ShapeGen and the Lathe are both now available for sale at shop.onrez.com. For those of you not familiar, these are building tools of mine which construct large shapes by combining multiple prims. ShapeGen is useful for making large cylinders, cones and spheres. The Lathe allows you to build large curvy shapes by defining a bezier curve to be used as the outline. Both tools continue to be available through SLExchange.
Terrain Sculptor is a tool I've made which maps the terrain of Second Life sims and generates sculpty textures for them. It's written in C# and runs on .NET 2.0. The tool uses the libsecondlife client to log in an avatar to retrieve the terrain data. It also downloads the world-map image of a sim so that it can be used as a texture. A "decal" version can be generated which includes a border to align better with the sculpty. The elevation data can be saved seperately as a binary dump or as a grayscale image. The process typically takes only a few seconds after logging in and the files are saved automatically.
Visit Terrain Sculptor Page
The technique for retrieving terrain data using libsl is taken from the heightmap example in the libsecondlife source code. I used the technique for making sculpties from heightmaps explained by Pamagester Darracq and LaeMi Qian in the SL Wiki.
I've tried to make the application friendly, but it's not a shrink wrapped product. The source is open so people can contribute improvements if they like. Sooner or later I'll add something to generate decent land textures for the sims instead of using the world map image with builds on it (I've done something similar in the past). An obvious missing feature is the ability to generate a grid of sculpty textures instead of one for a sim to achieve a higher resolution. In theory this shouldn't be too hard but I haven't looked into it in detail. I've found that the map decals align better with the sculpty if you offset the decal texture by .015 for some reason.
Someone was asking me about my mapping of Second Life sims today, which got me to playing with some heightmaps. Not being an expert at Photoshop, I was pleased to find how easy it is to make a simple texture for a sim just using the gradient map tool on a heightmap. It's not that it looks all that slick compared to tiled terrain textures, but it took almost no time. Here's a sample render of Seacliff that I threw together in a couple of minutes in Max.
The Cadroe Lathe build tool is now available through SLExchange.
The Lathe allows you to construct a large shape merely by defining the curve of its outline. You create the curve by adjusting the handles of a bezier curve, familiar to users of Photoshop, and a preview of the outline is generated for you immediately. The Lathe is ideal for creating shapes such as the onion dome of the Taj Mahal, a giant champagne glass, or any shape with a smooth curve. See the accompanying pictures for examples of what the Lathe can do.
The shape produced by the Lathe is highly customizable. You can adjust the thickness, as well as override the height and witdh of each block. You can set the color, texture, alpha and texture scale. The Lathe can also generate only a certain section of the final shape, or rotate the shape by an amount you specify. The Lathe creates the shape by rezzing and arranging mutliple box prims. The more prims that are used, the smoother the shape.
For a quick demonstration and complete instructions, please visit the Lathe web page.
