Sculpted Prims: 3d Software Guide

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Offline Previewer Tools

Basic tools that can be used to preview what a sculpt texture will look like when uploaded into Second Life and rendered as a prim. All of these are made by other Residents and should generaly be considered beta or works in progress.

XNA Sculptpreview

  • Creator: Eddy Stryker
  • Link to get it: XNA Sculptpreview
  • Requires: Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, along with the Microsoft XNA framework (see above link for details)

A Hacky Sculpt Previewer

Modeling Software: What Features are important for making sculpted prims?

Free 3d Modeling Software

Blender

  • Website: Blender.org
  • Licence: GPL
  • Operating Systems: Windows, Max, Linux and more.
  • Supports user scripting?: Yes, Python
  • Supports NURBS?: Yes
  • Built-in Texture Baking/generation?: Yes
  • Current Sculpt Map Support?: Development in progress by SL residents. Also, people have figured out how to get Blender to generate sculpt maps as you work, without needing a script! The process is documented here.

Formerly a company's in-house tool, Blender is the current king of the open source modeling programs. With all the features of the expensive programs, an active development community and even some existing SL-based tools made by Residents, this is going to be the default choice for many people. Downsides: Blender's interface is not newbie-friendly. That combined with spotty documentation can make for a steep learning curve.

Resources

Art of Illusion

  • Website: Art of Illusion
  • Licence: GPL
  • Operating Systems: Any OS that will run Java (requires Java Runtime Environment 1.4 or later)
  • Supports user scripting?: Yes, Java via Beanshell
  • Supports NURBS? Yes
  • Built-in Texture Baking/generation?: ???
  • Current Sculpt Map Support?: No

A number of Residents have recomended this program; If you're familiar with it, please give the rest of us a summary!

Resources

Moment of Inspiration

  • Website: Moment of Inspiration
  • Licence: Open beta testing/freeware
  • Operating Systems: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
  • Supports user scripting?: ?
  • Supports NURBS? Yes
  • Built-in Texture Baking/generation?: ?
  • Current Sculpt Map Support?: No

This program has some cool things going for it. It's the work of a former Rhino developer and has an interface that pretty much lets you draw shapes with the mouse or a pen tablet. Documentation on the website is sparse however and being in beta means there will be kinks.

Resources

Ayam

  • Website: Ayam
  • Licence: BSD licence
  • Operating Systems: Unix/Linux (native), Windows 98, 2000 and XP, Mac OSX (with X11)
  • Supports user scripting?: Yes, tcl
  • Supports NURBS? Yes (NURBS modeling only; polygon meshes can be imported)
  • Built-in Texture Baking/generation?: No
  • Current Sculpt Map Support?: No

Resources

Wings 3D

  • Website: Wings 3D
  • Licence:BSD licence
  • Operating Systems: Windows, Mac OSX, Linux (binaries), other Unixes (source only)
  • Supports user scripting?: ? (Plugin interface avalible)
  • Supports NURBS? No
  • Built-in Texture Baking/generation?: ?
  • Current Sculpt Map Support?: No

Wings3d is a subdivision modeler and has the advantage of being fairly easy to use and should be able to produce models fairly well suited to making sculpted prims without a lot of trouble. Documentation is sparse, however. The program is in Beta.

Resources

Professional 3d Suites

It has to be said: most professional 3d software is incredibly expensive, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars for a single copy; they're marketed at big professional studios with thousands or millions of dollars to budget for this stuff. There are ways to reduce this expense so that it's witin the reach of an average person: some legal, some not.

  • Don't post links to downloads of pirated software or directions/tools to crack trial software. They'll be deleted.
  • Don't ask in a public forum where you can download pirated software.
  • Don't be fooled by online retailers selling "OEM" copies of software online for cheep. None of these programs come in OEM (original equipment manufactuer, or anyone who makes computer hardware and bundles software with them) versions. Many companies such as Autodesk go so far as to only sell their software through authorized retailers. These too good to be true offers are just that: crooks trying to get you to pay them money for pirated software. (ed.: Trust me: I've fallen for it before and now know better).
  • Do be aware that downloading pirated software is a good way to end up with malware on your system such as trojans and keyloggers.

That said, here are some of the legal options you can look for:

  • Educational Licences: If you're a student, you can usualy get a signifigant discount on most of these programs. The downside is that many educational licences say you're not supposed to use the program for commercial purposes.
  • Subscriptions: You pay anualy for a subsription to use the program. While this business model sucks for things like Anti-Virus programs, it can really save you money over time for 3d software and is a lot easier than a huge initial investment for the full licence. You also get the full benefits (and sometimes extra) of buying the program outright. I've seen (legit) subscription prices for 3ds Max run as little as $100 or $200 a year.
  • Trials: Most 3d software has a demo or a "learning edition" that you can download from the software maker and try on your system. They will be either time or feature limited but this is a good way to get your feet wet.

So with that out of the way, the list...

Other 3d Programs

These programs may be free or cheap, but won't have nearly as expansive feature sets as those above.

3d File Formats

If you're using software that doesn't have a sculpt exporter avalible for it yet, there's always the option of exporting it in another program or giving the file to someone who can. To do that you'll need to export the model into a format the other program can handle. Here's a brief rundown of the ones that will generaly be the most usefull.

  • .OBJ: Probably the most common cross-platform export format for polygon models; it's fairly open and any 3d program worth its bits supports it.
  • .3DS: The default polygon export format supported by 3d Studio Max. It has enough clout that importers and exporters for it are common, but it doesn't have as many options as OBJ.
  • .FBX: Another Autodesk format that is good if you need to export whole scenes; objects, animation, lights, cameras, etc. More importantly for our purposes, it preserves NURBS objects. Especialy usefull if you're trading files between 3DS Max and Maya; it's also supported in some other programs but Blender isn't one of them yet.
  • .3DM: A.K.A. OpenNURBS, this is the native format of Rhino3d and, as the name suggests, is a NURBS export format that is gaining some popularity. Unfortunatly, it's not supported by the Big 3 (Maya, Max and Blender). However the format documentation and code libraries are open, free and avalible without copyright restruction, should someone feel brave enough to try and write import/export plugins for it.
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