i got my start with the first few steps of the heart-shaped box... after that, the working concepts are pretty easy... i force a sphere or cube to 8x8 for rough modeling, then refine by forcing to 16x16... the 256 bit tga is what is applied in second life, but due to roundoff error, it usually comes out a little mushy in second life compared to the form you see on the screen in sculptypaint or autocad...
here is a sculptypaint screencap of a recent project...

and here is the dxf export as seen on architectural desktop in autocad...

finally, here is the result in second life covered in a seamless rust texture i created...