Importing products from offline

I'm new to SL, havent had a chance to get into the SL world yet, I'm still waiting on my new graphics card to arrive so untill then I have a few questions on importing products, in my case it will most likly be cars and maybe a few buildings.
Im just wondering if your able to build a product offline with other 3D programs like 3D Studio Max or Maya etc. and import them into SL? or do you have to stick with the Blender3D program?
If you do have to stick with Blender3D do you have to use the prim.blend script to build anything that you want to end up importing into SL or can you just use Blender with out the script and still import the product?

Might be a few other things but thats all i can think of now.

Thanks
Ted

the blender tool is athird party, in theory you have to use the built in building tools

no 3Ds hehe

Ok...
Well in theroy can i build offline with blender while im waiting for my new graphics card to arrive and fix my computer and then later import what ever i created into SL?

Anyone help me with these questions?

Thanks
Ted

More or less. Though more recently, I've confirmed that the sole public working importer died between versions, either of the tool or of Second Life itself.

The tool is relatively stable right now; the good folks behind libsecondlife are also working on a more robust importer that sidesteps the kludge of Second Life's interface. Last I'd heard, they imported a huge building into Second Life from my tool, but that they needed a little longer to work out all of the bugs and wrap up a public release.

Speaking of bugs, if you find any, let me know.

I'm also interested in this topic. Newb to SL but a longtime architectural 3d content creator. I have a huge collection of buildings that I have created over the years and would love to import them!

Is it possible?

Unfortunately, not really.

Second Life relies on a proprietary set of building tools most similar to OpenInventor. Mesh-and-Nurbs-based objects simply have no effective means of being brought in. The closest I was able to put together is an old importer script, which makes every face on the mesh one or more prims. Which, given a sim can hold ~15k prims, isn't cost-effective.

Wow. that's hard to belive given the amazing amount of models that people have created out there and the huge potential for envronment rich content inside of SL. I kid you not, as an architect who was on the 3d bandwagon from the start, I have probably 200+ ready made buildings...

There will have to be a way eventually!?!

Eventually there will be, but not for a while. The reason SL uses primitives is to keep the bandwidth as low as possible. Every client already knows how to make a cube, a cylinder, a sphere, etc, so the only data that needs to be streamed back and forth is a few basic parameters, such where to put them, what size to make them, what direction to rotate them, etc, which is a tiny amount of data.

Were actual mesh models to be incorporated, then all the data for every single vertex would have to be streamed. Multiply that by thousands of vertices (or more) per model, and again by the thousands of models in view at any given time, and it's pretty easy to see how the system would choke. The internet's just not up to the task yet. It will be, but not now.

LL has said it is absolutely in their plans to allow mesh models to be imported from Maya, Max, etc, but we won't see that capability for a good long time.

Well, looks like that plan wasnt worth thinking about, Thanks for the help.

Next qestion, im planing on making a few detailed cars (basicly copies of RL cars with attention to detail) in SL so how do i go about building cars with decent detail without the use of mesh models?

To me it just doesnt seam too possable to build a car and get all/most of the lines and curves looking the way they should if you need to use those building blocks, but then again i havent tried it yet or know how to do it properly so any help with that instead?

Finally got my new graphics card ATI Radeon 9550 256mb card, so i should be able to get into the SL world sometime this week if i can get my comp running, so i might as well visit some car builders ingame and get a bit of help from them too.

Thanks
Ted

Hi, I'm new to building in SL but from my understanding about building vehicles in SL is that.....

If you want your vehicle to carry people and move, its considered a physical object which is made up of 31 physical prims. For each occupant of the vehicle it takes up a prim spot so initially its actually 32 prims....the 32nd spot being for the avatar that drives the vehical. If you want 2 people to ride within your vehicle your prim allowance for your 'physical' object would be 30 and so forth.

For ordinary prims, you can link up to 256 prims in one set (according to ITLP notecard - m1s6). So if you're building something that is meant to be displayed rather than physical, you can link 256 prims.

Now the catch is .....prim allocated per land.
A 512m2 parcel can only hold 117 prims, and 1024m2 holds 234 and so forth.
The use of prims are important to the landowner because they use it to place house/furniture/other land-bound accessories on their lot. I don't think anyone is willing to sacrifice 256 prims for a show piece on their land unless they have the space/prims available for it.

The ideal way in creating a 'detailed' object with minimal prim usage would be to use custom made textures on individual prim components. That's probably where the real creation comes into play.

Btw....anything you wear (accessories/boots/belts etc) does not count to land prim use. Unless you need to rez it on the ground to use before you wield/use it.


