Using the box exporter is a quick and easy way to get ideas and layouts into Second Life.
See it working in Second Life:
Why use it? Use it to swiftly plan large buildings, design furniture or anything you like to save time positioning and stretching objects inside Second Life.
How it works The AC3D Second Life box exporter works by generating a second life box prim for each object in the AC3D world. You can either make boxes in AC3D, or if you just want flat rectangles, you can simply make AC3D rectangles. You can use whatever shapes you like in AC3D e.g. spheres etc. but everything will appear in SL as boxes. (If you want to, you can edit these objects and change their shape, sizes and appearance from within Second Life).
How to use it You'll need to get hold of the AC3D Box Creator object in Second Life. You can get this from:
After you've bought this object (it's free L$0), it will appear in your Inventory.
In AC3D, create boxes and polygons. Objects must be smaller than 10 units (one AC3D default large grid = one Second Life meter). It sometimes helps to design the object on a small scale, get it into Second Life and then scale the whole lot up (SL will stop scaling when one of the objects reaches maximum size). If you have an object and you'd like each surface to become a single Second Life box, use AC3D's menu Object->Fragment to put each surface of the object into its own object. The color and transparency of the surfaces is also passed on to Second life, so you can easily give your models color and make some areas look like glass.
Export the model from menu File->Export->Second-Life-Boxes. This saves an slb file.
Start up Second Life and go to a world where you have permission to create objects. A sandbox is fine for testing (just do a search for places called sandbox).
Open up your Inventory and drag a copy of the AC3D Box Creator object into the world. Don't left-click on it yet.
Right click the box and select Edit. If you see a 'More >>' button, press it. Press the contents tab.
Right click on the geometry note and edit it. This is where you will be inserting the box information from your .slb file that AC3D generated. Select all text and delete it. Paste in the full text of the .slb file (you will need to edit this with Notepad (under Windows) or some other text-file viewer. Save this text note and close the edit window to stop editing.
Now you can click on the box creator and watch your model asemble in front of your eyes!
Notes
Remember, some worlds will have restrictions on the number of prims. Each object/box must be less than 10m in any dimension. The notes have a maximum size which limits the number of boxes you can insert as text.
