Recommendations for Building Programs

Hello, I am a person who is interested in building structures in SL. I am aware that there are programs outside of SL that allow you to build structures and import them to SL. Could someone recommend to me such a program (especially one that would be easy to use)?

If you're looking for something easy to use, you've already got it. It's called Second Life. I think you'll find that SL's inworld building tools are much easier to understand quickly and to use for the novice than just about any other 3D modeling application there is. It was designed for 3D newbies, afterall, and it performs that role quite well.

The 3rd party importers are far from perfect, but if you really are determined to try them out, there are a few of them to choose from. First is Jeffrey Gomez's plugin for Blender, called prim.Blender. Search this forum for "offline builder" and you'll find it.

Blender's a pretty tuff program to learn though, so it doesn't exactly fit your request for "easy to use". Its interface is a bit nightmarish, as tends to be the case with open source graphics apps.

I've never used prim.Blender myself, since I'm a bit allergic to Blender, but those that do use it say it works pretty well. Jeffrey is a genius, so I have every confidence that it's great. I just really hate Blender's interface, as I said, so I steer clear of it.

Adrian Eisenberg has created a script for Maya, which is very promising, but still incomplete at this time. To find it, search this forum for "Maya to Second Life".

Maya is a phenomenal program. If you've seen movies like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Shrek, Ice Age, Final Fantasy, etc, then you've seen what Maya can do in the hands of talented artists. It's a $6000 piece of software, but you can get its Personal Learning Edition absolutely free. PLE should work well enough for SL purposes, although it does have many features disabled.

Maya comes with what is easily the best help documentation of any program I've ever seen, so even though it's extremely complex (because it can do so much), as 3D apps go it's relatively easy to learn. Just don't expect to be doing Lord of the Rings quality work overnight.

Beyond that, there is Jeffrey Gomez's OBJ importer, which will take any existing OBJ file (just about all 3D modeling applications can create OBJ's), and rebuild it in SL by constructing a triangular prim in place of every tri in the OBJ's ploy mesh. Needless to say, the results are insanely prim-heavy, making the OBJ Importer more of a neat curiosity than a useful tool for everyday purposes. I find it to be great for quickly creating temporary scaffolding on which to model complex objects, but that's about it. I wouldn't use anything it creates as a permanent build for SL.


Those are the only three tools that I'm aware of. None of them are incredibly practical right now. Again, the best thing for you to do is to learn to master the existing inworld building tools. Once you've done that, then play around with the 3rd party stuff, and see if it enhances your work at all. Don't try to use those things to circumvent SL's own tools. Trust me; you'll just end up frustrated if you do.

Thanks! You've been a great help!