Interesting idea - and since you are coming from the OpenSim / SL side, you might be interested in the sculpt map (sculptie / sculpted prim) converter that Fabrice3d or another guy he mentioned was working on
On Oct 23, 8:04 pm, Bibek <[email protected]> wrote: > We've put together a simple-to-use, scriptable 3D editor / animator, > which uses Away3D under the hood. You can see it > at:http://world.edsploration.org/ > . > > There isn't a lot of documentation there yet, but I hope (pray) that > it's easy enough to figure out just by looking at it. > > The purpose is for creating 3D-based educational content. It's built > around the concepts of EduSim / OpenCobalt, but something that you can > arrive at simply by clicking a link, rather than installing a > program. It needs to be easy enough for overworked-teachers to use > without having to spend much time learning, powerful enough for > technophiles to do a lot with, and secure enough for school system > administrators to consider valuable. And it needs to be open-source, > using open formats, so that it can be easily used in the developing > world. > > Simplicity is in the user interface. It's not nearly as powerful as > Prefab or Maya, or possibly even Sketchup, nor is it intended to be. > It's intended to work /with/ those systems, and load models created by > those systems, and export things that those systems can manipulate. > (Thank you, ObjExporter!) When you need per-point control, edit > models in those other systems, then load them here. When you need a > simple animator, this is the place to turn. > > Power is in the D.eval scripting engine. Although I'm a little wary > of the licensing, it is free, and it gets the job done - and does it > really well. It has full access to the whole Flash / Flex > environment. In the example loaded, if you look at the "library" > code, you'll see that the functions in there control the Object3D > objects' alpha values directly - all in script code. I didn't make > any fancy hooks (other than a generic callback-wrapper), it's all done > automagically by the script engine. > > Security is in the Flash player itself. Everything in this program > runs inside of Flash, and is restricted by the standard Flash player > sandbox. Thus, whatever your views of Flash security in general, this > is an equal security risk to navigating in your browser to a random > web page and having that page load a Flash file. And school system > administrators already allow that. (So when I add link following, it > will reload the engine, rather than load things directly inside. Yet > another reason to shrink the program.) > > ---- > > The intent is to release this open-source, with a plugin-based > architecture, for anyone to use / extend / modify / etc. And, with a > plugin-based architecture, that will make it easier to separate out > different chunks of code that fall under different licenses, provide > support for different versions of Away3D, support different script > engines, etc. So a standard set of content-type requirements is > probably in order before that goes /too/ far. > > The only reason I'm holding off, for the moment, on releasing the > source code is simple code-elegance: the current code is not elegant, > and not something I want to show people with my name on it. It was > literally /thrown/ together as I experimented with connecting this > with that, etc., etc., and while it doesn't need to be anywhere near > perfect for an initial code release, it does have to at least not > make /me/ cringe. :-P > > So, yeah - you'll get load / save soon, and you'll get the code as > soon as I can make time for a basic cleanup. > > - Bibek
