Using meshes in SL

I'm part of a research group that is looking into the possibility of using Second Life as a tool for architects and other disciplines involved in designing buildings. As such, we're interested in making SL interoperable with standard CAD systems, in particular we would like to be able to import meshes created using CAD systems into AW. I've been looking through the forums for information about SL's modeling capabilities and found a disheartening part of the bugs and annoyances thread which says that meshes are not currently supported. This is a pain. In an ideal world it would be possible to grab the mesh description of a design made in a CAD system, change it to some SL compatible format like Activeworlds' RWX files and import it into SL, but it seems this is not really possible.

I am aware of Jeffrey Gomez's 3D model importer, but it's only really much good for small models and since we're looking at designing building-sized objects that's not good enough. Has anybody out there has either a really snazzed up version of Jeffrey's code, or has come up with some other really brilliant idea for getting meshes into SL?

Well, of course, RWX files are not "Activeworld" files but Renderware files, a format which Activeworlds happened to use.

The notion of importing models into SL has been around since the beginning. I think it's always been one of the things they'd like to do "eventually". One of the big advantages SL has over Activeworlds (or any other similar program that I know of) is that you do NOT need an external modeling tool. In AW any user could manipulate the tinker toys available in the "library" of the world they were operating in, but only world owners could upload totally new objects. That meant that world owners had to take the responsibility of "rendering" their world unusable by people with older computers. (pun intended)

One of the most common mistakes new AW world owners made was to put too much eye-candy in their world to the point where almost nobody could move around in them. A similar problem exists in SL and they have battled from the beginning the problems of too many objects in one place, too many scripts running or poorly written scripts causing the same effect. I doubt these issues will all be resolved any time soon. As it stands, things run fairly smoothly for most users. But what would happen if you imported an exact replica of the Eiffel Tower? I think they would have to replace the current prim-limiting system with a triangle-limiting, or vertex-limiting system for starters and with that they would have to make major modifications to the building code, since by taking a box and adjusting the many parameters on the object part you can end up creating something with quite a few vertices. I'm not saying that would be a bad idea, as it is actually the number of triangles rather than the number of "prims" that affect performance the most, but it would be a lot of work from where they are.

Anyway, I think the idea is on the features voting page. So, go cast your vote. I'll do the same, if I have any votes left.

PS:

http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=53

You rang?

Actually, I've been looking into creating a more comprehensive version for a while - I just happen to be chronically sidetracked with this Game Dev Contest entry. That ends July 26th.

I'm aware of the ramifications of 3D modelling in Second Life. There are two projects I plan to pick up (one with a friend of mine) in this vein of things. Likely to start that by 1.7.

Perhaps you should send me an email or IM in-world?