Has the side effect of producing a larger invisible bounding/collision box - so it's best to set such sculpties to phantom. Take your sculptie map/texture into Photoshop ... go to Image menu/Adjustments/Levels and adjust its Levels as per pic below ( is almost the same dialog in GIMP)

Play around with the slider settings to achieve a result that best suits you - the settings above are my favourite. Hit OK to close the dialog..and your sculptie rainbow will appear to dim a little. Import into Second Life to see the results. It will help the sculptie keep its detail at a longer distance - but please bear in mind it is not a perfect fix.