EispoO

Not to rehash the old "prim versus mesh" debate, but I'd actually like to see some hard data figures for texture-versus-prim data in Second Life. I'd be willing to bet the need to use unique textures for "just the right effect" on prims (vs. UV maps) has easily compromised the Lindens' original argument favoring them.

as long as the model is efficient in terms of face count the data set should be a wash....


It's just a bummer that all the time invested and familiarity with a modeling software cannot be utlized in the SL environment. Once this opens up you will see some great stuff! Some of us have been modeling for a decades now...

if you ever worked professionally you should know any training in modeling is never done
, you have to learn constantly if you want to stay up to date

Tadao, all the time you've invested is definitely not wasted -- you'll be able to pick up the building tools without a hitch -- they're quite similar to 3DS or Maya.

Once you open your heart to the SL tools, you'll see some really great stuff. ;P

Ted if you want to build cars that work in SL anwyays your limited to 31 prims or so. Its a physics limit. I'd of reccomended grabbing up an Nvidia card if it was specifically for SL as it would ultiamtely run it alot better then an ATI card would. As SL heavily relies on OpenGL rendering. I have a Nvidia GeForce 6600 Agp version you can get one for like 100-110 dollars and it works great. Diablotek makes a Nvidia geforce 6800 agp card with 512 mb but thats like a 200+ dollar card. A 6600 - 6800 is still a great agp card. Preference in game should dictate what kind of card you get. As i mainly play SL and quite a few open gl based games i went with an nvidia card because they just work better for SL. You can build some very nice cars in SL by the way take a look at the dominus shadow sometime its freaking awesome.

Ive just forked out for a graphics card so im not looking to waste even more money on getting another one.

When you've spent litterally thousands of hours on projects in the past it's not exactly 'fun' to recreate them with another tool. It's not so much about learning the new tool but, moreover the inablity to take models that you have already developed and bring them into this VR.

constantly learning is a given but, for the most part I have been able to 'build upon' past work . It's simply discouraging to have to start from scratch...

you can't tell me that this is easy to recreate...



or this:



This is two of hundreds of projects I've worked on over the last 17 odd years....

Tadao, I hear you man, I'm just giving you a hard time, as it's something we're all wishing for -- that is, the ability to import other models we've made.

Having a multitude of buildings I've built in other programs, I totally feel your pain.

Nice work, btw.

If most of that is flat surfaces or very large structures, and if it can be converted over to an OBJ file, I might have a solution for you.

Mind contacting me sometime... err... when the grid is up again?

Exactly... we are not talking about nurbs or intense tessilated surfaces here...

I'd be glad to!

Jeff

I'm think about converting soemthing from Gtkradient - its mostly brushes (i guess the same thing as prims) and noly some meshes. Is there anything to do this. The gtkRadient .map files are quite straight forward can they translate directly to prims (breaking doens to tris would be a nightmare of complexity for the build I have in mind)

Thanks

AA

another little building factoid, while the system lets you group ("link" prims together, it has rougly a 30m range limit. So say you make a long wall around a house, you can only group it in 30m sections. Ive found 2 ways to to deal with that. If its over 30m but still fairly small, I have found you can do a selection rectangle around the objects, click take, and it packs them all into 1 item. Though thats kinda a slopy way to do it, and there is a limit to how far away some of the prims can be to be included in the selection.

The main way to do a big building as a single object is to use a script like Builder's Buddy. You put a compnent script in each prim. Then create the box that it will be stored in and add the base script. Then you can click the box to get a menu and choose record. Each prim's component script then saves location & rotation information about the prim realtive to the box in itself. Then you have to take every prim into your inventory, and dump them into the box. When you tell it to build, it rezs all the items in the box, then issues a position command and all the prims go to where they were before in referance to the location of the box.

One big thing I have learned is not to link/group anything that is rotated to anything else, save each rotated prim by itself, otherwise the "reconstruction" will go a little fruity with some objects not having the correct rotation. Other then that the script is great.

I am new to 3D modelling and trying to make up my mind on whether (a) invest time to learn a 3D tool like Blender or Anim8or or (b) rough it out with the basic building took provided in the SL client.

Working offline on a thirdparty 3D tool has obvious advantages but if the resultant product either (a) cannot be imported into SL or (b) can be imported with significant difficulty or degradation of quality ... then it may not be worth the while to spend time on the offline tool. Might as well stick to the in-world tool provided by Governor Linden !!

Is there any offline 3D modelling tool that allows easy, yet high quality imports into SL ?

Will any master builder please advise this newbie ?

Cheers

Calcutta, the offline stuff provided here is built to simulate the creation tools in-game. I had no clue how to use Blender and still don't, but with these tools, I don't need to learn much. It took me a little while to figure out how to make the tools here work, but once they did, I was blown away. You don't need to learn how to use the full features of Blender if you learn how to use the stuff here.