Offline Building Tool

Years ago I used to work with a relatively basic 3D tool called Strata Studio Pro. It's certainly no 3D Studio Max but it did have one tool used in editting that I thought was a godsend but I've never seen anywhere else since. A similar tool in SL would be amazing...

What I'm refering to is a way to edit objects without seeing everything else around you. You essentially seperate the object you're working on from the environment and work JUST on that. In SL though I'd like to see it extended slightly as follows:

1) Have it work offline. You can connect to SL to download your Inventory to the offline editor so you can work with your existing textures etc and make sure it supports the same scripting etc

2) Support for multiple views. This is something that loads of people have asked for in the past. Make this tool look more like a CAD program allowing projection views etc and choices of rendering such as wire-frame, hidden line etc. Just to make it easier to see what you're doing. It will make it much more professional and appealing to real-world virtual builders etc (I mean people who already work with CAD just to clear up any confusion there!)

3) Land editing. Allow the user to pick a plot of land and simulate it in the editor so the user can build on that plot and then upload it and effect change. The ability to chose someone elses plot would be cool too but not so you can change this plot, more for builders who are working for that land owner so they can demonstrate a new building effectively in situ without affecting the current plot

4) Sharing objects. The ablity to send this work to another user to look at. OK, so this could be done by saving the object to the inventory and then giving it to someone else who could download it to his/her editor but I meant more like being able to email the file to someone instead. Any textures that are needed could be downloaded from SL rather than needing to be attached to the file

5) Advanced Editing Tools. Within the editor it would be nice to have a better interface styled more like a CAD application with better tools for snaps etc. One thing that really gets my goat when building in SL is having to keep copying objects to another or calculating every number to make sure it all lines up properly. I don't want to have to do this any more. I think MicroStation is a good example of how to use 'Tentative Snaps' to quickly snap to the corner, centre, origin etc of an object for precision building. Trust me when I say that much greater and more interesting buildings WILL come with just slightly better tools!

On top of the obvious advantages listed there, and I'm sure there are many more, it would eliminate the need for so many sandboxes. Granted the sandboxes create a meeting place for builders but maybe we'd only need a couple rather than all the boxes that we have at the moment.

I'd love to hear other peoples ideas. Subscribe to the thread if you're interested and we'll create a vote once we've got all the ideas together.

Thanks everyone!

Something like this?

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kind of like that, yeah, but I still want to be working with SL tools, not Blender. I would be happier with an official Linden system that may be part of SL maybe?