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.