Offline Builder: Now in Beta

I am glad you saw this I almost wrote something in your tutorial site but did it here didn't want to like pester you with tons of questions if I wasn't sure you get them.
I look forward to wonderful stuff you conjure up with your coding magic

I have tried to use blender for last 10 years or more but never got beyond the interface and tutorials...most I have figured out how to do anything is read tutorials enter and exit Blender.
Right now I am the reading phase of your program, but I am going to try out your program.
What I read seems simple to understand but still bit scared of Blender's interface it hard
for me to read.
I wish there was zoom feature in blender that like little pop ups that said hey if you want to do this use this tool. LOL.
I have read some of your tutorials but few things you didn't elaborate or I didn't see.
I remember you mentioning something about limiting big builds but you didn't say what is big.
I did wonder about if the prims were connected or not when I bring them into SL?
Also I was curious what is lag like when I am using the importer if I go to a sandbox in SL will I crash the sandbox if it involves more then 40 prim type of object?
If I go nuts and rezz too many prims with exporter will I shut down the sim? I have never done that I don't think I want to crash sims nor break the internet or the viewer .hehe
You also mentioned that prims take on your name. Have you tried to use similar script that
Prim finder has that changes the owner of the prim?
Just curious that why I asked but I got no problem changing the prim to myself the way you described in the tutorial.
Yeah my stand alone for some reason all the script files are not working and I have lot some of the add ons I initially installed
.I know I have ambitious dreams and fantasy for my stand alone but I am not programmer just artist so it may not happen but its dream.

Certain features aren't working properly there like scripts, poses, script library in Stand alone poofed today.
But I guess I can also use the program in SL too.
Thanks for making the program and responding so quickly.
Tired right now but I want to start playing with your program soon. LOL

Hm. That is a whole lot of questions. (To be fair, I did see this yesterday, I just had to take care of a few things first)


If you'd like, drop me a line in Second Life. I might be able to schedule some of my time to help you work through those... though it'd need to be the middle of next week at the earliest.

In the meantime, have you worked through Blender's own tutorial series and my Prim.Blender tutorials?

(http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials
and
http://halfpastnull.com/?cat=35
respectively)

Thanks yep I have read some I just need to install it and try it out sort of have hate thing going on the last 10 years with blender but it is on computer.

I just picked up one of your rezzers....
ANd created the .prim file several times as instructed.
Tried a couple different types of prims.

WHen I drop the notecard in the rezzer, it says complete, but nothing appears.
ANy ideas?

I came to this forum from the note in Prim Blender. I was able to install it in Blender, but I have no clue where to begin. This forum is like a club of people who all know what they're doing. Maybe I should have checked first for a Prim Blender newbie forum, but this was supposed to be it. How do you make anything happen? It's all so cryptic. I want to sculpt a cube, I envision whittling its matter away to make an object, then save the sculpt map and upload it to my av in SL. All I've managed to do is make a cube appear on the endless plane.

- How do I get something to happen to that cube?

- Should I bother going thru the regular Blender tutorials, or is Prim Blender SL-specific and therefore different from regular Blender (as I suspect)? If it is SL-specific, can it make a scupty for SL or is it just a Prim Editor outside of SL? If so, what are the advantages of using it?

-Is Blender capable of saving a sculpt map for SL?

Thanks for any help. I have been unable to get sculptypaint to work for me either. Elout's 'tutorials' are so useless, and that's from someone who's trained other people to use computers for a few decades. I put the little boxes on the cube map but instead of straight lines, I get a v-shaped groove when I extract or minimize. I can use Photoshop with my nose but I can't figure out this 3-D stuff. I'd appreciate being pointed in the direction of any SL-specific sculpty creation tutorials. Thanks very much.

This is really not the topic, but i'm new and i was thinking. Can you model a house or something in an other program for example like google sketchup or solid edge nad upload it into second life? I'm really having trouble getting used to the second life building system and i have great lag. Well thankfulli there is this program now but i haven't gotten anything built beacause of the lag so far.

Reckon you need to start at the beginning, Victoria, and going through the regular Blender tutorials is a logical place to begin.
Go through the Machinimatrix series : http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/
Prim Blender is really an offline regular prim builder for people wanting to do the work outside SL and the objects are manipulated in the same way as if you used SL - at least that's my understanding of it.
And yes, Blender saves sculpt maps for SL. That's what it's mainly used for among the forum people here, I think.

Thanks very much for clarifying that for me about Blender. Appreciate it.

