‘Finally, I will be able to do fairly decent looking sculpted prims!‘, I thought, when reading Hamlet’s Au’s article on Plopp Second Life. After some experimenting with it, it seems like it’s not going to help very much at allowing a sculpties noob like me create beautiful (or practical) sculpties like for instance Juliet Ceres does. Apparently, doing that is either ‘not in this lifetime’ for me, or at least only after learning how to work Maya or 3Dmax or whatever. *sobs*

Maybe a child can grasp Plopp Second Life’s interface, but I could not. The thingie that looks like a garbage bin is actually a spray can and does not delete stuff. The rest isn’t very clear either. What’s wrong with ‘file’, ‘edit’, and ‘options’ menu’s?! The only thing that does make sense is the ‘day - night’ clock. Which is actually fun if you spin it very fast. :d But then again, how do I kill those annoying sound effects?

The drawing tool isn’t that great, but as Plopp does accept importing .png files - including alpha layer - I tried to do things that way. If only now there would have been a way to tell it that my precious Linden Dollar coin is a coin, and not a sphere, I would have certainly started an affair with Plopp Second Life - despite the fact that it can not hold it’s mouth sounds shut.

The Plopp Second Life site states the following ‘to do’ list:

1. improvement of the conversion to Sculpted Prims
2. sculpture preview within PloppSL
3. see how your sculptures will look in SecondLife™
4. automatic generation of sculpties for each part in the original image
5. currently we only support closed models without holes

Someone *beep* me when they have finished doing that? The idea of ‘just painting’ something and then converting it to a sculptie is great, the execution, well… *points at the to do list*.

Until the Plopp people have checked all that as ‘done’, you might want to try one of the following ’sculpted prim tools’:

• Wings3D: A free and open source polygon mesh subdivision modeller. Wings 3D is available for most platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Wings 3D is ideally suited for modeling and texturing low to medium density polygon meshes. It has a wide range of very effective tools optimised for these tasks hidden behind its ‘minimalistic’ interface.
• Blender: 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 slow learning curve. But make a good start by visiting Amanda Levitski’s tutorial on how to export the sculpties from Blender.
• SculptyPaint: SculptyPaint first was written for creating 3D sculpt models for SecondLife. Currently it can also export to .dxf files that can be read in Blender, google sketchup and other 3Dmodelling software.
• ROKURO: You draw a line in 2d by editing the various points and the program effectively spins that line around an axis to create the 3d object. Cylinders and polygonal prisms are both possible.

Tags: gadgets, plopp second life, sculpted prims, SLinovation, software, tools

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