The advent of an illustrious age of sculpted prims!

Via the blog...

This fulfills a number of longtime content creation wishes. Curved corners on boxes? Yus! Better organic shapes? Yesiree.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/04/27/the-advent-of-an-illustrious-age-of-sculpted-prims/

http://youtube.com/watch?v=LlfpACg_lww

-iw

and check this out!:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel

I can hardly wait. This is going to bring a REVOLUTION in building.

So, start saving up your Lindens, folks, 'cause there are going to be new items for sale that will make our jaws drop.

Do you think they will be developing the stone axe to go with the wheel? Or is that destined for the Bronze Age upgrade?

This comment made me 'chuckle'- "Sounds great! I look forward to it not working."

I'll wait, build on my own. Give it at least a month (well after the three months I have to give LL to actually get it running) before I buy anything using them with higher prices. Flexi dropped, this will too.

I honestly hope this doesn't result in higher prices charged for builds. If anything, once over the humps and through the hoops, seems to me this will actually make the more complex builds less tedious to do, IE less work on the part of the builder. Raising prices because Linden Lab gave us a new prim wouldn't seem very honorable.

Hopefully LL will be consistent and take a lot longer to roll this out than they announced. Give all us non 3D modellers a chance to get to grips with Maya or Blender because I for one dont want to be left behind when the 3D designers start importing shapes that we cant even imagine. This could have serious consequences for existing business and may well bury allot of the 'object' related businesses as amazing new content is created and released by a select handful of residents that are skilled enough to do it. I'm sure it will all balance out in the end, but I for one am very excited and aprehensive about the release of the 'sculpties'.

Flexi prims are not even in the same league as sculpted prims. Flexi prims were a throwaway addtion in my opinion, sculpted prims will revolutionize designing and building in sl. Hoever this shouldnt affect the overall prices of things. The consumer general determines the market price of items and people are not willing to pay much more than they are already paying.

A build that uses, say, 20% fewer prims isn't worth more?

It seems from the discussion page that it's entirely possible that, if you're using a large number of prims in a small space to create an organic effect or other similar look, you'll just be able to select them all, link them, and then "bake" them into a single sculpt prim that you can give out to customers while retaining the original primmy version to edit.

Also, apparantly, somebody (Eddy Stryker I think) has already come up with a sculpt exporter for Blender, so the panic of "OMG I have to find US$7000 for Maya or I can't edit sculptures" is put off a bit. Also, it's looking likely that the most popular sculpt prims (such as rounded edge boxes) will be made available for free use, so you can pick up a freebie box of standard sculpts to reuse. (It appears that sculpts can be scaled, I expect it would be vaguely possible for them to be cut too but I don't know if they're implementing that.)

You are right that it will however make building harder to get into, by raising the standards bar. But residents falling below the bar isn't a new thing - if you're worried it'll happen to you with sculpt prims, bear in mind it happens to hundreds of newbies every day with the existing ones. There isn't a great deal that can be done about it.

I doubt this will happen. Sculpt prims have a limited number of polygons. Just two tori linked into a single object will hold twice the number of polygons of a single sculpt prim.

I too am excited about the potential of sculpted prims, but I would point out that anyone who thinks they're going to run out and grab a copy of Maya to create them should know that the price of this software is $6,999--and that's in US dollars, not Lindens. While we can wait for the macros for the freeware 3D modeling programs to emerge, SL does NOT currently support their use for creating maps. Right now, the way things stand, only the larger development firms like Electric Sheep will be able to afford a commercially licensed version of Maya--and hence, they'll be the only ones able to legally use scuplted prims for resale. Until and unless SL supports a cheaper form of 3D modelling software, sculpted prims are pretty much out of the question for most users.

Why they didn't START with a freeware version of a 3D program is, of course, another question entirely.

Kam

Good point!

I imagine that Maya is the 3D modeler that Qarl Linden (the guy behind sculpties) is most familiar with. Hey!, he can only do one thing at a time!

Because Qarl Linden, the implementor of sculpted prims, is a 3D art professional from the movie industry and so it happens to be Maya's scripting language that he knows?

Linden Labs does not "support" any software for making sculpted prims at the moment, and there has been no suggestion that they will only support Maya. You wouldn't say that LL "only support Photoshop" for uploading textures, would you?

Also, US$7999 is for Maya Unlimited which I think has a lot of features you cannot use in making sculpted prims... and Qarl also expressly mentioned supporting Blender (free), ZBrush (only $400, less than Photoshop), etc..

If someone wrote a standalone tool to convert standard 3D files (like obj or 3ds) into sculpted prims, that would be like manna from heaven. Then you could use whichever modeling tool you wanted.

Come to think of it, I wonder how hard that would be to program? Once I see the specs for how sculpted prims work, maybe I'll try writing such a converter.

The specs are already on the wiki, I think - and I did mention that kind of converter there too.

Am sure I read in the building forum that someone has already written a plugin for Blender that will support the required file format. If not if wont be long before the community comes up with a workable free alternative.

i do believe it should be fairly trivial to generate such textures in 3DSMax, thing is i would need to know the tech name that is equivalent to this technic , it sound like a flavor of displacement mapping but i can't pinpoint any previous use in the past , and i am sure there is at least one, it doesn't sound like an idea nobody would have had before.

In essence if that is all you used it for Blender is the equivalent of a converter as it has many file formats you can import into it.

So you can create your model in any modeler you wish and import it into blender and export
it with the exporter.

The next question is will the uv map need to be created in the same program you export from?

I'll have to say I'm not looking forward to it. With each update comes more damn bugs.

Good point, I didn't think of that. duh


I'll be reading the specs this evening so I don't know for sure yet, but from the images on Torley's blog post it looks a lot like normal mapping (I don't mean "the regular sort of mapping" but the term "normal mapping."

Those fruit pictures got me thinking of bannana phones.

Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring

That sounds quite ap-peal-ing

Im a commedy genius

If a new prim is introduced, I would say it is only fair to provide us mortals with an extension of the built-in editor to be able to sculpt it.