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Can exisiting 3DS Max meshs (3DS files) be imported into SL

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Alex - Guest

11:14 am - Nov 20, 2008

I've been scouring the net for days now trying to look for an outright answer to this question, and I've found some leads and some dead ends.

From what I know SL does not support true meshs, only sculpties/sculptie maps. Therefore I know shapes can be made witht the prim composer, and that more organic shapes can be made with sculpties. However, is it possible to somehow (through any number of tools) take a not so complex 3DS Max model, and convert it somehow into prims, or a scuplt map and import it into SL?

I've read a stupid number of entries on JIRA about 3DS imports, OBJ (which is apparently can be achieved through the use of a script, although it didn't look like it was going to be supported anytime soon) tutorials that use the projection modifier to create a scupltie map, all sorts of hacks really, but no-one seems to have a clear cut answer as to whether existing 3DS Max models can be converted (either by converting them into prims or maps) or imported into SL via any other method!

If anyone has any information on this it would be most appreciated Also if different methods are know, how effective are they? With regards to there quality and the ease of the method from A (3DS Max) to B (Second Life).

Thanks in advance, Alex

Shack Dougall - Admin

11:44 am - Nov 20, 2008

posts 368

Hi, Alex!

As far as SL goes, there are some tools that will break a mesh into triangles and re-create all the triangles in SL. I think maybe Jeffrey Gomez posted something like that to the Scripting Library on the SL forums. The problem with that is that each triangle becomes a prim, which is prohibitively expensive in terms of resources.

Another approach would be to create several sculpties to approximate the mesh. This would definitely be better than the triangle method, but I'm not aware of a tool that does this automatically. The projection modifier method that you mentioned can be helpful. Chip Midnight (who first wrote about using the projection modifier) has also mentioned another method using Conform.

All of these are poor substitutes for true mesh support in SL. And based on what Qarl Linden has been saying, I think that it is likely that we will get the ability to import meshes into SL next year sometime. There is already an OpenSim derivative called realXtend that supports meshes natively and I believe there is an effort underway to put this to OpenSim itself.

If anyone knows about other methods or tools, please share!