Saturday 27 January 2007

SL, Blender and SketchUp

I overheard a chat conversation between two people at the Berkman Sandbox the other day while playing some more with LoopRez. The conversation was in German so I couldn't understand it. But I followed up a couple of the URLs they were talking about (just being nosy I guess!), here, here and here.

These pages talk about using Blender, Google SketchUp and even MS Powerpoint as tools for building SL objects. Very interesting... not that I've tried any of this yet. But it seems to me to be indicative, in a very positive way, of the powerful ways in which SL can be interfaced to other software and systems.

Coincidentally, I was interviewed by someone from the museum community the other night (for me) in SL - part of some background research for a paper for the Museums and the Web conference. The interview was primarily about my experiences of developing ArtsPlace SL. In passing I was asked if I'd tried other 3-D virtual worlds. I responded that I'd tried There.com briefly, but didn't like it - largely because the camera handling disagrees with me slightly. But it's also interesting to note that the growth of the porn and gambling industry in SL which, while somewhat unsavory in some respects, can be viewed in quite a positive light from a purely technical view. As with the early days of the Web, the porn industry in particular is very quick and innovative in the way it adopts new technologies and generally leads the way where others follow (at least in technical terms).

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for checking out my site. Those articles are fairly old and it seems like the original ideas of creating a prim building system as a plugin for Blender/Maya/Sketchup have mostly run in to dead ends or fallen out of use.

I've been working on a new angle recently; extracting the rendering code from the open source Second Life viewer in to a standalone library called libprimrender and using that to build tools. Here's an early preview: http://www.jhurliman.org/images/primpreview-03.png