


Unless you know exactly which 32 vertices these are, you just risk being disapppointed because the details of your model rely on some of those 2950+ vertices that are going to be ignored once they get into SL. quadrilateral faces, the triangular faces allow Wings to better match the way SL will render your model. The only disadvantage of triangular faces is that it makes the model look a little "busier". The big benefit of starting with one of the templates, rather than creating a sphere with the Wings command, is that the templates contain UV maps (provided by Hypatia Callisto - thanks again, Hypatia) that allow you to create and preview sculpty textures using just Wings and any 2D paint program. In the original release of sculpties, SL only supported sculpties with a "spherical" topology. (That is, the surface has no breaks and the solid has no holes.) As of this writing, SL has incomplete support for the planar (one surface break), cylinder (two surface breaks) and torus (no surface breaks but one hole in the solid) topologies. The Wings 3D plugin fully supports all four topologies. The exporter and importer now have a number of options that allow the SL sculpty to better match the Wings model (or vice versa). To access these options, click on the box on the right side of the File/Export/SL Sculpties menu. If you click anywhere to the left of the box, Wings will export with the default option values. The size of the sculpty bitmap is not strictly tied to the size of the model. The main reason for this is that for quite awhile after Sculpties were introduced, using a 128x128 bitmap was the best way to minimize compression artifacts created by SL, regardless of the resolution of your model.
