Sometimes it’s the easiest things people are looking for. While I am offering entire houses, furniture, plants, even hair and stuff, people are googling for a stairs sculpt map. Okay, being the service-oriented blog that we are, have a go: Here’s a 9-step stair sculpt map.
How to use it? In your viewer, choose File > Upload > Upload Image, select the sculpt map on your computer and make sure you check ‘use lossless compression’ in the preview window. Then upload it (might cost some money in Second Life or other grids). Next, create a prim, select Building Block Type: Sculpted in the Object tab, then drag the sculpt map into the texture field underneath it. Your prim should now start looking like a stairs. If it looks distorted, make sure to set Stitching Type to ‘Plane’ (again in the Object tab). You will have a stairs with 9 steps using one prim now. Sadly, you can’t climb the stairs, at least not in SL, as the collision bounds are calculated as a box surrounding all your stairs. A workaround to this is to set them to ‘pantom’ (in the Object tab again) and create another prim shaped like a plane that will serve as a walking grounds (see the white prim in the above picture). You can make this plane transparent (using, for example, this transparent texture) and that way have a nice 2-prim stairs. Do not link the two prims, as phantom and non-phantom prims can’t be linked without overriding one or the other.
[EDIT 13th June 2010: To anyone wondering why prim stairs don't work on OSGrid or any other Open Simulator Grid: OpenSim uses a different physics engine than Second Life, which calculates collisions differently. Thus, stairs, depending on collisions, don't work as expected. Also it makes terrain wonky. To circumvent this flaw, just use a transparent prim as a 'ramp' as described above.]
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Nedd Zeplin
ok, just read your tutorial. ‘cos I was in need of some stairs.
Funnily enough, I only read the main paragraph, about more or less how to do it.
It wasn’t until I had the stairs completed, in my OpenSim based grid, that I read the last chapter. Funny, they work fine in my world, can walk up and down them with no problems at all.
Cheers
[Reply]
V
Hi, thank you for the comment. OpenSim uses a software called Meshmerizer, which enables the ODE phsyics engine to calculate the edges of a sculpt and use actual sculpted bounds. In short, this means that within any opensim-powered grid, the “surface” of a sculpt is what your avatar can walk on, whereas in Second Life, sculpts have “bounding boxes”, which means that there is an invisible box around the sculpt that is large enough to at least keep the whole sculpt within its bounds, and this box is the “surface” of the sculpt as far as physics are concerned, meaning that avatars will bump into that invisible box when trying to climb the stairs. Hence the workaround for SL as described above. The stairs work fine in any opensim environment without doing the voodoo SL needs.
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