Sculptable prims were released onto the main grid yesterday. Before you run out and spend $3000 USD on a copy of Maya (or $7000 USD for the Maya Unlimited package), or worse steal a copy - you may want to consider a few things.

First, if you aren't already familiar with Maya, actually having it isn't going to make you any more able to create sculptable prims than not having it. We're not talking easy here. If you're going to scale the learning curve anyway, though, there are better ways to learn it than Maya.

What the hell is a sculpt texture?

It's a three dimensional displacement map that is applied to a sphere. Basically the sphere is made of lots of little triangles. The point where those triangles touch at the corners is called a vertex. A sculpt texture has the X, Y and Z position of each vertex laid out in a flat sheet, relative to the center of the sphere. That tells it where every vertex goes and will form the final shape.

This is not something you work out on paper, this is where you make a shape with a modeling tool and then use it, or other tools the make that sculpt texture for you. Lots of those tools aren't really intended to do this, so there's bonus learning involved, and there are all sorts of non-obvious things you can't do if you want it to work at the end. If you want to charge around trying to learn Maya off the top of your noggin to get sculpties to work, don't expect to succeed. Learn Maya first, then learn to do sculpties with it; or use some other tool.

Rokuro Rocks!

First up, there's Rokuro. It's fast, it's free and it's designed specifically for creating SL sculpties. Granted, it only handles radially symmetric shapes, but if you want a champagne flute or a wine-bottle, or a table-leg, Rokuro will do it for you in under a minutes, and take less than that to download. Get Rokuro here. If you're new to sculpties, start with Rokuro.

Wings3d

Wings3d is a cross-platform subdivision modeler that handles simple texturing. If you've never pushed a vertex or face around in a modeler, wings3d is the modeler for you. It's also free (available here, for free), but like just about everything (other than Rokuru) it just wasn't designed for sculpt textures, so there's some finicky things you need to pay attention to. The export plugin and requirements are all listed here.

Pov-ray

Pov-ray is free, but is only going to be useful to you to make sculpt textures if you already know how to drive it. If you do, Johanna Hyacinth completes the puzzle for you here, and you can grab Pov-Ray here - though trust me, if you're considering using Pov-ray for this, it's because you already have it.

Blender

Blender's not all-singing and all-dancing, but it certainly sings and dances right up there with a lot of very expensive tools. You can run it on nearly anything and it's free. Two tutorials exist here, and here for generating sculpt textures without a special exporter or script. You can get Blender itself from here. You can also use it for creating complex animations if you get tired of using it to create sculpt textures.

• THE CUBE WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA
  LOOKIN' FOR A SQUARE TO STEAL
  HE'D LOST HIS MIND 'CAUSE HE COULD NOT FIND
  THE SPHERE THAT MADE THE DEAL