Shrinkage
There is a more technical trick that will actually help keep your sculpt's shape at greater distances.You can shrink them.
I don't mean in SL. In Second Life, you'll actually be making them bigger.
An Explanation
You see... the distance at which your sculpt loses resolution is relative to how large the sculpt is. The larger the sculpt, the farther away your camera can get before it loses resolution.
So, what we want to do is make the sculpt larger, but make it appear to be the same size.
Yeah, I know. Weird. But it can be done. You've probably seen sculpts that do something like it. Several of the freebie sculpts floating around don't quite fit inside the bounding box when you scale them. Have you noticed? You can stretch and stretch these sculpts, but they they never seem like they stretch far enough! Well we're going to do this on purpose.
What you need is some sort of image editor like Photoshop and decrease the color contrast. Some experience in Photoshop is recommended, because I'm going to describe how to do things in Photoshop, since I have practically no experience in any other image editing software.
Open your sculpt map in your image editing application. In Photoshop, the next step is to go to Image > Adjustments > Levels. Ignore Input Levels. You want to change Output Levels, and it needs to be changed by the same amount on both sides. The default values are 0 and 255. I usually change mine to 55 and 200 since those are easy numbers to figure out. The greater the difference in the new values from the default, the more your sculpt will shrink. Once you've decided on your values hit 'OK.' Your sculpt map will look slightly greyed.
Alternatively, you can use Brightness/Contrast and decrease the contrast, but this is less precise.
Upload your sculpt map and apply it to a sculpted prim. You'll see it shrink. If you have the original sculpt uploaded, try placing the two next to each other, and stretching your shrunken sculpt so it looks the same size as the original. Then zoom out and watch how their resolution changes.
A Word of Warning
Although this is a neat trick, you can decrease the contrast on the sculpt map too much.
First of all, if your sculpt is not made phantom, the collision box will be as large as the bounding box, not the shrunken sculpt, but also, your sculpt can become deformed.
The image on above shows the same set of sculpts as the first image on this page, only with the Object detail in SL's Preferences turned to Mid. Notice that the first two sculpts look identical. The third is slightly more choppy looking, and the fourth, obviously, is rather deformed. Below is what the sculpt maps look like:
The less contrast there is, the more values start to run into each other and the more choppy your sculpt will be. If you've done a good job with multires and texturing, there usually isn't any reason to even get as shrunken as the third sculpt. Remember to use this trick wisely. Only when you absolutely need it, and only to the degree it's needed.
