Exporting From 3DS Max To Second Life

Dear fellow second life users.
I've been asked as a Game Designer to make a virtual world for a school.
I have one problem tho, I work in 3DS-Max, I've downloaded a Primcomposer from liferain.
But it doesn't support basic max functions like extrude, bevel or chamfer.
So I have no way to add a nice sense of detail, does anyone here have a solution for this??
Furthermore I can export models bigger then 10x10 Meters wich is a problem since my Lobby Building is 60x40 Meters and I don't really feel like uploading it one part after another.
Thanks in advance for helping or even botherd to read

DesignMage Grafta

Ilse - Windesheim, Zwolle

Hi DesignMage,

I can't help you with the 3D Max question, you would probably do better in the building section.

With regard to size, you can use mega prims to make larger, the best method I find for getting the right sizes is the SALT hud: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=712605

Thank you for this quick respond.
Do you have any idea if the salt hud will respond to the primcomposer?

When making sculpties, you can only use certain fixed numbers of vertices. It's my understanding that the operations you mention above add extra vertices to the model, making it impossible to convert to a sculpty texture.


Yes, as Chokolate says, megaprims are the best solution. You make your sculpty texture first, upload it, then apply it to a megaprim of the right size. Megaprims are slightly odd in that you can't change the size of them: they ping back to normal prims (max size 10m) if you try.


The Salt Hud is an inworld search tool for finding the size of megaprim you need. It won't talk to prim composer, and neither can prim composer be used to create megaprims. Megaprims can't be made on demand (unfortunately). Those that are available inworld were all made by a few individuals when, on a couple of occasions, a "bug" made it possible to create prims larger than the official maximum dimensions.

Building in Second Life is very different from building in other 3D and game design applications, and it's quite likely you'll find it a bit frustrating at first. You might do better with something like Sculpt Studio, which is an inworld modelling application. Of course it's nowhere near as powerful as 3DSMax or Blender, but it is much more suited to the task.

ETA: it's a good idea to use normal prims rather than sculpties for most of your build. Sculpties can take a while to load and lots of big sculpty textures may only ever look like a mass of grey blobs to those without top-of-the-range hardware and superfast connections. They can also be difficult to work with in buildings as the bounding boxes are larger than the prims appear to be. If you haven't already done so, I'd recommend visiting the Ivory Tower of Prim to see the range of what is possible using normal prims.

A new question, now I am moddeling with sculpties and it seems to work but I get to errors while exporting my sandbox model.
Please someone help me solve these primcomposer errors or atleast please tell me what they mean.
1. MaterialExporter -> exportBakedMaterials(); — Type error: array index must be positive number, got: , got: 0

2. Exported Sculpt FAILED in prim 'SandBoxIsle' -> — No ''''-'''' function for undefined

If you are going to build *in* Second Life, you are going to have to learn to build in Second Life. You might prototype in external tools, and that is fine, but in the *general* case it is not easy, maybe not really possible, to take external models and import them.

There are good technical and historical reasons for this.

Maybe you need to go look at OpenSim, or some other envirnment.