3D workflow in SL

Hey all/

I'm a designer with lots of hands-on 3D experience (Maya, Softimage, even Blender) and I'm a bit frustrated building in SL. Can I get some feedback on how other experienced 3D people, especially designers and architects, are using the SL modeler.

What are your workflow tricks? Where do you store component objects and how do you recall them?

I lost some work today, which is something I HATE have happen to me. All the suddenn, the objects I was working on (about 60-70 prims) were put in the "Lost & Found" folder. It happened twice within a 1/2 hour. I can't figure out why this happened and nobody seems to be able to tell me??

Thanks for any advice.
//Kliger

The land you were building on may not be yours and therefore are returned after a time period set by the owner of the land. Best bet on your builds is to link and draw into inventory often. No real way to save, as in with ACAD and the like, but once in inventory you can rez it all if you do lose it for some reason. I have no problems building in SL, have used several 3D modelers as well, not as an architect, but as a test technician. Anyway I hope this helps.

SL reminds me of lego , and good luck with building \o , just wierd at start.

As already mentioned, when you build on land that's not yours, your items are returned to your inventory after certain time configured by the actual land owner. Fortunately, there is special places which generally let your objects exist for the whole time between cyclic 'area cleaning' every 12-24 hours or so... try to search for "sandbox" places in the Find requester, that's where you can have fun building as long as you don't mind others staring ^^;;

IF you love Maya like I do..well..Second Life is sloppy seconds. But, if you can take lag, grid shutdowns and folks outright shooting your avi across a sim while you work..yes..SL's for you when you wish to create a masterpiece

I b'lieve it's mainly the social element that keeps folks logging on to SL. And that, in turn, keeps ppl like myself and other builders/designers/service providers in some sort of business. There are some exquisite designs in SL, but no, they cannot compete with what you can do in Maya.

I'll drop a copy of my water design tutorial on you when the world comes up again. Perhaps tomorrow. It has some basic notes on 'permissions' and land oddities in SL. As well as other helpful suggestions for professional designers.

http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=66971&sort=PictureID+desc&Name=Margot+Abattoir /an example of LL sw stuff

Hey Margot/

Yeah, well, for me, it's especially being constrained to generating spaces from primitive forms and not having paths, extrusions and whatever other non-linear modeling technique we use.

I have no doubt that people are doing cool things with the SL modler, I've seen some decent stuff and one place I consider pretty darn good. But I think that "the medium is the message," or at least one is an expression of the other. We can do creative things, obviously, but constrained by the fondation of the software... form (and not animation or transformation...)

Anyway, I'd very much like to see your water design tutorial. Thnx.

//Kliger

Sorta like my cousin. But, that said, they both have their good points

I've used SL as a platform to create 3D based UI for websites and and other medi forms. I've also been able to us it for blueprint scaled models of actual blueprint frameworks of actual builings from rl for rl construction companies (though wrking in metrics is a pain the arse at times) through converting a scaled version of feet to metrics to SL and back.

I could say the same about feets. Majority of world uses metric system.

because of SL's limitations to of prims, it is more important in SL to consider textures very early on. many builders incorporate texture considerations right into the initial concept. perhaps not the actual making of the texture but at least what it will be and what it's scale will be. sometimes it isn't the prims, but the textures that do the heavy lifting in conveying form.

in building the castle in Frish, Nicola and I were developing textures and buildings simultaneously. many aspects of the building were designed as a reaction to the textures as we were focused on avoiding any noticeable tiling effects

when i am building, i save small linked components in my library. if i back up a larger group of components, i will often type the exact location of the root prim in XYZ so it can be replaced precisely if need be. i find it really usuful to link completed or semi completed areas until you return to them because they become easy to identify, select/deselect, and if they do end up in my lost and found, it's one object, not 50.

Jauani //
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Naming or commenting root prims w/ X,Y,Z coordinates is exactly the kind of advice I was looking for. As for linking, I wish that linking kept the hierarchies (ie. when I put link-A in link-B, link-A disappears when I open link-B. Anyway, I'm getting used to it.
//Kliger.

kiliger, you can select multiple prims and take them into your invetory. they will go into your inventory as one object, the last object you selected being the root. when you rez them, though, they will rez again as seperate objects.

you can use this to bick up a group of linked objects so they don't all have to be linked to each other. of course this is not ideal but every little bit helps

I would tend to agree with Jauani about the texturing process. Learn it, and learn to use it early. I too have found myself building, and creating, or changing textures as part of the building process. Another thing to consider, and I see it alot in the builds in SL, not only texture the exposed faces, or polys, but also texture the faces that may show slightly at a joint between two prims. This is important because it allows a smooth continuity between the exposed textures at that joint. Many can tell you about trying to align two prims so they look as one, only to find a slight lightened stripe running along the joint which is the plywood you forgot to texture near the joints. This texturing of the unexposed faces allows for some small deviation in the two prims, and still allows them to look as one.

Just some things I wanted to ad, thanks

Barb

good point. even when prims are aligned, after rotating them here and there, the geometry may no longer be so clean. also some lower rez settings which turn curves into facets will expose your hidden faces. so it's good to look for vulnerable surfaces as you build and texture appropriately.

a good trick property resistance shared with me last week was about texture caching. put a small hidden prim with all the textures on it at the landing point. then they will already be loaded by the time the viewer reaches the first instance in the build.

Jauani, that's a pretty nifty trick about the cached textures prim!

i wonder how much smoother SL would load if more people incorporated that into their designs?!?

credit goes to Property Resistance for that one. i haven't even used it yet

Sorry im new to this too. I use Maya, XSI, and Hammer (HL2) editor myself. My second day in SL.

Im assuming that there are no UVs for primitives so how does one do texturing properly? Is there a way to export out a texture template? It seems silly to be paying $ to update your texture every time to need to check out the fit... Is there a min/max for texture resolution?

I understand there is transparency and bumpmap(?) using alpha channel. Does this mean only one or the other can be used? Can normal maps, spec maps, etc be used?

-Crode

The UV mapping is fixed. Look up Robin Sojourner inworld and follow the link to her texture tutorial (in profile picks) for details about how each prim is mapped. The maximum texture resolution is 2048x2048 but don't ever use such big texture (min is 32x32 I think?). Check out some older threads in this forum (and in Design and Textures forum) for reasons why you should use small textures.
Yes you can have 8bit transparency if you upload texture as 32bit TGA with an alpha channel. Bump is very limited, most people don't even see it I guess. As for the rest - no

OMG what an awesome tip Jauani! Thank you for shareing this trick. I am now complete.