Baking sculptie maps
When you have finished editing the mesh, you can create (or update) the sculptie map by selecting Render - Bake Second Life Sculpties from the menus.
You can then set the baking options for the sculptie. Usually the default settings are fine.
Fill Holes will bake over any holes in the UV map.
Normalise maximises the scale of the sculpties to give the finest mesh detail level.
Compressible was a feature request by Aminom Marvin. It basically removes the interpolation on none vertex pixels of the sculpt map.
Clicking OK will update the sculptie maps for all selected meshes. They will use the same scale, so if you want maximum detail only select one mesh before baking.
If you are doing animated sculpties then all objects should have the same centre and any required offset done in mesh edit mode. Select all stages of the animation to bake at the same time.
You can see and save the map images in the UV/Image Editor window.
After saving, the sculptie map is scaled to one Blender Unit (1m in Second Life®) in all three directions. If you prefer the sculptie to keep it's proportions at a sacrifice of some detail, then you can uncheck "Normalise" in the bake options. The console window will have the LSL script commands to recreate the sculpties in SL™.
The baker uses the UV map so any object mapped to a full flat square will work. If you have some mesh parts missing, then selecting "Fill Holes" will surface over missing pieces for the sculptie map.
Finalising a Sculpt Map
The finalise process can also be performed from the UV/Image Editor with the Image - Finalise Sculptie option.
This performs both the fill and the finalise steps of the sculptie bake.
Edge baked map
The fill does three passes, first on U, then V then a final pass on U.
On the first U pass, any gaps at the edge of the sculpt map are ignored. Only horizontal lines with baked pixels at each end are filled. Any completely blank lines are ignored.
The V pass then fills vertical lines, any gaps at the edge are filled by extending the baked pixels outwards. Any completely blank lines are ignored.
The final U pass fills and extends all lines to the edges.
Filled sculpt map
The finalise step optimises the sculpt map in an LOD protective way. This copies the values from the vertex pixels to adjacent pixels that aren't used by any LOD levels. This gives a map which is more compressable without affecting the stored vertex information.
Finalised sculpt map
When baking sculpt maps for the library, you'll want to disable Finalise and just use Fill in the bake. This is because there are no unused pixels in a library file as depending on the X, Y face counts and other add mesh options, the mesh may be generated from the inbetween pixels.
When baking multiple meshes to a single sculpt map, you should disable fill and finalise until the final object's bake. The baker uses the alpha channel of the sculpt map to store state information, and this needs maintaining during multiple bakes.