And just as a bit of full disclosure, if anyone is interested in carrying on the project, let me know:

http://halfpastnull.com/?p=130


I /really/ don't have the time for this that I used to.

Just wanted to let you know that your contributions were appreciated by many Tom. I am sure that there are others like me that asked the question; "How did he do this?" and this prompted an exploration of LSL and code in general.

Thanks!

Jeffrey,

I'm truly sorry to hear this, but you have my sincere thanks for all your work in Blender. A good portion of Prim Composer is built on top of a port of your offline builder code. Without Prim.Blender, there would be no Prim Composer.

To all,

In light of this announcement, I'm considering whether or not I have the time to take on Blender as a second platform for Prim Composer.

I am trying to gauge how much interest there would be in Prim Composer for Blender. If you would use it, please vote in the poll here:

http://liferain.com/downloads/forums/primcomposer-for-3ds-max/poll-prim-composer-for-blender-yesnomaybe/

Note: I'm not promising anything. Just trying to understand the scope of the task and the interest in it. Please pass this along to others who might be interested.

As I mentioned on Shack's forums, I have no interest in PrimComposer for Blender because of being spoiled with the 3DS Max version, but I'd be willing to bet that there are quite a few Blender users who would indicate interest if there were greater visibility on the question.

To Jeffrey: Thanks for all your hard work, it is much appreciated by a user of tools which have evolved from your fine efforts!!!

Jeffrey is most excellent.
<3<3<3

I never did get a chance to reply to this in full. I blame my mail rules for not catching this post sooner.

Fact is, I wish I had the time and will to continue supporting full development of Prim.Blender. While it was my intent to lapse support to better developers and tools in the long run, I never expected to have the sort of userbase this tool has generated.

For that I'm both thankful and more than a little sad to pull the plug.



The seat is still open for a new admin to pick up where I left off, so if anyone feels they're up to the task, by all means poke me by PM or email.


-----



I'm glad I was able to help.

Hallo, I found (I think) a bug:
I add a prim... let's say a cube
I modify it and when I pass my mouse pointer on the left tools window the midified mesh returns on its original default state! so I can't use your editor!

Pls help me!

This is expected behavior; most prims cannot be deformed arbitrarily. The only prims that currently allow this on the normal Second Life grid are sculpties.

For more information, please see:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_FAQ

So with your plugin I cannot modify a prim but just assemble more prims together?

With the exception of sculpties (which are supported*), that's correct.


* Although it's worth noting that the export code needs to be cleaned up to support non-square maps.

Just to clarify. This is true of all offline builders, not just Prim.Blender. Non-sculpted prims are mathematical constructs that are completely and exclusively defined by their parameters in Second Life such as path cut, twist, hollow, etc.

This is a limitation imposed by Second Life, not by the offline building tool.

This is really nice work, thanks for this. I don't have access to the internet as often as I would like, so this makes those times away far less of a headache.

I aim to please.



Thanks for that clarification.

Given the small stint of interest in Prim.Blender (and questions I've been receiving by email), I posted a blog entry detailing my former development roadmap. These are features and fixes I had planned, prior to deprecating the project.


This is good stuff for tool developers, and anyone interested in picking my brain on the scope of this beast of a project:

http://halfpastnull.com/?p=150


Once again, should anyone wish to become project maintainer, please please PLEASE let me know. I'd love to hand the reins over to a dev with the inspiration and the time to continue building prim tools for Blender.


I also apologize in advance if my blog is a little unstable. I've been optimizing its memory footprint, given I run it in a VM with 128 megs of RAM.

If there are any problems, PM me. I'll fix it.

Thanks for all the work you've done on this project. It's truly a shame you are letting it get deprecated. I have just been attempting to get it running with Blender 2.5 Alpha from Blender ORG. Unfortunately this is not gonna happen without intervention.

Hopefully, someone else will pick up where you left off with the project or maybe you'll get back into it. Alternately, it would be nice to see PrimComposer MaxPort & MaxProxy make it to Blender.... from Liferain. I would love to see an offline system tied into Blender, Wings or similar "FREE" tools to bring objects in-world in either PRIM format or SCULPT format.

I bet that domino is on that track Well, he did not tell about his next moves, but just from guessing (maybe hoping?) i expect to see something like primblender to become incorporated (probably reimplemented) into primstar on the long run.

http://www.dominodesigns.info/

BTW: From what i have learned so far, blender-2.5 will get a new programming-api. Hence it sounds like there will be much of effort to migrate the existing scripts. But i remember about