I haven't blogged in a while, but I thought this was worthy of a NEWS FLASH. It looks as if a new type of prim is on the way: the Sculpted Prim. There's info about it over here on the Second Life Wiki: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims
Cubes with rounded corners, at last! It would take a long time to really think through all of the ramifications of this great new tool. But just think how many prims one could save, creating even simple shapes like rounded cubes . . .
Looks as if I'll have to get Maya. I'm always a bit bummed out when I have to use a tool other than Second Life itself to create content, because I like my virtual workspace in SL. I like shoving prims around the surface of the frozen pond between the cabin and the covered bridge on my snowy Second Life parcel, with my friends working around me and joking in Skype. Looking at a modeling program running in a window somehow just isn't the same. But I'll still be virtually "with" my friends/coworkers, and it'll be worth it to build even cooler stuff.
I wonder how things built with the old prims are going to look next to things made out of these sculpted prims. I usually design things so they are pretty compatible with the SL building system, so I think most of my stuff will probably look all right. But wow, there's going to be such a temptation to redo things!
Hope they get the Blender exporter working pretty fast, because Autodesk's Maya costs a pretty penny, and I would hate to see a lot of folks unable to make use of the new prims. There's a free Personal Learning Edition of Maya available over here for anyone who wants to give it a try: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639525. It's free to use for non-commercial applications, but there's a watermark, and I don't know how that might mess up a sculpted prim. And I don't know if anyone is entirely clear on where to draw the line between Second Life businesses as a game and Second Life businesses that are RL businesses.
MORE NEWS: Torley Linden just blogged about the new prims, with a bunch of info and images: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/04/27/the-advent-of-an-illustrious-age-of-sculpted-prims/. Included is a link to this amazing video: http://s3.amazonaws.com/Media_Archive/Videos/Sculpted-prim.mov .
Friday, April 27, 2007
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This has a lot of people pretty damn excited! I hope to be able to creak myself up the learning curve. I'm also happy to see you post again Kim!
ReplyDeleteThis latest release also has enabled thousanths decimal points in hollow, cut and texture repeats, which is pretty sweet. Our team is also raving about a new cross sections feature that you can turn on in the Grid Options pop-up. - Giff / Forseti
I'm quite excited to see everything people do with this. I consider this to be the biggest feature added to Second Life since I've been around, even bigger than custom animations. The possibilities are now pretty endless! I'm wondering if we're going to be able to take a mega-prim, say the 100x100x100 sphere, and change it to be sculted? The possibilities for single prim huge redwoods is enticing!
ReplyDeleteoh wow flipper. I hadn't thought of this being used on a mega-prim.
ReplyDelete