Importing Second Life Prims from Google SketchUp
Shortly after I wrote a somewhat harsh post on the libsecondlife-dev mailing list detailing out why it wouldn’t be feasible to export Google SketchUp data in to prim data ready for Second Life import, Andrew Reynolds has written a Ruby plug-in for SketchUp that does exactly that. Well technically my original arguments still hold as it simplifies all surfaces in to a rectangular face, but the fact that any data at all was pulled out of SketchUp, and that it looks like the original data if you are using the basic tools is a big leap forward. Maybe we can convince him to use the .prims XML format that libsecondlife has been cooking up.
October 24th, 2006 at 1:54 am
I saw Andrew’s site, and disagreed with his aproach (exporting every face), so i wrote an very simple exporter for Sketchup in ruby myself. Im using a pre-canned library of very simple components to represent the SL primitive types (box, sphere, cylinder etc).
I also looked at using the .prims format given here, but the lsl script to import it kinda horrified me, so i settled on a much simpler delimeted format instead (seperate lines for each prim containing prim type, position, size, rotation, color), and wrote my own importer in lsl.
I basically agree with your original argument, but Sketchup *can* be used if your willing to settle on a small subset of the SL functionality. Sketchup is a nice tool and very simple and effecient to use, and i found it handy for doing quick mockups, especially in getting dimensions correct. In terms of functionality, its not half as good as the prim.blender version though.
October 5th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Google…
Google…