Second Life plugin now available

[Andy]

For download and more info, see: www.inivis.com/secondlife.html (http://www.inivis.com/secondlife.html)

[fragghetto]

Hey Andy,
cool! This will bring many people on AC3D website (and even money I hope for you)...;)
The question I have is that will be possible with this plugin to directly export meshes in SL like: buildings, characters, etc?

thnaks a lot, and again, great plug!

[lisa]

That's exactly what this plug-in is for, in fact.

This plug-in allows you to create meshes in AC3D and export them to a "sculpted prim". Sculpted prims, if you haven't seen them before, are a new format that allows you to create complex, organic shapes from a single prim. You'll likely still need to use more than one prim for something like a character, but I've already been able to do things as complex as a full head with a single sculpted prim.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Works flawlessly! Thank you so much. I was using another sculptie exporter, which sadly was Windows-only (I've bought both Mac and Windows licenses for AC3D). I'm very thankful for you to have released this!

Now I just need to learn how to apply textures and bake them, and save both together :) Please bear with me, I'm an utter newbie with AC3D (and a very amateurish 3D modeller!...), but so far, this sounds very very promising. AC3D has been the easiest modelling tool I've used so far, it's very encouraging to work as a total amateur.... but still allows a high degree of sophistication, which is exactly what I like: simple to use, powerful to create things!

[lisa]

Awesome, Gwyn. Are any of your slexchange things sculpties, or too soon yet? :-)

My own slurl (Zora Spoonhammer):
Areumdeuli (73, 102, 104) (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Areumdeuli/73/102/104/)

[Cheewha Palen]

Hello,

First, Great product love using it to export to Second Life! Thank you!

I have a question about the sculptie extruding found on the surface tab.

When I use this and export a model I get a wad of something...lol sculptie looks like a crumbled up version of what it did in ac3d.

Any steps I am missing to get this tool working right?

Any advice is greatly appreciated



Thanks!

[lisa]

Try exporting a face at a time. The "scultpy extrude" isn't as full-featured as the regular extrude, so it doesn't handle multiple faces very well, but it preserves the UV space which the regular extrude doesn't. If you extrude one face at a time, you should have better results.

If you have something really complicated that you want to extrude, and the sculpty extrude still isn't cutting it, it's okay to use the regular extrude but you'll need to re-texture the area when you're done. Just texture all surfaces of the extruded area, and then fit them back into the original map and snap the UVs together to get rid of any holes.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Awesome, Gwyn. Are any of your slexchange things sculpties, or too soon yet? :-)


Waaaay too soon, Lisa, not only I haven't got much time free (an hour per week... at most :) ), but I'm no professional modeller — so, like any begginer and amateur, this means that it's pretty much low on my priorities :))

Still, it's lovely to know that this works quite well — and it's easy enough for people like me to use and enjoy!

[HD1]

Andy !! Brother !! LOL
Awesome job on the SL Exporter package !! Thank you Very much.
I was wondering if you could point me to a good tutorial on creating UV Maps so I can branch out from the base prims some.

Thanks again for a job well done...

[ramesh]

Hey Andy,
Glad to see u again ;) I had some difficulty to get into the forum but today I tried my password and it worked.
I was trying to find out how use ac3d for sculpties. Works fine if I start from the 3 primitives available in the plugin folder. What would be your advice if one wants to important a 3ds object and try to export it as a sculptie? I know it has something to do with UV maps + texture but am a total noob in this aspect. Can you point me to info explaining how it can be done. I imported my 3ds object in ac3d and it looks fine. So that part works.
Ramesh

[lisa]

What would be your advice if one wants to important a 3ds object and try to export it as a sculptie? I know it has something to do with UV maps + texture but am a total noob in this aspect. Can you point me to info explaining how it can be done.

I just put together a walk-through on how to map & export an existing model to SL:

http://independentdeveloper.com/archive/2007/09/27/sculpted_prims_from_existing_3

It's also got a before-and-after example you can download.

Please let me know if this tutorial is helpful or if it's still confusing--if it's still confusing, let me know what didn't make sense, or what didn't work, so I can improve the tutorial if possible.

[Oh, uhm, and don't mind my website is entirely broken links. :) It's not done.]

[HD1]

Hey Lisa,
HD here... :-) Awsome tutorial... it has been VERY helpfull. I do have one question thow... in it you say :

"From the File menu, select Export, then select Second Life Sculpted Prim. This will create a series of TGA files, one for each mesh in your model. If you have the newer version of the plug-in, you can export a "normalized" sculpt map instead. This makes the sculpt map use the full range available to it. Your sculpt map will be smoother and more precise, but you will have to re-size the shape inside Second Life after you import it."

I'm using the newest plug in now but not sure what you meant by "you can export a "normalized" sculpt map instead" ...

is this something you do to the model before exporting it?

Thanks ....
HD

[lisa]

It's just a different export mode. Basically, what it does is stretches the boundaries of the sculpt map so that its 1x1x1 meter, no matter what the dimensions of your original sculpty were. This gives you a little more numerical range, and hence detail\smoothness, but has the disadvantage that you need to rescale the sculpty to it's original dimensions once imported into SL.

The newest version of the exporter isn't official yet, but hopefull will be very soon.