PE_6 Second Life Mesh Viewer (Part 3)

Time for the finale! In the last installment of the Second Life Mesh Viewer, I just exported out the 3D model I made into the format that will allow Second Life to import it in using a Collada plug-in for 3D Studios Max. Now I will talk about how it goes into Second Life and what all can be done in the import options.
Now that I had the mesh I wanted to use, I logged back into the beta mesh viewer and instantly started to try to upload the mesh into Second Life. Selecting Model from the Build menu options, I chose the table mesh I made and was instantly greeted with a new mesh window that had a lot of different options on it. I was able to generate the Level of Detail of the mesh (LOD), normalize the normals on the mesh making it look smoother, or I could go in and manually set each LOD as I saw fit through the input boxes next to each LOD sample. It is quite detailed in how you want the mesh to look in Second Life which I find a very exciting feature. I left the LOD samples at their default as I was more interested in seeing the final result of the mesh in world, so I pressed the Upload button and...nothing happened. I started over, double checking all the settings in the model window and pressed the Upload button again with the same results. Hmmm...

Undaunted, I delved into the Second life forums, scouring for the information I need to find out why my lovely model was not uploading. I finally found the reason...I needed to be on a specific sim that allowed the rezzing of the model. Oh, that makes sense, so I whisked off and landed in a Mesh sandbox sim where I was greeted with quite a few mesh models scattered around the place. I was at the right place! So, I quickly repeated the procedure on importing the mesh into Second Life, got the Mesh window, saw the mesh preview, played with the different options, then hit upload! I was suddenly greeted with two objects in my inventory, one was the mesh import and the other was the actual object to rez out in world. Immediately, I dragged out the object onto the ground and watched it rez up before my happy little eyes.

After some manipulation and resizing, I now had the model I made in Maya in Second Life! I took a look at the model from all angles and the model translated perfectly into Second Life without any loss in detail. I am now looking forward to making even more detailed models into Second Life and and very impressed with the way this new mesh viewer is coming along. The mesh viewer uploads meshes using the .DAE format, which is handled by Collada and so far, just about every 3D program is able to now export their models into Second Life, something that many of us have wanted for so very long. I am extremely excited to be able to use this tool now and hope that Linden Labs makes an official release of it very soon!