The technicalities are a bit out of my league. Er, not a bit…a lot. What you’re describing sounds a lot like what SimTools did with Maya.

http://www.simtools.jp/sltk/en/index.php

It has a plug-in for Maya which includes a little side bar with standard SL prims. You can texture them using textures from the SL library and as I understand it, if you can figure out how to work the script within Maya you can also load additional textures of your own and just code in the UUIDs. You then rez a ‘build prim’ in SL which rezzes the full build (as many prims as included, up to a full sim’s worth they say) including the textures and placements.

Now, it’s wonderful, but it’s Maya specific. I assume the other work-arounds are program specific such as a work-around I saw for importing Google SketchUps.

I wonder whether what’s needed is a bridge to Collada? Seems to me most game engines and so on have a Collada import function.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA

If you could build a bridge from SL to Collada, then you’d have a bridge from Collada to most third party applications. You’ll always run into the texture UUID issue, but I’ve been working with someone to see if there isn’t an automated way to upload textures and then collect the UUIDs.

I know with sculpts that they recommend loading your sculpts directly to the library rather than through the “upload texture” feature, so seems to me there’s a way to connect to the database outside the viewer.

Complex problem! And as I say, this isn’t my area, just sharing a few of the tools I’ve run across and little bits and pieces.

Thanks for the post Taran!

the trouble will be… (1) scripts won’t be able to be sent, (2) texture UUIDs might be considered a bypass of the inworld permissions system (see http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/889 ).

Then, (3) – converting abscissa,ordinal and azimuth plus dimensions to a format another application can read. I haven’t looked into this… I’d expect someone has a CSV format, but… with all the proprietary data formats out there, it is hard to say. Still… it could be a base for rezzing stuff on an OpenSim simulator.

The question is whether or not it is as efficient as hacking a client bot to do the same. But then we get into bypassing the de facto DRM, which can be very problematic from a legal standpoint.

These programs are no longer just confined to hugely expensive platforms like Maya and 3DS. It’s not just architects who are creating buildings, it’s someone at home creating the perfect cottage, or the most stunning bicycle. Because these objects are increasingly portable between programs, and because they’re spawning amateur/”user-generated” content, then at some point users will be attracted to the idea of porting those pieces of content to virtual worlds, and in some cases already can.

It’s not the specialized few who will have the deepest long-term interest in interoperability, it’s the non-specialized many. I may not be the best builder in SL, but I have fun with it, and then I hit a wall…I want to sculpt, I’d love to properly render lights in the build, or I want to create a custom animation. What happens (or happened to me) is I cross out from SL to try to build on what I’ve learned and discover a whole other world out there of software, different ways to build, and different ways to express myself. But I can’t bring most of it back….and so, some day, I find a platform that WILL allow that and maybe I go there instead.

Yes, I do believe that the “pros” will find their own homes with true interoperability so they can throw together 3D walk-throughs of a building design in a virtual world. I also believe that this capacity should be built into SL….because they’re not the only ones who would like to see their work on other platform brought into a virtual world.

IF SL doesn’t do it, someone else will…and that someone else won’t be creating interoperability to satisfy a few architects, they’ll be doing it to tap into an ever-growing community of SketchUp, Daz3D, Poser and other artists who are doing it for the sheer joy of it – kind of like what SL has been.

I’d like to protect the garden. I’d like to make sure that if SL expands its reach into other creative communities that it doesn’t do so at the expense of the economy (in objects, time, real estate, etc).

My issue with the walled garden isn’t that the garden shouldn’t be walled, it’s that its boundaries shouldn’t remain static. The issue of interoperability is a question about whether to shift the garden’s boundaries and cultivate new soil.

I’m not sure my idea of ‘walls within walls’ works, it’s just an idea.

What I am sure of is that Second Life does not have a lock on content that’s “user friendly and available to all”. This is the very premise, for example, of Metaplace and will be the premise of platforms to follow, none of which is worrying particularly about the architects, but *are* worried about being able to tap into the widest available tool sets being used by the ‘non-professional creators’.

As Prok says:

“More sophisticated tool sets are alright in their way, but if they can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? A perfectly rendered Taj Mahal just sits there like a postcard.”

Now…replace “more sophisticated tool sets” with “Second Life” and that’s the argument I’m making:

“Second Life is all right in its way, but if it can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? And in Second Life, the Taj Mahal that sits there like a postcard isn’t even perfectly rendered.”

Everything important about interoperability is about intellectual property. And because no one has a good way to protect it, that’s why interoperability isn’t needed in the burning way that you imagine.

Dusan, I realize, too, that this dream of Maya and working offline and all the rest is held by a tiny handful of geeks. But most people using SL don’t care. Eventually, if SL doesn’t supply this, some other platform like Multiverse will — and what of it? It won’t speak to the needs of the majority of users, who need creation of content not to be the property of a specialized few using complex utilities like Maya, but need it to be user-friendly and available to all on a continuum of ability.

More sophisticated tool sets are alright in their way, but if they can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? A perfectly rendered Taj Mahal just sits there like a postcard.

There is nothing wrong with being a walled garden; people enjoy the protection and *the civility* of walled gardens.

I see the bigger question being one of intellectual property protection. In some sense, the genie is already out of the bottle, but reputable virtual world providers will have to provide some kind of protection against blatant rip-off.

In the end, I believe interoperability is about logging into your preferred avatar provider, and then navigating through a shared, interconnected world, using that avatar. This allows different VW providers to provide different price points on the cost/value chain, similar to how e-mail servers serve different users in different ways.

Hopefully we can find some way to avoid spam, though :-/