Tent City and Sculpted Prims

I found out that we are going to do a "show-n-tell" next week with our boss, so I decided I wanted to fill in around Joe's house and start adding in some of the interactivity, so that everyone could see where I am going with this whole project.

One of the things that I needed to complete Joe's area of the village were some neighboring houses, some foliage, and the tents that the field students stay in out in his yard.

Emin had just sent me a link to a free application called PloppSL that allows you to paint your object, and it then "pumps" it into a 3-D object. It will then export a sculpt map for you to use in Second Life. So, I decided to give Plopp a try. I mean, a domed tent should be an easy object to figure out. (http://www.secondplopp.com/)



At first glance, PloppSL looks very child-like, which initially gave me hope that I might soon be turning out sculpted prims for all my Second Life needs. There is no explanation for how it works, so I had to find a tutorial, and after that it was quite easy to use.



The drawing tools are quite clunky and I had a hard time using them with any kind of precision. But eventually I painted a tent, and then pumped it up into a 3-D object. It never seemed to make anything "wide" enough, but I figured I could stretch it in Second Life.



Once satisfied with my Plopp drawing, I exported out the sculpt map for my tents. If you have never seen a sculpt map, don't expect it to look anything like what you painted in Plopp. It is a color-coded file that tells an object what "shape" to take and looks kind of like an ink-blot test. I personally see an owl or a bat in my tent sculpt map - for whatever that's worth!



I was so excited to import my sculpt maps into Second Life and try them out. My first attempt had no z-value, and no matter how much I tried to stretch it in Second Life, it was pancake flat, and did not resemble a tent in any shape or form.



I made several more attempts in PloppSL, thinking that I should try to make the shape more simple and less-detailed. That helped a little bit, but my sculpted tents never really made the grade. I could eventually get a tent shape wit the sculpt map texture, but never anything that would wrap the texture and color of a tent correctly.

So I will have to rethink how to do tents. And my personal take on PloppSl is that it was a nice try, but it needs more features, such as copy and paste. Is it too much to wish for some kind of replicator application where you copy and paste an object from photoshop and it renders a perfect sculpt-map file for you to use in Second Life?