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Playing with PrimComposer

Sep
11
2008 in off topic, product reviews, 3ds Max, sculpties, OpenSIM, omgbots!, Cool Tech and Second Life.

PrimComposer is a 3ds Max plugin by Shack Dougall that can greatly streamline the building process for Second Life content creators by turning Max into an easy-to-use offline building environment.

I’ve mentioned recently that I have started work on a new weapon, but I decided to take a little detour first to try and get up to speed on a new 3ds Max plugin that I strongly suspected would assist me in building better weapons faster than I have done in the past.

I had been watching the progress of this wonderful little project for a while now, but until recently it had not become mature and capable enough for me to really spend much time playing with it. That changed late last month with the release of Version 1 Beta 5b.

For those not familiar, here’s the description of PrimComposer from the author’s website :

Prim Composer is a complete offline building environment for Second Life and OpenSim. Build in 3ds Max; Deploy to either Second Life or OpenSim.

I’ve tried similar things in the past (like Prim.Blender by Jeffrey Gomez for instance) which, while quite promising and surely worthy of praise, simply didn’t work well for me for one reason or another. I expected a similar experience with PrimComposer, and ended up being quite surprised and pleased overall.

Simply put, it rocks.

First of all, it extends the Max interface to add all of the prim types (Sphere, Torus, Box, Ring, etc) and prim attributes (Hollow, Path Cut, Profile Cut, Taper, etc, etc.) you are used to seeing in Second Life, which allows you to work directly with the equivalent of Second Life’s prims. It’s hard to overstate the power of this to someone who’s never tried it. It’s absolutely amazing workflow.

Secondly, by using PrimComposer to simulate SL prims, you can get the full power of Max’s texture baking abilities, to ‘bake in’ shadows and lighting, ambient occlusion, bump maps, etc. The results can be quite spectacular, and when imported into Second Life the build looks very nearly identical to the Max version.

Finally, it uses a custom libsecondlife bot to act as your surrogate during the import process. This bot will log in as you, build and link all of the prims you’ve created in your Max scene, upload and apply your baked textures, and then log out. That is an excellent use for bots, and I will be certain to mention that to the next jackass on the SL forums that preaches that there are no good reasons for Linden Lab to allow bots and they should therefore be categorically eliminated.

Following are a couple of quick ‘throwaway’ builds that I made to really get a feel for PrimComposer and it’s benefits and drawbacks.

This first one took me maybe 5 hours, because I had to learn how PrimComposer works as well as a bit about 3ds Max (did I mention that I’m a noob?), but OH BOY was I excited when I imported this gate into SL and it looked almost exactly identical. There was a bit of a difference in texture quality, which is fixable and entirely my fault, but it was extremely gratifying to see just how similar it looked.

The second one I actually had more trouble with, as it turns out that PrimComposer still has some warts with regard to texturing hollow and tapered prims, but I’m still very pleased that with the relatively low amount of effort I spent the results were better than expected :

I could have created the builds themselves in Second Life in a shorter amount of time, if you ignore the texturing process. It’s hard to see the details in the textures from these snapshots, but texturing alone would have taken longer than the entire PrimComposer-enhanced build process if I had done the texturing ‘by hand’, so in the end I saved myself many hours - and quite probably many texture upload fees - by taking advantage of Max’s lighting and advanced materials.

To say I’m stoked about PrimComposer is really an understatement. PrimComposer is teh awesome and full of win, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what I can do with it with regard to building new weapons. I really think it’s going to save me a lot of time and headaches!

Popularity: 49% [?]

Pixologic ZBrush 3.1 Crashes to Desktop on startup

Sep
05
2008 in DAZ3D, ZBrush, Customer Support, product reviews, off topic and WTF.

5 Comments

Quick Summary: Pixologic ZBrush 3.1 and Process Explorer by SysInternals/Microsoft do not play well together.

There are probably a hundred and one reasons that this happens to other people : When starting up ZBrush, the program will get as far as displaying the "Initializing ZBrush" splash screen, then suddenly and without any warnings or errors simply crash to desktop and disappear.

I’ve been through this probably a hundred times or more, no kidding. I’ve ended up calling Pixologic customer support no less than 10 times, and it’s because of this issue that I’m now permanently running Windows Vista instead of dual-booting XP. Originally I had tried to install ZBrush in XP, but this crash happened during activation and permanently borked my XP partition’s ability to run ZBrush, and Pixologic’s support team couldn’t figure it out. I installed on Vista, and it worked, so as I spent more and more time using Vista and getting it customized to the way I do things, it became inconvenient (and increasingly unnecessary) to switch back to XP.

