Maxwell Graf’s Rustica in Cloud Party is a very impressive setting:
Maxwell who has a presence in both Cloud Party and Second Life is a very accomplished content creator and the Cloud Party setting is very much a picturesque build to get lost in your thoughts and admire the scenery.
However whereas the above builds are Mesh Maxwell has now started to play with Cloud Party’s inworld voxel building tools as he explains in an interesting post over at SLUniverse. Maxwell is downloading his Voxel build (which is a nice feature in Cloud Party), importing it into 3DS Max and then uploading the build to Second Life as a Collada file.
This process isn’t without minor challenges and Maxwell explains how he had to convert the downloaded obj file to FBX before it would play nicely in 3DS Max. However there are also benefits to this process.
Maxwell explains some of the benefits:
“This was very interesting to me for several reasons. The voxel tools allowed me to build most of the house with a good amount of detail in a relatively short amount of time. Making it from scratch inside maya/3ds/blender would have taken me considerably longer. It went very fast, perhaps 5 hours total.
In addition, by being inside CP with my avatar while building it I was able to make design choices base on live position and scale (i.e. the room is too narrow, ceiling too high, stairs too large, etc.), which is an advantage over building outside of the virtual environment and something I miss about the old days of prim building inside SL. Not certain why the errors appeared when importing directly to 3DSMax, but Maya went perfectly. I have not tried it in Blender.
All in all, a very fun experiment, worth considering if you want to shave some time off your workflow. It was definitely faster getting the textures where I wanted them. As they are tiled, it is possible to change any of the textures very easily once inside SL.”
For my part, I’ve found that when I download a build from Cloud Party, upon import to Blender the scale is about 100 times too large. This can be quickly fixed in Blender but it’s certainly something worth noting or testing for yourself. I may be doing something wrong of course.
The advantage to this process is of course that you can build in Cloud Party, download said build, tidy it up if needed and then upload it to Second Life or other virtual worlds. This won’t be a suitable workflow for all but it’s an interesting way of working and the voxel build tools are certainly fun to play with, even if my empty field is currently one hell of a mess!
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