PloppSL: create sculpies with ease

We just released a first version of our tool for creating Sculpted Prims for SecondLife™:

http://www.secondplopp.com/

PloppSL allows you to create intriguing Sculpted Prims for SecondLife™ easily. Both texture and model are created in one step. Simply paint the front and back side of your model and it will be converted to a Sculpted Prim by PloppSL.

Features
You can create or use different textures for the front and backside of your model. Paint in your favored paint program, import the images into PloppSL by drag&drop and turn them into 3D models with one click.

About the Project
PloppSL is a specialized version of Plopp the award winning 3D Painting Tool for kids. It brings the ease of Plopp 3D model creation to the SecondLife™ community. It is free to use, but we kindly ask for your support to help with further development.

Support the development of Plopp and PloppSL
Please help us supporting further development of Plopp and PloppSL with a donation or by buying Plopp the 3D Painting Tool.

ToDo list for PloppSL

* improvement of the conversion to Sculpted Prims
* sculpture preview within PloppSL
* see how your sculptures will look in SecondLife™
* automatic generation of sclupties for each part in the original image
* currently we only support closed models without holes

I don't see anything about PloppSL at this URL. Did I miss it?

Sorry, had the planet-plopp.com url in there at first.
The corrected one is http://secondplopp.com

Michael

Very cool! Reminds me of the paint-modelling tool in Croquet

It actually started on that code base, but has come a long way since then

Very nice, a little tooltips over the buttons might help, its a bit difficult to figure out what to do

Ok, so it takes a child to understand how to work it. This is harder than Blender, LOL.

It appears to take a drawing and inflate it as you would a mylar balloon. You have the ability to texture both sides differently.

There may be real potential here, just need to learn how to operate it.

Kudos!

Take a look at this:

Ack! My work net is too slow.. will see if I can get it to completely download before I go home, else I'll have to download from home and then transfer to the notebook. Looks good and interesting! Will have to give it a go.

So, I can create images in Photoshop, and import them into Plop?

Yes, you can. Save your image as an PNG with proper alpha-channel and then drop it into PloppSL's painter.

Thanks for the tip. I recognized a bug when dropping the PNG into ploppSL, when the painter is closed in the current version 0.5... but when the painter is open, it works.

Hey I like the this trend, outside companies creating tools to enhance our creation process.
That is awesome!

Imagine if Z brush created a sculptie tool for us, how many more people would buy Z brush?

Hi,
I've loaded up ploppsl, but when run I don't see any export button top left and title bar displays plain old Plopp.
Checked source files all display Ploppsl file names, did I do something wrong or have you got your files muddled.
I did install Plopp before Ploppsl but did a full uninstall, have checked and no plopp files are left.
Hope we can sort this out as it looks like a great way to get sculpties.

Cheers Drongo Samas

The export button is currently the doubled miniature image of the plopp object, which is shown, when you select an object in the scene. We have to make the export-button more obvious and/or place it somewhere else.

Thanks for your swift reply.
Yup, there it is, I was looking for an Icon on the main screen.
May be when you do the next release change the name in the title bar to the SL version.

This looks **wonderful**

That page does not list them.

It looks interesting, but what does it run on?

VERY nice.


K.

Another thing to note is that upon exporting your sculpt map it does not ask for a save file
location it automatically puts it into an SLPlopps directory it creates in your "my documents'
folder.

Also the method of importing a file for me that worked was to drag it directly from my windows file list onto the paint palette. From a square texture it makes an apparent two
sided object with front and back texture representations which looks like a pillow that is sewed together on all edges.

However if you use one of the preset cartoon drawings then it preserves a non square shape.
It also does this if you simply make one with the drawing tools in the paint palette.
I did notice that if you use the paint bucket and then draw something that it is once again
formed as a square shape. I am guessing that the default canvas has an auto inclusion of the
png. alpha requirements "on it' so that if you leave the margins of your drawing untouched
it will preserve its intended shape.

I did read that if you prepare your intended texture in advance with the pgn. alpha prep
then it will work correctly as well.
The texture created at time of sculpt map export is definitely the one that works best with
your resulting model although you still can retexture it inworld.

Once you get past the little quirks of no tool names on the interface it is definitely one
of the easiest sculpting methods I have seen.

And the method of texturing and exporting your texture at the same time is very innovative.

Thanks for those tips Infiniview

Imp, this looks great! Finally a sculpty program that does something other than lathe. Can't wait to see how this develops.

I can only repeat what has been said by others in terms of improving it. Tool tips would be a great help. (I did figure it out though after playing with for awhile.)

Options to turn off sound effects would be nice.

I notice it seems to freeze up just a tiny bit when it changes modes.

Other than that than its wonderful!

Thank you very much for this wonderful and incredibly easy to use tool! I don't use sculpties myself yet, still have to learn it, but it was very easy to just splatter something on the screen and then make something out of it with this application Very fun indeed! It is one of those "huh where did the time go?" moments, which alway is a good sign.

Pretty spiffy! It's neat to be able to just sketch out a shape and have it transformed into a Second Life object - especially since the custom textures comes along for the ride.

It only took me a few minutes of button poking to figure out how the program works. Even got a PNG image from Photoshop into PloppSL.

Thanks so much for sharing this fun tool! I can see this being used for all sorts of fun, cartoony shapes. You could even use it in conjunction with other free tools like Wings3D by importing the sculptmap that PloppSL exports.

I cannot find where itis saving these files to upload. pls help I keep saving file and loosing it

Checkout:
http://www.secondplopp.com/HowToUse.html


On windows it is "My Documents\PloppSecondLife\"

Wow, I like this. With some refinement this will rock!
Seems it makes the sculpt textures 128X128 and the end result is a bit "messy", as in not smooth or well defined. But hey, it still is awesome!
Took two minutes to get where I was in two days with other programs and it's auto textured! I love that I can paint on the reverse side only if I want, or paint different things on both sides.
The paint side of it would be nice if it did more but I know thats probably in the future.

Thanks!

I am also having fun with Plopp. However, I have started my mental map of improvements...

1. Save the sculpture texture in a lossless format, such as png or bmp. (Actually, because I use Wings, bmp is good.)

2. Decide if 128x128 is the best default. There is a lot of discussion in other threads that 128 is too fine, and that 32x32/lossless is better.

3. Add a zoom feature. I can see that for kids on a 800x600 screen, Plopp is just right, but on my 1920xwhatever, it is tiny and thus hard to draw on.

4. Allow to export parts of the scene spearately, rather than all as one big sculpty.

5. When I drag and drop an external file onto the world view (instead of the paint view), Plopp complains, and then exits.

Anyway, I am having fun. I added Plopp to the wiki.secondlife.com, too.

I've been having fun with PloppSL and thought it might make a good subject for my first tutorial. So I made this casual, walk-through style video where I explain what all the buttons do and show you what you need to do to turn your 2D drawings into 3D sculpted prims.

You can see the video at www.shiny-life.com

http://www.shiny-life.com/2007/10/06/tutorial-create-sculpted-prims-with-ploppsl/