This new tool actually came out at a very opportune time. As I am moving along in my Action Research on Second Life, I have been steadily building up a new campus for Full Sail University that I believe will be more conducive to learning and engaging students who hopefully will be using the Second Life sim in the future. Well, Linden Labs just put out their beta viewer that allows for meshes in many 3D programs out there today to be imported into Second Life, which can create even more fantastic user created content. Once I heard the news, I immediately went to the Second Life website and proceeded to download the new viewer. First thing is first, it is currently a beta viewer so when I logged in, I was instantly sent to the beta testing grid where I saw quite a few new mesh buildings scattered around the small testing sim I was on. I proceeded to wander around a little bit to see what all the new meshes were about.
My first impression with the new viewer is that it still has a lot of work. I was experiencing quite a bit of lag just moving around the sim and it was not even completely populated. Aside from that, I noticed in one of the menus at the top, it had a new upload feature in there called Meshes. This is where you can upload the meshes you create in a 3D program, such as Maya or even SketchUp, and be able to place them down in Second Life. The new mesh feature handles polygon models now so I will no longer have to fiddle with NURBS surfaces to make any custom models in Second Life anymore. This is a feature I have been hoping for for a long, long time. For this to work, however, you need to download a plug-in or converter from Collada that will change the mesh coming from these 3D programs into the proper format to be uploaded. I went to the Collada website, got the plug-in for Maya and I am now ready to test just how well this new feature is for Second Life! I am totally excited!
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