building

What you're watching is SLTk Pro (website) render an object in Second Life that was designed in Autodesk Maya. The software itself works as a plugin, augmenting Maya to enable the in-world rezzing function as well as all of the extras like texture application and joining multiple sculpted prims. If you'd like to see some of the neat things they've created you can check them out in-world (SLurl) or download the 15-day free trial. A 3dsMax version is on the way as well!

Importing data into Second Life, rather than using the in-world building tools, is certainly an idea whose time has come. It doesn't have to remain on a small-scale either, but can apply itself to the world's largest structures:

(The real action begins at about the 4 minute mark!)

Metaversed readers may remember our previous article on AI Design Studio's "Henshin", the software that imports AutoCAD files to Second Life. There's something awe-inspiring about seeing an entire building snap itself together, isn't there? The third version of the software is about to be released with a far more friendly user interface.

What if you're not a designer? What if you don't have advanced design tools like Maya or AutoCAD kicking around your hard drive, but you really want to fill a SIM? If you were a member of the Things To Do group back in June, you'd already have your answer:

If you can't build, at least there's Sim In A Box to make your life easier. Sure it's a prefab, but let's face it, you probably didn't design your real life home either.

Thanks Mike!

One of the things that Second Life affords companies, is the ability to rapidly change track when the present course no longer makes sense. To make adjustments on the fly, even complete changes in business model (read, virtual world strategy..) is very web2.0, and Second Life, above all, allows for seriously rapid prototyping of ideas and builds through it's object and scripting tools -- at a level you wouldn't normally associate with large companies. In fact, only this week, Christian Renaud over at Cisco was (justifiably) cursing the hoops the corporate machine was making him jump through to get some stuff done. It's interesting to note, that in the virtual world, where he has domain, this is not the case, and more interesting yet to read about how the company has rapidly evolved its Second Life strategy based on first hand experience.

We had planned to do a gradual rollout of new content and some interaction, however the experience of participating quickly changed our direction. By April, we had redesigned our presence in SL, added four islands, and had the governance and infrastructure in place within our company to scale for the foreseeable future.

The first aspect, the redesign, was in direct response to how our customers, partners. Second Life Cisco User Group and employees told us they wanted to use our 'Virtual Campus'. We did away with buildings for the most part so avatars could get in and out easier, and adopted a user-centric model of navigation, so users could decide where they wanted to go (products, training, technology, building in the sandbox) and get quickly there.

This hands on approach to Second Life is what Prokofy and I discussed on Second Rant today. The first wave of corporate washouts in virtual worlds is past, it's time to learn from those experiences and move forward with the benefit of experience.

For those few firms, like Cisco, who entered in that first wave and are making a success of their Second Life strategies, it's time to teach what you know to others.

Today's Things To Do, is a voice discussion on "reflexive architecture" led by RL architect Keystone Bouchard. The event is produced by InformationWeek/Dr. Dobb's and will start at 8am SLT/PST, 4pm GMT today -- The organizers have asked me to remind you to please keep your mic's muted during the presentation, and to download the First Look voice client if you want to ask questions in voice. Landmark is here.

See you there!

Join the Group!

Not a member of the group? join today, its free, fun and a great way to explore Second Life with friends.

Thanks to Malburns for the suggestion!

Late on Tuesday evening, amid Linden server problems, way up high on a large Mystitool skybox in Second Life, Cadroe Murphy, a student by day and virtual worlds tool builder by night, demonstrated his new bezier curve building lathe tool for Metaversed.

The tool which is based on Cadroe's famous ShapeGen code works by using "handles" that allow the builder to manipulate the outline of the final shape very similarly to tools like Photoshop. Once you're happy with the final curve (see first image above), you can start to build out the final shape.

The final shape can be a full 360 degree construct, or just a slice of that, making building curved shapes larger than 10 meters (if it was less, you'd be better of using a single sculpted prim) a piece of cake. Like the ShapeGen tool however, the quality of your curve depends on how many prims you can spare. The final shape you see here in this last pic used almost 600 prims --- Ouch!

You can get Cadroe's Lathe tool for just $300L at SLX

The race to get virtual representations of real life cities into Second Life amazes me. It amazes me that independent developers, such as Second Promotion would take on such monumental tasks as virtual Salzburg, and it amazes me that so far, we've not had a city council throw a royal fit over the representation of their town in the virtual world, where at least in theory, anything can happen. Second Life is known for it's adult content, and virtual Amsterdam, which was almost sold earlier this month is teeming with it, though in that particular case you can perhaps understand why this doesn't represent much of a problem.

Just this week, I've visited virtual Munich, and just moments ago, virtual Manchester. Munich-Secondlife, according to Brain Mills, a developer with In World Momentum, the company behind the build, is four weeks away from completion. IWM are using the new Second Life building tools known as Sculpties to complete the construction. On that basis, they can be forgiven the somewhat chaotic build, and in my opinion, applauded for not locking down the sim whilst building. It's interesting to many people to see these projects grow. Manchester on the other hand, the creation of Clicks and Links is somewhat of a poor show. It seems complete, though according to Aleister Kronos' full review, not "officially" open despite hosting a tech awards ceremony yesterday evening. I have to agree with Aleister, after having looked around for a while at virtual Manchester, I just came away feeling rather sad that it hadn't been a more fulfilling experience. I've never been to the real life city unfortunately, but it's Second Life cousin just didn't do much for me.

In his review, Aleister says "the site feels half-empty and disjointed, with the shells of a number of Manchester's iconic buildings dotted around the landscape. Few, if any, have anything inside."

