SketchUp to Second Life importer now live ( http://vrshed.com/sketchlife )

Hello everyone,

As part of a project to get our University of Western Australia onto Second Life, I have written a system, called Sketchlife, to make modelling more convenient. The idea of it is that the prims are drawn inside SketchUp, using SketchUp-like tools, and then are uploaded using a streamlined web-based process. It's useful in a general way, so we have now packaged it into a product and made it available to the public.

It is aimed at buildings, so it supports the Box prim, with arbitrary taper and shear, and the Cylinder prim, with arbitrary taper, shear, path cut and hollow. Probably 99% of buildings are built using those - box shapes, roofs, columns and arches all can be done. It supports full texturing - flat faces are mapped exactly as seen in SketchUp, and curved faces (of the Cylinder) are not exact, but are usually close.

There is a plug-in for SketchUp that needs to be installed, and there is also an in-world object (the Sketchlife Importer, looks like a suitcase) that can be found on the UWA island.
More information:
http://www.vrshed.com/sketchlife
On the above website, we have a video showing an example of use of Sketchlife, from start to finish, on a Hello World model.

We have set the cost at L$1 per prim. However, it is free to try - one prim at a time, with at most one textured face, is free.

I hope Sketchlife helps someone.
Have fun.

Mrs Brandi

This looks like it has potential. Lots of people have expressed interest in the option of building
offline. It sort of reminds me of Prim Composer but less expensive to process as you need
a version of Maya to use it.

Without personally demo-ing it as of yet I am assuming the costs are charged by the importer.
Are the prims linked once you rez your build inworld? Or is there a way to choose linked or unlinked from sketchup? And how is it in terms of accuracy of prim placement once rezzed?
Are you guys using this to build your University for SL? And how is the progress so far?

Just a minor correction. Prim Composer uses 3ds Max.

I noticed Prim Composer when exploring alternative possibilities, but I couldn't test it because I don't have 3ds Max, and I'm not familiar with the 3ds Max toolset anyway (is it like Blender?). Still, as far as I could see, Prim Composer recreates building tools found in Second Life inside 3ds Max, (correct?) If so, then Sketchlife is different, because it allows one to draw prims in, what I think is a better way: by selecting the corner points (three for the base rectangle and up to two others to fix the top rectangle - in one particular configuration, anyway), snapping to existing geometry.

Hence one of the key strengths of it is the placement of prims, relative to each other in space. The prim placement once rezzed should be perfect, compared to what is seen in SketchUp - at least I haven't noticed any discrepancy during testing.

Linking is automatic, it happens progressively within 30 seconds after the model is rezzed (prims talk to each other to link). Linking is size-pessimistic, so that a model could be rotated in any direction and it should not be unlinked (keeping in mind the 54 metre Axes-Aligned Bounding Box). That is, if the model exceeds that size, it is linked in several large clusters of prims, each of which does not.

The costs are charged by the importer in-world, when you try to build the model for the first time, it asks you to pay.

With the University - yes, the plan is to build it using the tool. I released Sketchlife last week, so the progress is not instantaneous, but here is one building so far (mostly the façade is done):

Yeah, it basically is. The user interface is different from Blender, but the basic workflow is the same. SketchUp is one of the few with a unique workflow.



Pretty much, yes. I have thought about implementing some procedural things like a stair-maker that would let you move sliders to change the number of stairs, their widths, etc. and have the prims be generated automatically, but it doesn't do anything like that yet.



Very cool!



Also, very cool. Prim Composer will probably support something like this soon. I love the idea. It's not something that everyone would necessarily want all the time, but it could be a lifesaver in some situations. Very nice!

So, if I understand correctly, the automatic linking occurs during the import into Second Life? Does it allow any sort of grouping inside of SketchUp? I'm thinking, for example, that it might be nice to group one set of prims in SketchUp and say "This is House 1". Then, group another set of prims in SketchUp and say "This is house 2". Then, when the build is imported into Second Life, the importer could autolink House1 prims separately from House2 prims.

Prim Composer also has a notion of hierarchical grouping. So, you could have something like Group1 that contains Group2 and Group3. Right now, it is only useful inside of 3ds Max, but I hope to have a Builder's Buddy type system soon that will automatically rez the linksets with scripts embedded in them so that the user could select Group1 using a HUD and then move and rotate the whole group in Second Life as though it were a single object, even though it would actually be composed of many linksets. This is overkill for many applications, but could be very useful for large scale builds that are very large in size or have very large prim counts.

