Primstar-2 for blender-2.57

[Gaia Clary]

Hi, all.

Primstar-2′s sculptie features are almost complete! We are planning an early adopters program that’s installable on the official blender-2.57 Release. Of course this only has a small subset of the full features of Primstar-2 but is certainly enough to consider migrating to Blender 2.5.

Currently we have the following features implemented:

Sculptie Creation:

• Basic shapes creation (plane,cylinder,sphere,torus,hemi)
• U and V rotation on wrapped shapes (shifts the seams)
• Support for oblongs (sculptmap ratios n:m)
• Import from File (includes all basic shape creations settings)
• Two UV Layouts (for sculpt map and texture)

Baker:

• Single sculpt map baking (produces optimised and finalised map)
• alpha channel preview (improved version)

The details about the early adopters program can be found on the Machinimatrix Blog.

Have Fun,
Gaia

[Indigo Mertel]

Hi Gaia,

thank you for the good news.

One question: will Primstar have features to support mesh building as well? Or, is it only focused on sculpts?

[Gaia Clary]

The first Primstar-2 official release will support mixed builds containing regular prims and sculpted prims. Of course you also can add meshes to the mix, but while the upload of regular prims and sculpted prims from blender to Second Life will be fully supported, the upload of meshes must still be done manually (via collada exports).

I have asked Runitai a few months ago about this issue. But there is no official statement from LL yet and as long as we do not have an official API for mesh upload we can/will not support uploading them. But since meshes can be uploaded with intact scaling, you can of course upload the meshes through the official viewer and merge them back into the build by hand later.

What other features would be of interest regarding meshes ? I have started collecting ideas. It would alsdo be nice to hear what kind of support you would like to see.

[Indigo Mertel]

There are two things that I'd love to have. Not directly related to Primstar, but you may want to consider these as additional poducts. One is a way to import an existing build from SL to Blender. It would be great for me to import an existing building into Blender to improve it and convert it to mesh. The other thing is to be able to import part of the landscape into Blender. This would simplify  how to adapt a house to the environment. I also wish we could have the snap-to-ruler system we have in SL.

There are probably other things that could be done but I need to get more familiar with the workflow before I can suggest more.

[Drongle McMahon]

I'll vote for that landscape thing. You can test it on my ravine in Siona.:smileyhappy: In fact the prospect is almost enough to make me bite the bullet and start learning python and lsl seriously. I think there are already terrain scanners that make sculpties, aren't there? It should be easy from there.

[Indigo Mertel]

Indeed there are, Drongle. Those I have used so far send the data to a remote RL server and create a sculpt image that can be saved on the HD. Having the same thing for mesh would be a great advantage to model a complex scene that must be adapted to a location on the grid.