Second Life

[system]

Cmon, send me some Lemo Dollars and I send you a primitive with exquisite 256x256 wood texture (hand made!). Very affordable I promise! Haha

You can try and paint second life nice, it’s still second life. Second to real life! I don’t want to be second. Period. Who wants to be second… has found the right place to be. Good thing!

Lemo

Second Life is just another game development platform. If you don’t like working on games - that’s cool. But don’t diss game developers. They’re just as respected as any other developer in 3d. Plus the fellow who brought the sculpted prim tech was one of the 3d artists on the Matrix films - I doubt you have that in your resume

[system]

I was just wondering about the 3d files they use there… I dont know anything about the game itself but, as you suggested, it seems there are lots of people willing to spend their money in something for his second life… We can think its stupid but money is money jjeje
They use something called “sculpted prims”,something very similar to a normal map … just wanted to know if anybody has any idea

it is very easy to bake a sculpted prim map in a 3d program which can bake textures to the UV maps - I’ve done it already in Carrara Pro, and others have done it for Maya, Blender, Modo, Max, and Lightwave. Wings 3d and Max both have a vertex position exporter plugin which will translate the model to a texture map - I’ve personally uvmapped the models for the Wings plugin to be compatible with Zbrush and other 3d programs that currently do not have exporters.

To try and make a long story short, a sculpted prim is a spherical prim in SL which at highest LOD is a sphere with 32x32 vertices, which then can reduce LOD as you move away from the object. Due to the complications of Second Life being a streaming platform rather than having the game art precompiled into the game - they use a texture map to encode the displacement of this sphere to create more complex models - these can be modelled in a 3d program and then using a plugin or a baked texture to create the RGB displacement map that Second Life requires.

There are plans in the works to create other topologies for sculpted prims - namely a torus, cube, and plane primitive. Currently just the sphere topology is available.

[dargelos]

I have baked some sculpties and I started from a sphere, a plane or a cilinder… as long as you have a regular grid uvmap it works…

[Ctrl-Z]

And I also have no inclination to join second life either as I am not done with Life 1.0 yet. I rather go play outside.
Lemo

you should appreciate this

…Cosmics Blobs …i dont know very “funny” modeler

That’s awesome!

Long before ZBrush, I bought a program called Organica (from a company who has long since gone out of business). Cosmic Blobs reminds me of that.

(I recently came across it again on an old hard drive. Organica runs mighty fast on today’s hardware! And if I could find my original CD, it apparently came with a Mac version as well. I’d probably still use that for the occasional base mesh, but it doesn’t export to anything useful – only .3ds and .dxf)