I should also mention that the file format that Prim Composer uses to store its builds has now been fully documented and published as a public specification. I would encourage other tool makers to have a look and see if it might be useful as a common method of interchange between different offline building tools. It is called the HPA (Hierarchical Prim Archive) format and the documentation can be found here:
https://liferain.com/projects/hpa

There is also a support forum for it where people can ask questions about it and propose changes and enhancements:
http://liferain.com/downloads/forums/hpa/

Anyway, sorry for the long, somewhat off-topic post.

Sketchlife is definitely very cool. It's exciting to see innovation in this area and it is sure to spark new ideas and new directions in other projects. Thanks for sharing this work with the community!

Right now there is no grouping in SketchUp, every prim inside SketchUp must be a top-level element. This can be lifted with a small amount of code changes, but it's "low priority" Actually I was making some repetitive columns the other day and then I had to change them all, so the priority has just got higher. However, prims could be put into SketchUp Components, it's just that before exporting them to Second Life, the components would have to be exploded.

But it's true that there is almost no control over linking that the Sketchlife user has at this time - it's fully automatic, and therefore, limited.

To link two houses separately, with the current version one could select one house in SketchUp first, export it, then select the other one, and export it. It's just a bit more work. In Sketchlife it's not currently possible to set the root prim in a linkset - Skethclife just picks the prim with the most negative coords. This is one of the things on the list of things to add.




That's a great idea. I haven't run into this problem yet, but I can see it's going to be important. The quickest solution would be for me to drop Builder's Buddy scripts into my Base prim, so that it can be used immediately after import. I'll look into this as time allows.




I wasn't aware of HPA when I wrote Sketchlife, so internally it uses a syntax that maps directly to llSetPrimitiveParams(..) function calls, one call per line. I was thinking of using XML, YAML or JSON, but then I went for this ad-hoc format, because it looked like the easiest option. Considering long-term advantages of interoperability, I should have probably used HPA, and in fact, Sketchlife could be changed to use HPA in the future without any action required on the part of the users (assuming that no bugs come out). Right now I'm somewhat behind on another project, so further development of Sketchlife will have to be limited to bug-fixes - if any are discovered - for the time being. But I do have a programme for further development - particularly I was thinking about sculpties.

Ah oops, my mistake.

I have now finished a major test of Sketchlife - converted the model of St. Basil's Cathedral (Moscow) from Google Earth (it's free for use and derivative works) and uploaded it. Sketchlife performed well.

Have a look at it here:


(Thanks to Western Australian Supercomputer Program, WASP, for hosting it on their land!)

Based on my experiences with the model, there are some modelling hints on this page:

Screenshots:




Also, after this model, I changed the cost to L$1 per prim, making it roughly the same as the cost of uploading the textures, for this particular model. The aim is to make it insubstantial for the builder (i.e. considering the time investment when building), while getting something back.

Note that the onion domes and the crosses haven't been done using Sketchlife - they are sculpties, made using Blender. All the rest of the cathedral was made with Sketchlife.

Someone has pointed out that there are a few gaps in my imported model of Saint Basil's Cathedral, and suggested that there could be maths errors in Sketchlife responsible for this. However, I checked several of the gaps I could find and discovered that each of them is exactly the same in SketchUp - I was a bit sloppy when copying and pasting the prims inside SketchUp when making the model. I will fix this when I get around to it, but, note that these are particular errors in the model (limited mainly to the sills around the perimeter and some sections of the central tower) and not in Sketchlife.

Here is an example image: a gap as seen in SketchUp, and a view of how it has been imported into Second Life:

Congratulations, I just test it.

Please, why we can't resize the Sketchlife primitives ?

Can you work to add some other shapes like torus and sphere ?

I'll be presenting Sketchlife to a college course of students doing 3D design with Sketchup. The goal is to have them take some of their SU models (of our campus, SDSU) and bring them into SL for our new island. I'm new to building myself, and want to give them some guidelines, so I was wondering about the following.

1. Take your Hackett Hall, how many prims, roughly did that end up being in SL? Since these students will have no prior experience in SL, I'd like them to learn about building efficiently and I don't know exactly where that comes into play, while they're working in SU or sketchlife? What do you recommend as some best practices for efficient builds, prim number for example?

2 . Ownership of the builds once they're in SL. How does that work? And at what stage of the process does that get configured? Ideally I'd like the models to be owned by this avatar, who holds the island inventory, or by the group.

Thanks so much!