External Modeling

Well there uis no search button(That I can see) so forgive me if this has been said.

I am an experienced modeler (MS3D, 3dsmax, maya) and I want something like the option of importing models. This way you could add more detail and et cetera without having to make an over proportioned object using only basics (I persoanlly use Poly-By-Poly which adds a lot more detail. I would also like to see other external game tools for animating, texturing, and sounds.

Pro's:
-Detailed.
-Easy for some of the more experienced modelers of the community.

Con's:
-Texturing could prove to be a problem
-In-Game editing could be a problem

This comes up a lot. This is a feature you will probably never see in SL. The reason is due to the streaming nature of the SL world. Arbitrary 3d meshes are data instensive. They contain information for the location of every vertex, the interconnections of vertices by edges, triangle, and surface normals for each triangle. To introduce an object like that into SL and sill have it where everyone can see what you're doing with it in real time would require SL to send the entire object description to each and every client that comes within draw distance of it.

SL works by using parametric primitive objects. Your client already knows how to make them in terms of vertices, edges, and polygons. All the SL server needs to communicate to your client is that there's a primitive of X type, with dimensions of XYZ, rotation of XYZ, and numbers for cuts, twists, and other special features. It's a tiny amount of data which is why SL can get away with streaming the entire world to you instead of making you store it locally. For this reason you will likely never see support for mesh objects imported from 3d modeling programs.

This is from an article that Philip Linden wrote... ""The average bandwidth to a Second Life player hovers around 100Kbps, although players with larger pipes can allow spikes to several times that if their connection allows it. Even with broadband, a huge amount of compression is needed. Each simulator in Second Life can handle around 10,000 objects, and although you can't see all those objects at any time, you can often see a good percentage of them. Existing compression techniques for transmitting generalized meshes could never get that many objects into view at a speed adequate for making the experience feel fluid, so the decision was made to throw out meshes for most of the objects in world and to switch to a constructive solid geometry approach built around geometric primitives. These basic shapes are represented algorithmically and allow a tremendous degree of flexibility via scales, cuts, twists and through combinations of multiple primitives that can be transmitted in an extremely terse form."

Well and what about the other way round? I would LOVE to be able to get a copy of my avatar into Poser and do some fancy editing there

I'm just started playing around with Poser a bit, so I guess there MAY be some way to relate the avatar settings on SL to the settings in Poser. Say, have a chart/table that says "setting X for twisting the nose in SL corresponds to setting Y for the same thing in Poser". That would be quite acceptable for me. In that way, I would be able to do custom-tailoring of several animations in Poser, especially those that interact with objects and are INCREDIBLY hard (and expensive, due to multiple uploads!!) to position on a trial-by-error basis...

Gwyneth, hopefully that will become a non-issue when we get in-world tools for creating animations. They're planning on doing that so poser will no longer be a necessity, and hopefully doing animations that involve props will become a whole lot easier.

Hi, this is already possible to do, and Kalleb Underthorn has coded one such application. But its still a bit primitive and he is too busy to complete it. If I knew a thing about 3D rendering I would build it myself.
Basically, you can use llGet/SetPrimitiveParams with XMLRPC to make an offline modeling tool that will then transmit all data required for you to automagically rez stuff in SL.

What you are talking about Eggy is great, no question, but I don't think it is what Pyotr was asking for. I believe he/she is trying to avoid SL's primitive-only modeling construct (which appears very childish to experienced modelers) and have the option to import more complex gemoetry into SL. As Chip said, this will likely never be an option (much to the dismay of people like me who have a whole zoo full of wonderful creatures who would love the chance to strut their stuff in SL).