Nice speakers!
Kudos have to go to Andy for the awesome program though. To clear up any confusion, I don't work for Inivis, I'm just a dedicated fan.
The sculpty exporter is my fault, however, lol. I am, indeed, I swear, working on an update for it, it's just slow going, aargh.
As a better explanation of how the exporter works: (I have yet to find a very good way to explain this, so please bear with and feel free to ask questions!)
- The exporter uses your uv map to make a "skin" around your model.
- It then renders that "skin" to a high-resolution texture where each point on the skin is the x, y, z coordinate of the surface of your model under that point on the skin.
- It then samples a grid of points onto the generated texture and converts the x,y,z to 8-bit color values that Second Life can read. i.e. It samples the texels of your uv map to create the sculpt map.
Soooo... what that means in English. You have to have a map with no holes so the exporter can form the "skin" correctly. The exact position of the points doesn't matter per se, however, when it gets to the sampling step the greater number of texels assigned to a part of the map will result in a greater number of polygons in Second Life... so, manipulating the map can help if you have areas of more or less detail.