Yes, I'd say give that a try, it is easier to make progress on each of those pieces.

You will end up with a different problem later on where the pieces will probably not be totally smooth where they touch each other, but I think you'll be better off.

One thing that might work fairly well for you is a kind of hybrid MoI / polygon approach - if you can draw different pieces in MoI and surface them, then you could export that to a polygon mesh modeler and then work on connecting up all the polygons and smoothing them out there.

- Michael

hrrm, I need to practice more... an eliptical sphere would work well for the bow, but I don't know how to make more of it look nice.. and I don't know the specifics about getting stuff made in this to work in SL x.x

SL = Second Life ?

yes indeed :3

It is kind of difficult to get models into Second Life.

SL does not support reading in a general polygon mesh object, instead it handles only prims that you create directly within SL, or a new "sculpt map" object.

You can get a 3dm2sculpt converter from here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/3dm2sculpt - that will enable converting from a .3dm file that MoI saves into a .tga sculpt map texture file (also check out the discussion tab there for additional details).

But the problem is that you can't convert just any object over, only "untrimmed" surfaces will convert into a sculpt map. So that basically means you can't use trimming or booleans on your object when you construct it in MoI, just build pieces only using stuff like Loft, Sweep, or Network.

Also the resolution of the sculpt map is fairly limited, when you convert it you will just get the sort of broad shape of your surface, small details and folds will not likely make it through.

- Michael

so I cann only import a finished, seamless solid, and it will reduce the resolution of the map?

The map will be at a fixed resolution for each surface, like a grid of 64x64 sampled points.

So the broader your surface, the less individual detail it will have since those points will be spread out over a larger area.

But your object doesn't have to be a solid, it can be an open surface or just one sheet - but any trimming information on the surface (which is typically added during boolean operations for instance) will get ignored and just the underlying surface will get converted to the sculpt map.

- Michael