Rounded Corners - Wouldn't it be lovely ?

And so long as you have to have that devotion to do it, 99% of the people who should have that desire will keep building with parametric prims instead. In-world building is SL's killer application.

I think that we are well in the process of opening complex tools to the "average artist" out on the streets. I can't tell much about other software apart from blender. Sorry for that. But this is what you can get from my favorite tool:

* we have the nurbs2sculpty converter, which allows you to push your work from the tool to SL in 3 clicks (convert to sculpty, export it to file, import it to SL)

* Jass (our enhanced work on domino's (old) scripts) has introduced an easy to use GUI and the library of ready made basic sculpts to be modified by you.

* primstar (domino's state of the art work) adds another object database with parametrisable shapes. even parametric sculpt generators have been discussed.

* Everybody can use the tool to check their sculpty for flaws before importing it to SL. again 2 clicks and you are there. Thanks to domino's "import sculpty" functionality...

Please don't take this as an attempt to force anybody to use blender. I simply do not know to say any valuable thing about other programs. Everything i mention above might be true for many other software programs too. And please do not missinterpret this as "external software is the better choice compared to an in world editor". I am not elaborating on the internal/external discussion here. And last but not least, i am by no means a professional 3D designer nor am i a professional artist. I just happen to have this intrinsic curiosity which forces me to look under the covers to find the jewels

Given that I have only personally used Wings3D a little to make a sculptie "Off World"

Do any of the 3rd party 3D modelling packages actually allow you to draw a simple box on screen (we'll say 6 faces with the 8 control point/corners (call them what you will)

You are happy with your simple box, you export it (using whatever exporter the package uses) load it up in world, apply it to a prim as a sculptie and you see in front of you a nice sharp/crisp little cube, looking the same as it did in your 3rd party 3d modelling software.

Is there anything that actually does that?

ZBrush will let you do that. You'll have more than 8 control points though. I'm not sure why you would want to create a sculpty box. Sculpties are more suited to organic shapes.

I suggest you wait for mesh support if you're wanting to create hard surfaced forms with curved edges etc. There are programs like this www.moi3D.com that are perfect for hard surface modeling. You can do all sorts of things like fillets, chamfers, bevels etc.

Try the trail version!

Now that's just silly. You've lost sight of where this discussion started. I don't think there was ever any question about whether you could make more complex organic shapes with meshes than with prims. There has been a bit of back and forth about whether either method is "easy," but I think the grudging consensus is that anything is easy if you know how to do it. My point throughout all of this has been that there's room for more than one modelling tool, and it would be a true shame if professional modellers somehow gave the average, casual builder in SL the impression that you have to use mesh methods to make anything decent.

For all of Argent's loud rhetoric, I think he makes a fair point by reminding us (as Piggie has) that not everyone in SL is a full-time content creator. I deal every day with residents who will never build a turreted castle but would love to be able to build a nice-looking garden wall and a dining room table for their 512 plot of land. They aren't into making horses and dolphins. In 15 minutes, I can show a new resident how to build a 3-prim chair with SL's native tools and he can be making tables and bookcases happily by nightfall. Chosen is right, and so are you, Batman, that the resident can probaby learn mesh-building techniques well enough to do the same thing. My point is that he shouldn't be made to feel that he has to, especially if he'll never need to make the lovely organic shapes that meshes are so good for.

I truly don't care whether mesh-building tools are available in-world or purely on the outside, although it's been interesting to hear the back-and-forth in that corner of the thread. I do hope that they become more widely used. I just (finally) moved up from CS3 to CS4 for my texturing work in SL, and I'm eager to do some of the great things that have been a real nuisance to try before. If that's the sort of future that mesh-modelling tools hold out too, I'm all for it. I just don't want to discourage all the casual, hobby-level artists in SL who can make quite nice backyard carpentry projects with the tools they already have.

Y'all are right, I got way off track, and we're not going to change anything by debating things here. I've deleted my last couple of messages.

YES! there is one contribute to the underlaying technology in it as i start with a plane and not with 8 decoupled vertices. And when it comes to the final sculpty rendering, there is another point, where it should be as simple as "just bake and export" where i have choosen to make it a bit more complicated due to a nasty bug in the SL viewer/server software. (You can not blame sculpties or the sculpty tool for that)

The demo video is currently rendering. Unfortunately i must head off from my place so i can't upload it within the next few hours. But be prepared to see a cute demo of what you can achieve with this "you know which i mean" open source tool I will publish it tonight when i am back at home.

ah, Please do not consider the shown demo as "how it should be done" . It is more a "how it can be done" demo Making a cube is much easier to achieve if you want one as sculpty. I got another video for that somewhere on the "you know which site" ...

Have fun,
gaia

LOL, yeah.

You can't see round corners anyway. Not without a mirror.

I'm looking at the bigger picture. I believe primitives ultimately lead to a dead end creatively and so Linden Lab shouldn't waste time and resources adding more parameters to them.