Still, having had a little moan about uncompleted builds, and voiced some speculation on future legal issues, I have to report that I love the idea of virtual representations of cities in Second Life and that I always enjoy visitng new ones. Im looking forward to seeing more, but also interested to see when the inevitable problem of content and representation takes an ugly turn for the first time.

Just prior to the latest update to the Second Life platform, which took somewhere over 3hrs of downtime yesterday, virtual architects and designers were abuzz with excitement of the coming of a new kind of building tool within the virtual world: Sculpted Prims. These new tools, available to all residents, represent a turning point for the virtual world as we know it. They allow far greater freedom and flexibility, and even integration with other worlds via common third party design application like open source Blender who's output can be imported into Second Life as with other 3D environments.

If you're looking to get up to speed in a hurry, Delzo Delacroix points us to this Blender tutorial by Amanda Levitsky. In addition, when you've sculpted your first prims, go drop off a pic at NWN who're running an open thread for examples.

Let us kow your thoughts, how you're getting on or even what disasters have befallen you in your pursuited of sculpted contentment....

ADDED: Tateru has posted some links to other tools for creating sculpties also this morning.

Despite a few enthusiastic cheers as Linden Lab, makers of 3D world Second Life prepare to release a new viewer to residents, it seems that the 1.16 viewer will NOT have voice support as previously expected. The new viewer will however have support for Sculpted Prims, a new kind of basic building block available to all residents. Together with the coming integration of recently acquired Windward Mark's atmospheric technology into the Linden software, the Second Life landscape is about to change dramatically.

The Metaversed small plastic trumpet award™ will go to the first enterprising resident to sculpt oversized flying genetalia with the new tools....

You can now take AutoCAD files and export them into Second Life. This is a demo of Henshin; software that converts AutoCAD files into language that Second Life can understand. The action really starts about three or four minutes into the video. Interesting song choice, don't you think?

This has major implications. Up until now, only the truest die-hard virtual world fans have been able to really take advantage of Second Life's environment to showcase building designs. With this new software architects have a quick and easy way to render designs in-world and walk potential clients through the buildings.

Keep an eye on AI Design Studio, developers of the software, for an upcoming public release.

Some excitement is starting to build as details emerge of Linden Lab's plans to incorporate a new type of building tool within Second Life that will make the rapidly expanding world more compatible with other 3D environments and open the design doors to more sophisticated and standardized tools.

Tao Takashi, who's recent chance conversations with a Quarl Linden has lead to the growing buzz says "it might mean that creating these sculptured prims is not for everybody. I guess the main way would be to use a 3D program and export it and this would mean also that more learning will go into making these things. At least you can do it with free tools aswell, such as Blender, so no money is involved. Additionally texturing such a prim might be more difficult than as it is now as there aren’t separate faces anymore but you’d need to do real 3D mapping as you do with 3D programs. So all in all it might raise the bar for some."

The technical details are a little beyond my basic knowlege, but the end result should be a much more flexible, mature and standardized system for building objects in Second Life that will at once make it harder for lesser talented builders to work with as well as make what can be done infinitely more complex, beautiful and useful. In answer to the question of why Sculpties, or Sculpted Prims, the names for the new forms, are being used, the Wiki page says:

Because there are a myriad of existing tools for handling images. Image compression, streaming, progressive loading, and animation are all well-explored problems. For example - we could create a quicktime stream which fades from one sculpt texture to another - attached to a sculpted prim, the prim would "morph" from one shape to the other. Or, as another example - it would be easy to have a flash animation generate a sculpted prim - and when a resident touches a spot on its surface, the shape could wiggle and ripple appropriately. This is the direction we are headed.

So as you can see the scope of possibilities this change will make could be immense.

Linden Lab, the company behind the the 3D world of Second Life has plans to institute a certification scheme for resident builders and scripters. Though many have signed up to participate in the forming of such a program together with Linden staff, there is an undercurrent of fear among some residents generated by the belief that the plan will cause a divide, and that it goes against the spirit of open sourcing the client and server software as has long been Linden's stated plan.

Linden says that they "believe this will benefit Residents, Developers, and anyone who wishes to use Second Life by clearly identifying both key skills and the holders of those skills" and that is is their "intent to work with an external certification provider to offer certification testing and maintain a list of those Residents who have been certified."

This has caused Tony Walsh to declare:

In my opinion, this is a stupid, unnecessary plan which runs contrary to the company's stated goal of opening up its entire virtual world system from server to client. Various company reps have suggested at one time or another that the logical pathway for Second Life is a form of 3D World Wide Web. Guess what? The web doesn't have a certification program: Any idiot with the right tools can slap up a web page. That's both the beauty and horror of the web, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

And I can't say I disagree. It would seem that providing such a governmental scheme and creating such a divide would run totally against the spirit of Open Source. But then we do have a Redhat certification program for Linux engineers, and even Google and Microsoft run similar programs, so why not Second Life?

Prokofy Neva says, in a scathing condemnation of the plan:

While some will welcome the system as representing a much-needed quality control for the world, the system poses serious questions not only about openness for creativity inworld and the free market of goods and services, but the Lindens' real intentions about "getting out of governance" when in fact, they're instituting a quisling/overlord system with a program that certifies what are likely to be their long-time pets as "the most skilled".

And therein lies one of the biggest problems for Linden I think. The move toward certification, which they say will launch late this year cannot help but to create a divide between those that have and those that have not been certified. Only time will tell for sure, but my gut feeling is that this is a bad move for Linden and Second Life that will leave a sour taste in the mouths of many skilled inworld creators.