Building Outside of Second Life: Prim Composer
March 17, 2008 — dusanwriterPrim Composer promises to continue the revolution for how content is developed for Second Life, letting developers compose scenes in 3DS Max, import them to Open Sim for free testing, and then seamlessly import them into SL.
At least, that’s the promise of its developer, who is planning a Q2 release which extends previous work on SculptGenMax and SLPrims for 3DS Max. Based on looking for a cost effective way to test and demo builds without the need for land ownership in SL, the developer increased the focus on greater interoperability with Open Sim:
Support for OpenSim will require a change in the way prims are exported by Prim Composer to Second Life (and now OpenSim). Previously, my focus was on building a LSL-based importer which would be augmented by libsecondlife to allow easy uploading of the images and notecards needed by the LSL script.
With OpenSim in the picture, this is no longer a viable option, since LSL support in OpenSim is very limited. At some point in the future, LSL will work for this, but not right now. Essentially, this moves the focus from LSL to libsecondlife. Now, the entire import process will be driven by libsl.
The product will:
Export all or part of the 3ds Max scene to Second Life or OpenSim via an automated libsecondlife bridge.
WYSIWIG: shape, size, rotation, and relative positioning of prims is preserved. Grouping is preserved as linked sets. Support for texturing is planned, but not yet implemented.
World Attributes: world attributes such as permissions and physics can be set in 3ds Max and are preserved during the export process.
Definitely a project worth keeping an eye on, and look forward to taking it for a test drive. Cross-linkages to OpenSim will soon become standard protocol, and anything that can improve the production pipeline for firms using standard 3DS and development processes might be further attracted to Second Life with this development.
April 21, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I’m CERTAINLY looking forward to something like this for Maya.
April 21, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Echo - in a way, there already is something like this for Maya. I’ve been using it fairly consistently, and although it has bugs and hasn’t been updated, it’s not a bad approach. Check out Sim Tools at the following:
http://www.simtools.jp/
I’m trying to do a bit of a Uberpost on a few of the tools I’ve found. I’m familiar enough with Maya, but only because of SL…I learned it for the SL tools and because a Maya person said that it was impossible to work across Maya to SL and so I had to prove them wrong.
While waiting for my broader post, however, a few comments on simtools:
- When you create a new scene in Maya you start a macro which loads a side menu in Maya that includes the SL prim shapes. You place these in the scene like you would Maya shapes or polygons, but are limited to those types. You also need to be quite careful how you change the size and shape of the objects - need to keep them within the 10m limit of SL, and can’t use tools like cutting faces, extrudes, etc. Basically, you’re limited to rotate, scale and move, much like the limitations to the SL tools.
- You import the scene into SL by pushing a button, a string of script is generated, and you drop this into a provided prim in SL. You click the prim and the build is generated. When you do the export in Maya you run into errors if a particular prim is above the size limit, was rotated the wrong way, etc. This is the major frustration with the plug-in.
- It doesn’t fully integrate into SLLib…you can use the SL Library textures but not other textures you’ve uploaded, so if you bake textures in Maya, you’ll need to import them directly into SL and then place them on each prim.
- The plug in also does a beautiful job handling sculpted prims of any size, so long as they’re made from planes, spheres, or cylinders. I integrate it with SculptyPaint for smoothing and quick baking of light effects.
Hope this helps. It’s not quite full integration but if you’re a Maya user it’s a significant assistance.