Fast forward to today… I haven’t used ZBrush in a couple of months now, so I had completely forgotten all about this issue. Now, however, I’m working on a new weapon, and wanted to do some preliminary detail work in ZBrush, so I fired it up and… POOF!

Now ZBrush was telling me that there was a problem with my license, so I had to call Pixologic and activate over the phone. I tried that, four times. Each time, they’d give me a new code, I’d enter it, and CRASH! After uninstalling my virus scanner, turning off Data Execution Prevention, re-installing the MSVC Redistributable Runtime, several machine reboots, and tossing some chicken bones (voodoo can’t hurt, right?), still no joy.

Then it hit me : I remembered having this problem quite frequently before, and I never took any notes because I was using ZBrush several times a day every day and I thought I’d never forget. Yet I did.

For me, the problem is that I’m a software developer by trade, and all of this graphics and Second Life stuff is a hobby. Naturally, my machine is tricked out to have a focus on software development, and as a part of that, I use a replacement Task Manager called Process Explorer by SysInternals (Which was recently bought out by ~~the Borg Collective~~ Microsoft).

I absolutely love Process Explorer. It makes it very easy to track my program’s memory usage, open DLL’s and file handles, and get detailed information on heap usage and garbage collection cycles.

But it does not play well with ZBrush. No, not at all. I don’t know if having Process Explorer trying to hook into ZBrush’s process triggers some sort of attempt at security against copy protection, or just reveals a problem with ZBrush’s code, but I absolutely have to close Process Explorer to run ZBrush.

I seriously doubt this will be a problem for most ZBrush customers, but since I couldn’t find anything about it online (having discovered the relationship quite by accident one day), and Pixologic’s customer support personnel had never heard about it, I wanted to post about it "just in case". At least they tried, and were helpful and professional, which is nice when you are stressed out and irritable

—————-

And speaking of customer support… This whole experience has reminded me that almost a year later I still have a fair amount of bitterness toward DAZ3D about having spent around $600USD on Carrara 6 Pro only to find out that not only does it not do the things I needed it to do (some of which were advertised features that convinced me to make the purchase), but that customer support is absolutely atrocious. I cannot recall how many times I’ve looked for a customer support number (no such thing, apparently) or scoured the forums looking for an answer to a question.

The "support" forums, as is typical with any company’s public forums, are full of opinionated assholes who commonly reply with "Use search before asking questions, noob" bullshit (even after a previous search had revealed no satisfactory answers) and frequently give cursory responses that do not solve the problem. Here’s some news, guys : Forums != Support

Now, I’ll be honest and say that I absolutely love DAZ|Studio, and for the price it can’t be beat. But I also feel it’s not acceptable to publicly support a company that I feel has not served my interests as a paying customer, so I have removed my page on creating Second Life animations using DAZ|Studio. There are surely many other resources out there for learning how to use the program, so this is no loss to anyone, but I felt it needed to be said and done.

Popularity: 50% [?]

The Lodo Loft - by Ravish Tyne

Mar
09
2008 in product reviews, Friends, products and Second Life.

1 Comment

Long-time (in SL™ terms) friend of mine and very well-known C:SI personality Ravish Tyne recently finished working on an awesome loft prefab, and I wanted to share my enthusiasm about it.

See more pictures of the loft on SL Exchange.

As you can see from the picture above, and especially from the other pictures on SL Exchange, this loft is truly beautiful. The textures are all high-quality, and aren’t repetitive. The baked-in lighting is expertly done, and adds a nice touch of realism and atmosphere (also note that the track-lighting is correctly positioned for the lighting effects). The atmosphere reminds me of a great time in my life (in my early 20’s) when I was living in a third-floor loft near the water with a couple of life-long friends, and really brought up some powerful and wonderful memories!

The loft is very configurable : You can change the window view to one of 15 different views (of several different cities around the world), each picture on the walls can be changed to one of over 30 built-in pictures or you can add your own, and the track lighting can be removed (it’s all one group) when you wish to free up just a few more prims. The roof is phantom, which really works great for me and makes me wonder why more builds don’t come that way by default.

The product is nicely packaged in a Builder’s Buddy system for easy placement, and I had absolutely no trouble putting it precisely where I wanted it and at what angle. It’s pretty low-prim for a build of this quality, coming in at a maximum of 121 prims, and as a guy that has 15 different half-finished high-prim builds of his own laying around most of the time, I really appreciate that :).

If you want to check it out in person in-game, you can see it at this slurl.

Popularity: 56% [?]