Using Blender for manipulated prims

I am new to building in sl but I have quite a good eye for design (I am an artist) and I want to build gothic style detailed furbature in sl.

I have used 3D game engines beofre so I am vaugly familar with working in 3D space but I find the sl building tools very tricky to use.

I want to and manipulate my prims outside SL and import them in.

Any example is to use a wire mesh and move the nodes to change the shape of my prim.

I have downloaded blender last night and I plan to teach myself how to use it, import my prims into SL, link and texture them using the SL engine.

Can anyone tell me how eefctive this is - is it worth my taking tHE time to use the tricky interface and will I get the results I require?

Any help appriciated.

Thanks

Aph

Blender has a rather steep learning curve and non-intuitive interface. That said, the prim.blender script and import tool work pretty well, so it definitely is a possibility. You won't be able to edit individual nodes in the prim mesh and re-import that to SL - that isn't supported in SL. What the prim.blender script instead does is offer an interface very similar to the SL building tool, only in Blender. So basically you're "limited" to the same options for manipulating prims as you'd have building in SL.

I would personally recommend to familiarize yourself with the in-world building tools first (there's an excellent self-guided tutorial at the Ivory Tower of Primitives) and giving it a few hours in a sandbox - you can always decide to stay with Blender after that.

I have come to the conclusion that there is no easy way but to uncork a bottle on wine and crunch prims until it looks pretty in SL hehe

Thanks for you help


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