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Article Overview

1. New SculptShape button and NURBS support
2. Introducing the Maxproxy exporter: Copyright issues and program architecture
3. Using Maxproxy to export from Second Life
4. What's new in Maxport and 3ds Max
5. A proposal for determining texture export rights
6. ALL (printer friendly)

SL to 3ds Max Workflow

Of course, the really big feature in 1.1 is the ability to export prims from Second Life and OpenSim to a local disk. Once exported, you can load the project into 3ds Max or upload it to another grid. In 1.1, prims and linksets can be exported but not textures. You must be both the creator and owner of a prim in order to export it. Basically, you can export anything that you have created. Textures aren’t currently allowed because determining the creator of a texture is more difficult than for prims. Later in this post, I will discuss textures in more detail.

Copyright and Inter-grid transfer

Before I get into the details of how export works, it’s important to look at the legal and moral context in which this operates.

There’s no doubt that content creators have the right to transfer their own works to other grids, including both prims and textures. They do not, however, have to right to transfer the work of other people without explicit permission.

The most common way that this permission would be expressed is in the form of a license such as the GPL or Creative Commons. Without explicit permission from the creator, it is both illegal and immoral to transfer a work out of Second Life. Prim Composer will enforce the rights of content creators to the fullest extent possible.

This task is made unpleasant by the fact that there is no mechanism for determining licensing (SVC-701) or inter-grid transfer permissions (MISC-1277) via an automated process. In the absence of this information, an exporter is forced to err on the side of caution. Restraint is also demanded by the fact that exporting and re-importing content has the egregious effect of removing all of the original creator’s identifying information from the content. In effect, the person who re-imports the content becomes the new creator in the target grid.

It is for these reasons that no prim or texture will be exported unless it was created by and is owned by the person doing the export.

Maxproxy Exporter

1.1 includes a new program called Maxproxy. Maxproxy allows you to export prims and linksets from Second Life and OpenSim grids to the Prim Composer project format on local disk. Architecturally, Maxproxy sits between your viewer and the grid. The viewer connects to Maxproxy which then connects to the target grid. Maxproxy forwards packets from the grid to the viewer, watches the data stream to determine when you select things in the viewer, and responds to chat commands.

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