Sculpties aren't smooth?

[Greeical]

I am using Maya for a while now to create sculpties for my hairdesigns. I still have a lot to learn about the program and I'm having a problem right now.

I have made some fully sculpted hairstyles before and it never was a big problem to me before, but right now I am really frustrated about it:

In Maya the sculpties look really great and smooth, but once they are transferred to SL they get kinda "crooked". They are just not that smooth anymore like they were in Maya.

I tried checking the 'use lossless compression' while uploading, but that doesn't make any difference.
I also tried using way more sections and spans etc to get a more detailed prim, but that also doesn't make any difference when it comes to smoothness.

Here's a picture to show what I mean.

On the left side (in Maya) you see the prims are really smooth and on the right side (in SL) you can see the same prims, but they aren't really smooth on top of the head.

Does anyone have an idea on what to do with this?

Thanks in advance!

[Ants]

Well, one things jumps out: I do not see, why the hair strand at the right top are of the right image are so angular. If this where an output from blender i would suspect the sculptmap is too small (something like 8 * 8 faces). I would expect to see something like this when i used a 32*32 faces map (not an oblong):

The left image is just the untextured sculptie, while the right model is with a simple texture.

[Jennifer]

A few things:

First, remember to always delete history, and freeze & reset transformations on all objects you're going to export as sculpties.  Otherwise, your sculpts will often end up lumpy.

Second, make sure your object display settings are in order.  In Maya, you want to be viewing your NURBS objects at detail level 2 (simply select them and then press 2 on the keyboard).  Your screenshot looks to be at level 3, which is WAY smoother than SL can do. Remember, Maya tesselates NURBS on the fly, for infinite resolution.  The poly count at level 3 is insanely high.  Level 2 is much closer to what SL will do with it.  Also, your object display quality in SL should be all the way up, as Katrina mentioned.

Third, do keep in mind that SL's rendering of sculpties is going to be somewhat angular, no matter what you do.  It's a fairly low-poly mesh.  The hair pieces in your picture look about as good as I'd expect.  They could be tweaked a little, sure, but on the whole, nothing jumps out at me as wrong.

[Greeical]

Anyway, I think I have found the solution!

There was no way to get my current meshes smoother than they were (or maybe there is, but I'm tired of trying), so i just started all over and just now I made a really basic hairpiece and it looks smooth! *yay*
I usually started with a 10x25 (or higher) NURBS sphere and just played along with it.
Right now I just started with a 8x8 NURBS sphere, detail level 2 on, made the basic shape and then rebuild it to 16x16, made some more adjustments/details and finally rebuild it to 45x45.

Then I did the delete history, freeze, etc thingy and exported it to SL and it looks great!

I'm not sure what it will do once I get to a more complicated shape (right now it's just the basic C-kinda shape)), but I am going to figure that out right away.

Conclusion at the moment:
- Detail level must be at 2 at all times
- Start really low poly for the basics and rebuild to somewhat higher-poly along the way for more details until I end up at 45x45
- Don't forget to delete history, freeze, etc.
- Really happy with the result within SL

I have tried out this new "method" and I can say that it works perfectly!

So, thanks for the additional information about deleting history, freezing/resetting information etc, my problem has been solved, and here's proof: