Very Good Tool Idea ( Carving tool )

This is probably the only thing I would ever want from Second Life, a carving tool. If you have ever played half life 2 and opened hammer to make a new map, you would know what I'm talking about.

This is how it works, lets say you have a big cube and a little cube you would put the little cube right in the middle of the big cube to make a hollow space inside of the big cube! Kinda like this:





Then it would carve





I mean, this could make impossible mesh designs! You could just get a huge sphere and keep cleaning up a polygon for great designs!

Have you tried using "hollow?"

he's referring to boolean objects. there's a feature request on the voting page for that last i checked

*edit* bah there's 3 in fact.
props: 1208, 149, 138

yea but carving is like a Hammer map making sin!

Hollow isn't flexible as I said before.

SL uses prims, not meshes, so IMHO this is a no-go

They could still have object intersection to handle carving, and get rid of the ghastly seams and flashies in the same fell swoop, with changes to the client-side renderer.

Yes, Second Life uses prims. Philip Rosedale talks of his love for Legos. Prims are like Legos. Logos are for children. Adults play with splines and meshes and normal maps. As long as they stick with a prim-only object model we will alwyas have more limited 3D options and worse performance to go with it, attempting to achieve through hundreds of prims what could be done with modern normal maps or meshes.

Prims are great for what they are: building blocks. They are easier on the learning curve for people who haven't used 3D tools. Ultimately prims should be just one object building tool. They can be extended a bit more, but in the end they are more resource intensive dealing with object intersection than true 3D object construction.

Sorry, I was trying to follow you, but I didn't even see you mention hollowing....

Hollow alwas Centres within the Prim, His idea could subtract the Volume of one prim from the other in any position within the Chosen parent prim,, done more than once some very complex negative spaces could be created. Interesting ideaand i'm all for it but IS it possible with this kind of 3D construction engine?

Angel.

i dont really think so ... the biulding system is simplified (partly for user ease, which inturn makes the simple things into a geomerty class, partly becuase LL just did it that way, which sorta makes since with the scope of things)

but there is no occulision in SL ... thats why you cant keep water out of submersed biulds and LL had to drop most of their weather model among other things

snoop around the SLCC threads theres a video file link for Linden World (basicly the prototype of SL) during the demo they touch breifly on this, and simply stated "we cant"

I just want a saw so I can cut an angle wherever I want it.

coco

Then it's time for them to hire some programmers who can.

20 of 27 programmers are already working on revamping the internals of SL, which date back to 2001.
Seriously, a major code overhaul (like the entire prim system) would take FOREVER, and they still have to have staff to fix the bugs people complain about.
So if you don't like it, go apply for a dev position.

Bassicly the same Idea, lets say if you have a sphere and a cube you place the sphere on the side of the cube and then it would carve... that would be a impossible prim to make with the basic tools we have now.

I was doing boolean modeling ten years ago on some little program called Ray Dream. You could do some really cool stuff, like a union of two primitives (push a sphere halfway into a cube and it is just one object, not at all like linking two prims is), or you could do the carving (subtract) as the OP mentioned. The coolest was to take only the part where two primitives intersect. Could get some really freaky stuff that way.

Just being able to do boolean modeling would be huge step forward, even if we didn't get real mesh import capabilities with it.

But, aren't our avatars meshes anyway?

Avs are special. The real point is most people can't deal with meshes

What you describe is very neat (boolean object composition) but, alas, completely impossible in Second Life without a total overhaul of the way the world is build.

Second Life is build of prims. Every prim (of any type) has a fixed set of parameters describing it completely. This is essential for the whole 3D streaming idea of Second Life and does not leave room for boolean object composition.

Seems like boolean modeling wouldn't be so hard for people to grasp. Heck, our OP looks to be fairly new, and grasped the concept perfectly. Even if others didn't, they could still just build with prims as we do now. In other words, I don't buy the, "Its too hard for users to understand" idea at all.

Whether it can be feasibly implemented is, as others have already mentioned, another thing altogether.

Unfortunately, truer words have never been spoken.

I'd dearly love to have more advanced tools... oh, like subdivision modelling tools in SL , but I know there'd be so many people who'd abuse meshes (seen it in other games, where people have uploaded hi-res models they merely found on the web that took the game down to a crawl - you think texture abuse is bad you don't even want to see what mesh abuse is like), and make things have even MORE polygons than we have to deal with now using prims. I prefer building with meshes (WAY prefer it), but I also realise the learning curve is very steep for modelling 3d objects with current tools. A friend of mine did suggest something like a "polygon tier" for building mesh type objects, the more polygons the more it costs you, but I dont know if that would work too well.

Not to mention the people who wouldn't be able to model in the first place - it would shut out a lot of people from being able to build at all.

I think a lot of detail problems could be solved by adding normal mapping to SL, and letting us import maps from apps like Zbrush to make prims seem like they have more detail than they do.

Boolean modelling, erm, don't know. I'd like to have it but it could be rather resource intensive as well. Perhaps an idea is to be able to change the center of where the hollowing is done from - say an offset or something. Then you could just line it up, cut the prim if necessary and size things appropriately.

Please use protection while carving....The morning after pill is only available over 18 years old women.

Troy

Or girls under 18 with a perscription </offtopic>

Really? I guess then that alone would make it worth my while to learn such a new system (assuming I had time left in this lifetime to do it).

coco

They're looking!