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From SketchUp to Second Life
writes "Roo Reynolds of Eightbar (an external blog written by some IBMers) has put together a tool to export Google SketchUp models and import them into Second Life. It only seems to work for fairly basic objects, and cylinders and non-rectangular surfaces 'are particularly badly hit.' Along with the Prim.Blender project, this sort of tool looks like it could make building in Second Life considerably easier, allowing people to choose their preferred tool rather than be constrained to the in-world editor."
There are plenty of giant phalli. This doesn't let you do anything you couldn't already do. It's just helpful if you already are used to working with a certain tool. Or when SL is down, like right now (and about 20% of the time, lately).
Of course you are going to be pretty constrained translating everything into constructive solid geometry without boolean (other than AND) operators, which is all SL supports.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
If you like building in SL but hate the tedium, you should check out Skidz Primz. It builds a intuitive UI around regular prims. Especially useful when trying to put many prims together.
(Skidz is a friend and I couldn't resist pimping his tools. Dont hold this spam against him please)
License: By reading this you are agreeing that you agree with me.
Posting anonymously because I'm the Google employee working on porting SketchUp to LiGNUX. Expect it later this year. I'm not sure if the commercial version will be ported -- it depends on closed source libraries for exporting videos and such.
Just friggin' link to the ACTUAL SOURCE!!!
There's Collada, which is at least a step in the right direction for the industry as a whole.
GodboltBlog
This is, and will continue to be sticking point for the next 9 to 12 months -- however the opensouce project libsecondlife, is in the process of creating a framework for unit testing client code which includes a server. This can eventually lead to personally owned and operated servers.
This is already possible with XML-RPC (from outside SL into SL), HTTP (Requests from inside SL to outside), and EMail (Both to and from SL.) These are all accomplished with user written code that is placed by users into in-world objects that they have created.
Not sure what your refering to by closed, but the economy is open ended in that you can transfer USD to Linden Dollars and back. There hundreds, perhaps thousands, that make extra income via Second Life. There is even a number of people who make a real world living working on just SecondLife land and/or content.
http://www.libsecondlife.org/
There is an open source client library, which has grown quite a bit in the last few months and is now receiving some assistance from Linden Labs themselves.
They've got a design studio that can import/export several different formats:
From the site: "Imports and Exports a wide variety of standard 3D file formats using the Accutrans Translator."
You can also programmatically add and control content within the rendered scene, in the web-browser, through AJAX. I was impressed with some of the samples on the site. You are required to install a plugin, but it's pretty painless. I thought it was rather fun to hack a little javascript and make stuff move around in 3d within the browser.
It's also open source: http://www.mediamachines.com/fluxsource/index.html
http://www.mediamachines.com/
http://www.ajax3d.org/