Daikon Forge

PrimComposer is a 3ds Max plugin by Shack Dougall that can greatly streamline the building process for Second Life content creators by turning Max into an easy-to-use offline building environment.

I’ve mentioned recently that I have started work on a new weapon, but I decided to take a little detour first to try and get up to speed on a new 3ds Max plugin that I strongly suspected would assist me in building better weapons faster than I have done in the past.

I had been watching the progress of this wonderful little project for a while now, but until recently it had not become mature and capable enough for me to really spend much time playing with it.  That changed late last month with the release of Version 1 Beta 5b.

For those not familiar, here’s the description of PrimComposer from the author’s website :

Prim Composer is a complete offline building environment for Second Life and OpenSim. Build in 3ds Max; Deploy to either Second Life or OpenSim.

I’ve tried similar things in the past (like Prim.Blender by Jeffrey Gomez for instance) which, while quite promising and surely worthy of praise, simply didn’t work well for me for one reason or another.  I expected a similar experience with PrimComposer, and ended up being quite surprised and pleased overall.

Simply put, it rocks.

First of all, it extends the Max interface to add all of the prim types (Sphere, Torus, Box, Ring, etc) and prim attributes (Hollow, Path Cut, Profile Cut, Taper, etc, etc.) you are used to seeing in Second Life, which allows you to work directly with the equivalent of Second Life’s prims.  It’s hard to overstate the power of this to someone who’s never tried it.  It’s absolutely amazing workflow.

Secondly, by using PrimComposer to simulate SL prims, you can get the full power of Max’s texture baking abilities, to ‘bake in’ shadows and lighting, ambient occlusion, bump maps, etc.  The results can be quite spectacular, and when imported into Second Life the build looks very nearly identical to the Max version.

Finally, it uses a custom libsecondlife bot to act as your surrogate during the import process.  This bot will log in as you, build and link all of the prims you’ve created in your Max scene, upload and apply your baked textures, and then log out.  That is an excellent use for bots, and I will be certain to mention that to the next jackass on the SL forums that preaches that there are no good reasons for Linden Lab to allow bots and they should therefore be categorically eliminated.

Following are a couple of quick ‘throwaway’ builds that I made to really get a feel for PrimComposer and it’s benefits and drawbacks.

This first one took me maybe 5 hours, because I had to learn how PrimComposer works as well as a bit about 3ds Max (did I mention that I’m a noob?), but OH BOY was I excited when I imported this gate into SL and it looked almost exactly identical.  There was a bit of a difference in texture quality, which is fixable and entirely my fault, but it was extremely gratifying to see just how similar it looked.

The second one I actually had more trouble with, as it turns out that PrimComposer still has some warts with regard to texturing hollow and tapered prims, but I’m still very pleased that with the relatively low amount of effort I spent the results were better than expected :

I could have created the builds themselves in Second Life in a shorter amount of time, if you ignore the texturing process.  It’s hard to see the details in the textures from these snapshots, but texturing alone would have taken longer than the entire PrimComposer-enhanced build process if I had done the texturing ‘by hand’, so in the end I saved myself many hours – and quite probably many texture upload fees – by taking advantage of Max’s lighting and advanced materials.

To say I’m stoked about PrimComposer is really an understatement.  PrimComposer is teh awesome and full of win, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what I can do with it with regard to building new weapons.  I really think it’s going to save me a lot of time and headaches!