I'm well aware of where the discussion started and even more aware of where it'll end!

* rubs crystal ball *

It's goiing to end with me strangling you all!

It's a good thing that Lego doesn't think that way.

LOL... I agree, we don't need any more parameters on basic prims. That was never a question in my mind, although I know it snuck into some parts of this thread. That doesn't mean that LL should abandon prims and use mesh objects instead, though. They each have their place.

In MY long view, we don't throw out a perfectly good technology just because a new tool is available. The big advantage of basic prims is that you can build most non-organic objects with them in-world. You don't need to invest time and, often, money in learning how to handle another external program if all you want to do is make good, serviceable objects. If the toolbox that came with your workshop already has a hammer and a saw in it, why should you feel pressured into buying a table saw and an air hammer?

But I start to repeat myself. Enough said ....

Can we have Boolean cuts added to prims....

He He, only joking.

(would be nice though)

Using 1 or more prims to cut a shape out of another prim.

Dead easy for anyone to use.

Hides under the sofa in fear of abuse for even suggesting it !!!!

LOL

I want boolean cuts, more profile options, more path options, chamfers, bevels, 4d perspective projection, you name it.

OMG, with talk like that I hope you have maximum shields on and are glued to the ground to avoid being caged and flung up into mega orbit by others in this thread !!!

LOL

We could have had some of those features already but LL insists on not allowing us to add arbritary data to prims like the other norma prim stuff. (Unless I'm mistaken here and there is an ocean of possibilities at our step?)

the ultimate round cornered prim, the sphere.

As i promised there is now a video available, which uses this "you know which" program available for free and hated by ... "half of the comunity", and ignored by "another half of the comunity" and adored by the "third half of the comunity". The video shows how you can create a 6-faces Cube and export it to Second life with a few mouse clicks:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/09/23/from-plane-to-cube-with-no-effort/

Some direct answers:
The program gives you precisely, what you created.

As i said, with little effort you can get precisely what you created. If you create a melted pale of ice cream, you will get it. If you created a cube with sharp edges, you will get it.

The software does this for you. For how to avoid using 1024 vertices for a simple cube, see my remark below.

It is works conveniently. I can't say though, that it is absolutely convenient. There are still some issues to solve.

On top of all is a ridiculous SL-client bug, which stops us from importing small sculpt-maps with high precision. I wished i could show you how the workflow goes in its entire beauty, but this bug (introduced by Linden Labs and not solved for ... 8 months ?) stopped me from doing the vanilla demo. On the other hand the workaround, that you see is not a big problem. What you need to do is understandable and does not involve huge intellectual capabilities in order to accomplish the task...

Gaia, Just wathed your video once (going to watch a few more times later)

Must say I think it's excellent and well done of producing something that looks so clear and simple yet produce the exact item in SL.

Is this flat plane and fold into shape (almost like orgami with a sheet of paper) a normal way to produce simple clean shapes?

Thank you for taking the time to put this video together for us to view.

All sculpties in the world have the same construction principle. They are all made out out a simple x*y planes, then folded to their final shape. This is true for all sculpty types. So the way how i constructed the cube is nothing special, it is just an explicit way of working out a basic shape.

But, damn... I was thinking all the time, that something was wrong with the video. But only when you mentioned origami and folding, it suddenly jumped up: The way i created the object should result in an inside/out object, but in world it looks correct. although it IS inside/out... So i have to redo the video and i have to understand, why the SL-viewer is cheating here

Anyways thanks for the feedback )
cheers,
Gaia

Ah, well, you see that's something new I've learned.

I thought they all started out as a kind of sphere which was pulled and pushed around, and made flat to create flat objects. Most of the sculptie things I've seen start with a sphere which is why I got that impression

Yeah LL giving us the sphere as the first sculptie type possibly wasn't the best idea

All sculpties are really just a plane. The different types don't do anything that couldn't be done just with the plane type. Primstar users have never had to deal with a true sphere sculptie as it's not a subdivision friendly shape - so we've always faked it with a cylinder shaped like a sphere during the modelling stages. And a cylinder type is just a plane with two edges joined together.

votes for prims with rounded corners anyway.

And while she's at it, also votes for prims that can be hollowed in any direction or even offset from the center.

And slice & cut in any dimension, too...

... while she's at it.

Why not? <--- For those who are already composing answers to this question, it's RHETORICAL.

I'm sure there are very good reasons, or reasons that some people think are very good reasons, about complexity, rendering, bandwidth, ancient hobbling computers etc.

But as long as the thread was originally about a nice prim improvement that saves so much sculpting, I just thought I'd add my wishes.

Your answers always induce new question into my mind So do you say, that a "true sculpty sphere" is not based on a xy plane of 32*32 faces ? Since the primstar sphere seems to be superior compared to the "true sculpty sphere", what is the exact difference between them ? I'd love to understand this point for completeness (although this probably does not belong to this thread...)