3DS Max/ Second Life/ OpenSim Integration

[Korish]

For those of you who haven't heard, Shack Dougall has created a plug-in to 3DS max to integrate it with Second Life, allowing you to build with prims OR sculpties seamlessly and have baked textures for BOTH. To top it all off, it even uploads it for you and assembles everything perfectly. Truly, it is am amazing tool.

See the original article here: http://dusanwriter.com/?p=931

Honestly, I agree with Arminasx Saiman. Integrating with something like blender would have been a lot more powerful. Though I suspect that 3DS was what Shack was more familiar with, and therefore we probably wouldn't have seen this at all if not in 3DS.

One thing I see as a potential problem is that this creates grossly inefficient builds! 6 textures for a single cube? For EVERY prim? People with less than spectacular machines (the majority of the Second Life population by my gauge) would choke at having to load potentially THOUSANDS of textures for ONE prefab house.

Don't get me wrong, I am by no means criticizing what shack has done, it's truly great. What I'm thinking, though, is that a later feature would be the ability to convert prims to sculpts without losing detail, so say you'd have that same house the poster made, but wherever possible, multiple (or sometimes single) prims would be consolidated into a single sculpty.

Edit: I thought about this some more and such sculpty optimization coupled with a system to "export" prim builds into 3ds max for this tool to use would mean you could build something in Second Life fairly quickly and then export it to 3ds max using Shack Douggall's tool to optimize it and then import the now less primmy (and possibly less texture-y) back into Second Life.
Why, you ask? Well, because despite the fact that a single sculpty is about the laggiest SINGLE prim you can find, when you start turning multiple prims into a single sculpty you'll start finding not only a savings in geometry rendering time, but also in texture loading time! A bunch of cubes that form an in auspicious rafter in said house, which may normally take EIGHTEEN textures loaded into SL (three prims: beam, and two brackets to hold it up) would take a SINGLE baked sculpt map. I think the results would be mind-bending and be the TRUE revolution of leveraging the power of these outside applications to build inside Second Life.

The ability to "optimize" a build would be a difficult task, but honestly no more difficult than what Shack has already done, so we KNOW it is possible.

[Shack Dougall]

Shack Dougall has created a plug-in to 3DS max to integrate it with Second Life

One thing I see as a potential problem is that this creates grossly inefficient builds! 6 textures for a single cube? For EVERY prim? People with less than spectacular machines (the majority of the Second Life population by my gauge) would choke at having to load potentially THOUSANDS of textures for ONE prefab house.

Thanks posting about Prim Composer! I appreciate the buzz.

Just want to clarify a couple of things.

First, Prim Composer integrates with both Second Life and OpenSim. I mention OpenSim because it allows you to run a sim on a home computer, so that you can preview your creations "in world" without going through the time and expense of uploading them to the Second Life main grid.

Then, regarding "6 textures for a single cube", this problem only occurs if you are baking textures, but you are right that it is a big problem with baked textures. One thing that I plan to do fairly soon is to implement a mechanism that automatically combines the textures from different faces of a prim into a single texture. This will reduce several smaller textures into one larger texture. This technique is sometimes called "Texture Zoning". It's not a perfect solution, but it will help.

[Korish]

Thanks for clarifying, Shack. =] I appreciate it. I look forward to seeing where this project leads (including the optimization that you just talked about).

[lomaany]

Is matchbook dual core good enough for running 3d max? I’m a power book user for now, and considering changing my laptop with windows OS, because I used to work with 3d max in virtual PC, and it was not running well (of course), but i still want to use Mac.

[Korish]

Seems to perform decently for me, but my expectations of how swiftly a system should perform might be lower than yours. *grins* I'm a bit of a miser concerning my own machine and usually wait to upgrade until something lights on fire =P Someone else might be able to chime in with a different perspective.

[ambeerli]

What are some 3d max alternativies? I want to learn how to make 3d objects and render them but im NOT spending 3500 bucks for 3d max. Are there any MUCH cheaper programs out there that do kinda the same thing?

[Korish]

Well "low cost" depends on the person I suppose but you are only going to find ONE 3dsmax alternative that has a comparable feature set and costs less than 500ish dollars.
Blender
The above costs nothing. Unfortunately it wouldn't work with the above tools without much finangling to my knowledge. However, it has a comparably (though not exactly) similar feature set.

[eddieduggan]

In addition to Blender there is Gmax, the free version of 3DS Max. Although Gmax was "discontinued" a few years ago, it can still be downloaded from Turbosquid.

Some info about the programme can be found in Wiklipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmax

Gmax can be downloaded here: http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax