Sculpted Prims for the Masses

I was very excited about the new sculptured prim building class, for the past few months I've been learning Blender just to build this new type of prims within Second Life. But Blender is extremely painful to learn, the millions of buttons adds to the confusion. Luckily there is a very good tutorial online that taught me a lot about blender. I was churning out good blender objects in no time.

I was able to make pretty complex objects in Blender, but ran into a wall when exporting this out to SL compatible sculpted prim UV maps. I found two tutorials ( by Amanda Levitsky and one on Bentha.net) that claims to do a Blender to SL sculpted prim transformation.While I could follow these tutorials and get the prims they made in the end... none of these tutorials worked with the more complex objects I had. My results looked like this:

This was way too frustrating, and I cannot justify buying Maya (the officially supported 3D software by LL) simply cause of the price ($2000-8000). Maya has a free version, but it does not work with SL export function that Lindens provided. Blender seemed to be the best option (given how difficult it is to learn) due to it being an open source project just like Second Life.

For a week I've been disappointed with my Blender to SL projects, then I saw a simple tool by Yuzuru Jewell that made it easy to model things using a lathe like system. I remembered this was how I learned 3d modeling long time ago (can't remember the apple software I used), but this tool (called Rokuro) was incredibly easy to use:

And the resulting sculpted prim came out looking as it was ment to be :

This tool could be used by anyone, you don't need any sort of advanced 3d training, all you have to do is move the points and hit generate UV map and bang you got a cool Sculpted Prim ready to upload into SL.

This tool is most useful for anything that could be made on lathe like machine, ie, drawing an outline and having it rotated 360 degrees. It's good for vases, mugs, tumblers, pillars and so on. I will still try to mess with Blender, but till I figure that out my Sculpted Prims come out of Rokuro.

Mystitool, the best thingy in SL?

This is Mysti (aka Mystical Cookie), and she's amazing...


How is she amazing? Well... she's the creator of MystiTool and it's a must buy for anyone who spends more than 1 hour a week in SL.

What is MystiTool? Well... it's a lot of useful things packed into a tiny neat HUD button that instantly lets you do magical stuff like freezing you in space! Yes you will be frozen and no griefer can ever move you. Isn't that neat? MystiTool has that and more.

Let me just cut and paste all the stuff it has:

1. * Avatar Scanner - Shows nearby AVs with distance and activity.
2. * Sim-Wide AV Scan - Scans an entire sim in 15-45 seconds!
3. * Remote Sim-Wide AV Scan - Run sim-wide AV scans remotely.
4. * Favorite Locations - Stores up to 45 locations for quick and easy teleporting!
5. * Landmark Manager - Unlimited landmark storage for quick teleports!
6. * Teleport History - Automatically remembers your last 36 teleports!
7. * Object Rezzer - Quickly rez your favorite objects without inventory hunting!
8. * AV Following Chair - Follow your friends while afk or scripting!
9. * Table + Automatic Seating - Low prim and always one seat available!
10. * Sky Platform Rezzer - Rez a building platform in the sky or at your feet!
11. * Non-Physical Vehicle (aka "Sit Shield") - Prevents you from being pushed in all situations! Walk through walls!
12. * Camera Follower - Follows your camera position. Seats up to six passengers, making this extremely useful for group building!
13. * URL Catcher - Gives you a popup when URLs are heard in chat!
14. * Flight Assist - Allows you to fly to ANY height!
15. * Bug Scanner - Shows nearby active objects. Know if you are being spied on!
16. * Mimic - Say, shout, or whisper anything as any name!
17. * Popup Sender - Send popup menus with any text to your friends!
18. * Auto Updating - Automatically receive new updates forever!

That's just a few of the neat stuff she packs into her little hud unit. Once you try this HUD, you just can't live without it. And she's amazing with the updates, her updates are all automagical and very neat (if only LL could emulate her bug free version updates .. sigh).

Oh she has a rezzer, a color converter, fun land tools, neat follow chair and security stuff like killing an avatar ! :D Not to mention all sorts of peacetime use stuff too.. like Sky Platforms and useful stats like Sim warnings and so on. She also has tons of different types of scanners built into it. All this packed into one cute little button in you HUD!

Mytitool is a must get (btw.. did I mention the non-physical cube?! You sit on it and you can walk through walls.. yay). Go get yourself one now!

SERIOUSLY!

BUY ONE NOW OR FOREVER BE DENIED AN UBER COOL SL EXPERIENCE.!!!11!!!11

Buy it at the following places.

Slexchange
Blumfield (26,147,298)

The amazing prims of Whisker Ophelia

Yep, I'm a fan of Whisker.. and the stuff she makes is absolutely amazing.

Her store over in Infamy Sim contains some of the most creative works of art that I've ever seen in SL.

For example, her guitar (209 prim) and banjo (116 prim) has so much detail that you could virtually forget you are in SL. This is a must buy for anyone looking for quality musical instruments in SL. (Each: 3000 L).

She also has many other cool stuff at her store. One real cool thingy is the Infamous Wind Walker. I bought one of these a month or so ago, and it is simply one of the best ways to travel in SL. With wind walker on you just need to go into mouse look, point at some object and click, and instantly you jump on that. It's almost as if you became an instant ninja!


Whisker also has a gallery nearby with tons of art work from excellent SL artists. A visit to Infamy would not be completed without checking that out.