Exciting Secondlife news!
http://ephemeralfrontier.blogspot.com/2010/04/linden-lab-and-selling-fantasy.html
Buried in the article is a quote directly from a Linden (ie the people that make and run Secondlife):
"Later this year, when we ship Mesh import (enabling a whole new set of
content creators, content, effects, and experiences)..."
OH YES.
This will change everything. Heres hoping the execution is smooth- apparently there are already preliminary tech demos out. I've enjoyed (to an extent) learning to make sculpted prims from pre-defined shapes, but I am more than ready to be allowed to define my own meshes.
Extended explanation: In Second Life, too many shapes, or 'prims', slows a sim down. To help alleviate this, they added support for 'sculpted prims', often called 'sculpts' or 'sculpties'. To make a sculpted prim, you have to start with a pre-set shape with a fixed number of faces on it. Imagine for example, the globe, with all of its latitude and longitude lines (in the case of sculpts, 31x32). You can then manipulate every point of intersection, and... well, that is roughly what you get. They are very finicky because once you have manhandled the shape into your masterpiece, neither adding nor taking away any points, you export it as a 'sculpt map'. A sculpt map takes the X/Y/Z coordinate of every point and converts it to an RGB color value on a grid. You end up with a nice little jpg that looks like tie-dye. Sometimes this does not work as well as anyone would like. The process can be time consuming and frustrating. The cause of my excitement in 'mesh import' is because that preset shape? Scrap it. The export to sculpt map? That too! Make it with as many- or few- faces as you like, arranged as you like, and THAT is what you can then put in world. This can't come soon enough.
Buried in the article is a quote directly from a Linden (ie the people that make and run Secondlife):
"Later this year, when we ship Mesh import (enabling a whole new set of
content creators, content, effects, and experiences)..."
OH YES.
This will change everything. Heres hoping the execution is smooth- apparently there are already preliminary tech demos out. I've enjoyed (to an extent) learning to make sculpted prims from pre-defined shapes, but I am more than ready to be allowed to define my own meshes.
Extended explanation: In Second Life, too many shapes, or 'prims', slows a sim down. To help alleviate this, they added support for 'sculpted prims', often called 'sculpts' or 'sculpties'. To make a sculpted prim, you have to start with a pre-set shape with a fixed number of faces on it. Imagine for example, the globe, with all of its latitude and longitude lines (in the case of sculpts, 31x32). You can then manipulate every point of intersection, and... well, that is roughly what you get. They are very finicky because once you have manhandled the shape into your masterpiece, neither adding nor taking away any points, you export it as a 'sculpt map'. A sculpt map takes the X/Y/Z coordinate of every point and converts it to an RGB color value on a grid. You end up with a nice little jpg that looks like tie-dye. Sometimes this does not work as well as anyone would like. The process can be time consuming and frustrating. The cause of my excitement in 'mesh import' is because that preset shape? Scrap it. The export to sculpt map? That too! Make it with as many- or few- faces as you like, arranged as you like, and THAT is what you can then put in world. This can't come soon enough.