Sketchlife HelloWorld example: Second Life building in SketchUp

[VideoMatoran]

Where is it from?

[EvgeniSergeev]

@VideoMatoran It's from the lab

[sd9800]

so can i import any of my already made models? ps if u say no then y the hell should i get this?

[EvgeniSergeev]

No. SL is not flexible enough - but other virtual worlds are, or so I've heard. The issue is called "mesh import".

Why should you get this? If it suits you. Reasons might be:

- You want to build things like buildings, with rooms etc.

- There is a lot of complexity. If you're just building a hut, then it won't help that much.

- You want nice control over your texturing - draping over multiple prims, positioning via handles and mouse, bucket ...

- I've been told it makes things more maintainable.

[CoolCat00001]

Is each prim that is used in the SketchUp model counted in second Life after Import, or is it counted as a whole?

[EvgeniSergeev]

Each prim is counted separately. (Sketchlife doesn't make sculpties which resemble several prims stuck together - there are some other tools that do that - Sketchlife works with simple prims directly.)

[CoolCat00001]

Could you lead me in the direction of those tools.

[EvgeniSergeev]

An in-world tool that I saw, but never used, because it seemed too technical, was called, I think, sculptie-o-matic. The most versatile tool I can think of, however, is Blender - with which you can make any sculptie that it is possible to make, not just things representable as other prims. There is some package of Blender scripts I tried, which is supposed to streamline the process, but I found that you still need to know exactly what you're doing inside Blender. Texturing is the hard part.

[hazonku]

Question... Does sketchlife support imported models as well? I prefer to model in Zbrush, so if I import a .OBJ file from another 3d suite into sketchup will sketchlife be able to handle it, or does it work primarily with stuff made in sketchup?

[EvgeniSergeev]

No, absolutely not. Sketchlife does not make sculpted prims. It lets you express a model using box prims and cylinder prims (with taper, shear, path-cut, hollowness, etc.). You have to draw all the prims in SketchUp. As such, it is mostly good for things like buildings, especially if you want to have good control over texturing.

Also it's much better for prim alignment, with true snapping, not just to a grid.

[michaelivingstone]

Hi Evgeni, Sketchlife is awsome dood, congrats...it looks much easier to model than SL,. Can I ask you will it be able to handle any action scripts in the future...you know doors and windows opening, that sort of thing?

[EvgeniSergeev]

Thanks Michael. Well, there have been a number of requests for various features recently. Now, doors are quite common, so that's an interesting idea. I guess it wouldn't be hard for me to add a generic door script to any prim that has been designated as a door. I'll have to think about how to let the user designate it as such in SketchUp, and also how to specify which way it opens. I don't have time right now - but I'll put this on the feature requests list.

[TheRealBlackPuma]

So does this work with larger and (far more) complex models? Because I have a model that I would love to import once it's done, but it's rather big and highly textured.

I would try myself, but unfortunately I have a too weak of a system to run SL in. So that's why I ask.

[EvgeniSergeev]

Yes, it does. I have imported a model of Saint Basil's Cathedral (the one on Google Earth), which had about 1000 prims. The system scaled quite well, because in SketchUp you can hide the parts that you are not currently working on. That's for viewing things in clutter. See the site linked in the video, under "Examples".

I did a few tests and SketchUp begins to slow down a lot at about 2000 prims. I could still work with 4000, but I had to wait for things to redraw and processing to catch up.

[TheRealBlackPuma]

Oh I see. That is in fact great news, because I've been drawing this model as a really big, but low-prim model, since I was planning to put into Second Life from the start. First I wanted to go trough Blender, and from there into SL (of which I had no idea how to do it), but thanks to this, I no longer have to.

Thank you for sharing. :3

[EvgeniSergeev]

I wrote it in the first place because I was in a similar situation. We have about a dozen buildings in SketchUp and it looked like too much hassle to go through Blender or 3ds Max.