Alt offline building in Max (plugin alpha)

http://www.netbay.com.au/~davidcoen/prog/image/008.jpg

http://www.netbay.com.au/~davidcoen/prog/index.htm

http://www.netbay.com.au/~davidcoen/download/SecondLifeHelper_070423.zip

for various self satifying reason i have started to implement a simple max plugin to help in offline modeling and animation creation. in version of max (max5 and up)

shakes fist at monitor. haven't forumed in years, why does it not want to link in a tumbnail of the screen shot.

IT IS ALPHA, ie, it compiles, it runs, it exports some .. data ... but the data is not yet in a useable form, and not emulating SL data compression

anyway, this is a max plugin (unzip and place the secondLifeHelper.dlu in max plugins folder, restart max) other file in zip is an example max file.

plugin has a prim object component (create panel::geometry:econd life helper:L prim) and then you have access to the code variables the viewer uses to represent geometry (including some i presume where not ment to be public, but, 'test' and 'circle2' are in the code so i support them)

plugin also has a util component (utilities panel::configure button sets:econd life helper:L util) which gives access to loading a linden skeleton (ie SecondLife\character\avatar_skeleton.xml) and saving a bhv animation

if anyone would liek to test this, or better yet, make a little animation and cmp it to a bhv you get out of another package that works in SL then please post differneces (if it cost me 10$ to upload files then i don't feel like doing uploads to i fix all the format issues in exporting)

the util also has a bone helper to copy and paste skeleton pos

and finaly a 'dump out prim as text file. this is to be replace with a data dump in a form more sutable to importing into SL, time permiting.

though people might be interested

Hi !
I cannot run Windows 3D softwares, but, I have made a tool that can export/import primitives from/to SL and I want it to be compatible with as many offline editors as possible.
If you have defined a format please let me know what it is, if not or if you prefer, we can collaborate to write an XML format that is LSL friendly (I also created a list based format, if you like that better).

I am fascinated. The proper use of this would be to back up my own stuff. However, I have no idea what max is?

(talking about my tool) Back up your object, have your own personal copy, transfer it to another grid, or edit it in an offline 3D editor like 3DS Max.

thanks for the interest Simil Miles,

i don't intend on making my own format. Unless having it generate a script to 'unfold' itself inside SL counts as a format... (have a weird distintion between text dumps and file formats, don't mind me)

well, this evening's progress was to have the prim in max mimic SL data compression (guess all params get changed to bytes for minimal server side size?) and a start at spitting out a script. ie not much progress but don't realy expect to get much done in an evening after work...

How do you want prims created in your plugin to be imported into SL, and prims created in SL to be exported to your plugin ?
By LSL, libSL or the open source client ?