Back in January I reported that there was talk of Blender dropping support for Collada. This was a tad concerning but as I pointed out at the time, not the end of the world. Collada is the format used to get Mesh into Second Life, so in Second Life terms it was important but you can happily use older versions of Blender to create content. Blender 2.62 hasn’t ended this discussion, but Collada support is not only still there, there’s now a mention of Second Life with the addition of a compatibility option for exporting armatures, which you can read about here.
There is also a mention of the issues with Collada and Blender there too:
“There has been much discussion about the state of the Collada integration, it’s not currently working very reliable yet, and this needs to be solved somehow. A new team now started working to improve Collada support to get it more useful for integration with external tools and game engines, improving the existing OpenCollada based I/O module.”
So the issue hasn’t gone away, but people are working on it, which is surely the preferred option. The team working on this currently includes:
- Domino Marama (development)
- Juha Mäki-Kanto (development)
- Gaia Clary (Organization, Documentation and all the rest)
If you want to help out, there’s a wiki page for more information.
Gaia Clary is a Second Life user, I’m not sure about the other two, I’ve seen Gaia’s name in the forums. However the other issue here is Second Life being named in an export function, this isn’t the first time this has happened, one of the cited features of Hexagon 2 is Second Life sculpted primitives. As an aside it’s also worth pointing out that Hexagn 2, Daz Studio 4 and Bryyce Professional can all be downloaded for free from the official site, which you will find here.
I’ve downloaded them but haven’t had time to start figuring out how to use them! However this raises another point, if these products can use Second Life as a feature, then surely Second Life can use them as a feature, that means inviting the producers of these projects to advertise, discuss and collaborate with Second Life users, Adobe should be doing this too. These tools are content creation tools, this is an area where Linden Lab should be in discussion with these companies, helping to raise awareness of what Second Life can be used for in their communities and encouraging promotion of these tools in the Second Life community.