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If you’ve tried to use Prim Composer to bake a texture across multiple prims, you might have noticed some seams when you import into SL or OpenSim.
At first, I thought this was a bug in Prim Composer, but now it looks more like it is a bug in the SL viewer.
You can verify it yourself with a simple experiment using only the SL viewer.
Today, I’ll be releasing Beta 5 of Prim Composer 1.0 (1B5). The previous release gave us the ability to texture prims and sculpties in 3dsMax. 1B5 takes it to the next level by automatically generating baked textures and uploading them effortlessly to Second Life and OpenSim. The final 1.0 release is around the corner and demonstration/tutorial videos are on the way.
If you haven’t gotten a copy of OpenSim, you’ll want to get working on that. Uploading baked textures gets expensive on the main grid.
In my previous post, I described Prim Composer’s support for UV mapping and materials. If you missed that, you’ll want to read that first. 1B5 adds automatic texture exporting and baking to 3ds Max as well as automatic importing of textures to Second Life and OpenSim via maxport. Both sculpts and regular prims are supported.
Prim Composer 1B5 can generate and upload either baked or unbaked textures. If you apply a material to a prim with a plywood bitmap and upload the texture unbaked, then the texture in SL/OpenSim will look exactly like your plywood bitmap. If you add lights to the 3ds Max scene and upload the baked texture, then the texture in SL/OpenSim will also have lighting and shadows.
UV Maps for Regular Prims!
Today, I’ll be releasing Beta 4 of Prim Composer 1.0. Time for an update and a hint of things to come! The future’s so bright, I’ve got to wear shades.
One quick note before I begin. If you haven’t done it, please turn off True Color dithering in 3ds Max. This is essential if you want to work with sculpted prims. I’ve added a note about this in the Prim Composer Installation Notes.
1.0 Beta 4 (1B4) has a couple of bugfixes and one major new feature: UV Maps for Regular Prims. First, the bugfixes:
I’m happy to announce that Prim Composer for 3ds Max has been officially released and is now available for download.
Prim Composer is a complete offline builder for Second Life and OpenSim. Create regular prims and sculpts within 3ds Max and import them into either Second Life or OpenSim as linked sets. Hierarchical grouping and gizmo scaling are supported within 3ds Max.
A lot has been happening with the development of Prim Composer and I want to take a moment to bring the community up to speed. This week I’ve been surveying the current landscape of open source tools for Second Life.
I looked at libsecondlife, of course, to see how difficult it would be to use it to automate the prim import process. Looks good. I was able to quickly set up a working development environment, although it will take some time to fully understand the library.
I also dropped in on the OpenSim project and was delighted by how much it has matured. To be honest, when I first heard about OpenSim over a year ago, I was skeptical. I’ve seen projects like this come and go with high hopes and little substance. But looking at it today, I’d say that OpenSim is poised to become a vital part of every builder’s repertoire.
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Published by Shack Dougall
