That is an interesting texture work around, Leben.
I, too, came across the merging of vertices to force hard edges for polygonal shapes in
SL by accident after nothing else had succeeded. While it does work, it can also become cumbersome. One thing that has aggravated me is that, without doing this,
SL seems to constantly fill in the geometry of sculpts arbitrarily once it gets into
SL. This can be ignored for many organic objects, but unacceptable in other situations.
I wonder, can't the MEL script that exports sculpt textures be tweaked somehow so that it uses more accurate RGB values? I've seen programs in
SL that allow you to create sculpts of, say, 30 boxes as one sculpt map, with each box having perfectly straight edges. Granted, they use a sculpt texture that is 512x8, so maybe they are just hacking the graphics engine somehow. But if they can do it, I would imagine there should be some way to allow Maya that kind of accuracy instead of having to use multiple programs (like Blender), which slows down work flow.
Imagine being able to loft 1 degree curves to create a surface, and being able to keep those hard edges without having to convert it to a polygon object and merging rows of vertices or exporting and dealing with the caveats of yet another program.
Ideally, it wouldn't matter how few points one could use, because the script would still be able to fill in the rest of the geometry without crimping/softening the edges within
SL.
I used to think sculpts were great, and they are, but after working with them and dealing with all their caveats, they seem more and more like some half-assed concoction
