Comment: I'm trying to get better at building everything with the
source code and parts and textures outside any virtual world, in the
"real world", and then importing them into Second Life, OpenSim,
Kitely, whatever after that. It loses the benefits of a huge SL
marketplace, but gets the benefits that what's mine is mine.
Basic (not Pro) Google SketchUp is free, and even without the many fancy
plugins, creates mesh objects that can be exported as Collada .dae
files and imported (with some practice) into Second Life, Open Sim,
Unity3d, Blender, etc. It's particularly good at making buildings,
because that's what it was designed for.
Took me a while to figure out that I had to set physics to "high" on
import or my avatar couldn't go inside the building because it stopped
at the "bounding box". And the textures have to be in a file that's in
the same directory as the .dae file during import, and maybe have other
constraints as well.
Still, I just redid a floor of a complex building I'd done in Second
Life, and admittedly I have way more experience now, but I rebuilt in
two hours a building that took me more like 2 weeks to build in SL
originally, and successfully imported it into OSgrid where it's usable.
It takes a while to get the hang of the right order to build things in,
but the documentation is excellent, it has an active usergroup and many
nice plug-ins, and most of all it's way easier to learn for casual
end-users than building inside Second Life with prims.
I'm thinking that the right package to ask for when contracting for a
building in Second Life, say, is that the work be done in SketchUp, or
something that talks to SketchUp, where it's easy to share and compare
and save versions ( !!! ) and backups, and the delivery consists of
BOTH the instanced object in Second Life AND the SketchUp source file,
along with all the textures used for the building.
THEN, you actually own it.
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