Monday, December 14, 2009

Sculpted Prim Tutorial!

Second Life provides a great avenue to learn, practice, and show off your 3D modeling skills!

As many of you know, there are two ways to build objects in Second Life. You can do so either in-world or via a 3D modeling program (like Maya). Building objects in-world is fairly straight-forward, but can be limiting. Building objects in an external program allows you to build more interesting and complex objects - and uses only one prim! However, bringing 3D models created in other programs into Second Life (to create a "sculpted prim") has traditionally been a fairly elaborate, difficult, and often expensive process.

However, after doing some research, I have started using one method that is quite effective and fairly easy.

The tutorial for this method that can be found here: http://www-scf.usc.edu/~slsdg/mayatutorial.html

It may appear a little intimidating at first - but it takes you through the whole process step-by-step so that even the novice modeler can bring some snazzy looking objects into Second Life in no time.

My hope for this tutorial is that it will help make Sculpted Prim creation more accessible to a wide variety SL users. If you have any feedback, suggestions, ideas, etc. that you think will help improve the tutorial, please let us know at slsdg@usc.edu.

Enjoy!

(Also, while you're at it - make something to submit to our Second Life Modeling Contest!)