Sculpted prims!

Not everything is doom and gloom in SL...

http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?p=260183

It is very exciting- and scary for builders too! One worries about being obsoleted!! But it's not only available to the $7000 Maya program users. There's talk of making sculpted prims easily available to Blender, which I think is free, and savvy Blender users can do much there already, I get the impression. Also, there are plans by LL to add functionality in our in-world tools. Much excitement and consternation to come in the days of builders!

There's much discussion about this in the Building Tips forum, now. I believe a number of helpful and civic-spirited people there are talking of coming up with helpful tutorials, after they work like mad to figure out and learn how it all works. I'm so grateful to them in advance!!

-Fo

Wasn't there also a mention somewhere that they might be looking at a future addition to the viewer build tools, where you could work with sculpted prims natively in the viewer?

Maya has a personal learning edition. It's free.

Scultpies are also resizable, so a generous soul could create a box full of shapes that are currently difficult...egg, hexagon, pentagon, generic body parts, generic animals, etc etc etc. People without the tools could still texture these and resize them, and assemble them into higher level aggregates...

The free version of Maya will not work for sculpted prims. Something about the Maya logo being in the textures.

Also me to say then....


CURSES

I have been using Blender to play with this stuff for the last couple of days, and although it's a manual process for now it *is* doable.

I am willing to put up a bounty (anyone wanna join in?) for anyone that releases a Blender exporter that works on an arbitrary closed mesh (with no face occlusion) and can simplify the export process. I envision such an exporter not requiring such manual steps as adding the material, 3 textures, and image by hand, for instance. I don't really know enough to suggest viable routes, but of the manual methods I've seen so far the most promising seems to be a (pardon my absolute ignorance of the correct terms, please) spherical UV projection method.

I am also aware that Deanna Trollop is working on a Milkshape exporter that sounds very promising. Milkshape is free to try and cheap to buy, and very easy to use. From what I understand so far - which isn't much, admittedly - that exporter will initially be designed to work with predefined (and pre-mapped?) objects that will then be sculpted into the proper shape.

I think this stuff is tremendously interesting, though I am really starting to have doubts about how useful it will be in the first run, since the level of detail problems are absolutely atrocious. But this is very cool technology indeed, and it has such amazing potential here in Second Life.



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If she does this, I am afraid I am going to have to sing her praises everywhere I go.

I was walking around the beta grid in the sculptie area (usin mah voice chat!) and talked to a guy that had heard they were gonna make a setup so you could import from Blender...which is free.

Hopefully this 3rd or 4th hand information is accurate! If everyone can use them then you'll probably see high prim items become a thing of the past...sure helps with server load I'd imagine!

I can't wait!!

This is what the exporter gives you if you try using Maya PLE:

I want to see what kind of shape that makes.

I see alot of people bitching about the cost of Maya and such but I think the bigger point is not even the price.... Its the learning curve and I think some people do not even know that. I have worked with Maya and 3DMax in the past when working on some game projects. 3DMax to me is much better to uderstand learning wise however they both still have a very big learning curve. So the question is not even the price of the software... There is more you will be investing then just for the software. Books! Yes there is alot of good forums out there with good tutorials however with this kind of software books really help in the learning proccess. Not saying you can't learn the two applications I am am just making a point that this is not the kind of software you just throw on your hard drive and start building with. It takes a long time to master.

So even if you do have the software.... Your building days will still be very limited till you really learn the software well which takes alot of time.

I myself and going to be head deep it seems now in some books as this is going to be a big effort.

~My two cents

Sculpted prims are going to shuffle the deck a bit for SL developers. Even with an exporters for free modelers, some folk are going to feel the sting of sudden displacement on the market. That's just the harsh reality of things. Mesh modeling has been severely overdue for quite some time here, and it's going to vastly improve things as a whole.

The only way to not get hit by this is to just roll up your sleeves and get practicing in one of these programs. Like, NOW. You'll be glad you did, and not just because you'll be able to stay competitive.