Sculpted Prims: 3d Software Guide

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About 3D Modeling Software

This page offers a list of 3D modeling software for use with sculpt maps for Sculpted Prims, along with a short explanation of popular 3D file formats. Each entry lists the software package's web site, operating system support, cost and trial versions if applicable, and the licence.

Note: Resident-made sculpt map tools and offline previewers now have their own page.

Important features

Each software entry includes a rundown of features that are particularly useful for creating sculpt maps. Although support for these features isn't necessary in order to create sculpt maps, it can make the process a whole lot easier.

Which you use will ultimately come down to personal preference and what your exporter will handle best.

Do I need a really powerful computer?

For most Second Life users, this shouldn't be a major issue. If your computer is capable of running the Second Life client, you should have no trouble running most of these programs. Some programs will run fine on something as old as a Pentium III. A few professional programs (like Maya) say they'll only support high-end workstation graphics cards but it will still run ok on a regular setup. Check the system requirements on the software vendor's webpage for specific details.

What programs are the best for making sculpties?

There's no easy answer to that question. It depends on a number of factors which will vary from user to user:

I'm new to all this. What should I start with?

Probably not with anything expensive...unless you're a university student at a school with a good computer art program where you can take advantage of their resources. If you're very serious about learning the tools the pros use, you might also want to seek out such a program, either online or in a classroom.

If you just want to dive straight into making sculpties then there are a couple of front-runners for your attention. (Please note that these are opinions and may not reflect everyone's.) If you have to go the free route, Wings 3d is probably your best bet: the exporter has some hard limitations and the interface isn't necessarily friendly but it's much easier to use than the other main free option, Blender. Once you get the hang of it you can make sculpties fairly quickly.

If you want free and simple, try out the Rokuro and Tokoroten sculpt-making tools. You'll be limited in the shapes you can produce, but they require no 3d experience and you can turn out some good sculpties in a little as ten minutes. The Wings plugin can also import these sculpt maps where you can tweak them further.

If you're willing to spend some money (under USD$100), AC3D is a good place to start. The interface is nicer than that of Wings, and Zora Spoonhamer's exporter allows you to take good advantage of program features which the Wings exporter doesn't; full subdivision capabilities, cutting and extrusion of faces, etc.

That said, the best way to decide which program you should use is to start downloading their demos and trying them for size and feel.

Adding Programs to This List

The hobby market for 3d software is currently growing rapidly: as a result there are dozens of software packages in the wild, many undiscovered or not well known. If a new program is discovered and proven by means of it being listed here, great, but it's not within the scope of this list to name them all, else the most useful ones would get buried and the page would become a confusing mess.

A couple things to consider:

With those in mind, if you're adding a program, follow the format used in the rest of the entries (they differ slightly between the free and commercial packages) and be sure to fill in as much information as you can; this will usually take a little research. If you've used the program, you're encouraged to include your insights and experiences in the short description blurb (you don't need more than a short paragraph). Tutorials, documentation and the like should be linked separately under the Resources section.

Special Purpose Sculpted Prim Tools

The resident-made sculpt tools such as Rokuro, SnurbO'Matic and the preview tools now have their own page: Sculpted Prims: Resident-made Tools.

Free 3D Modeling Software

Art of Illusion

A number of Residents have recommended this program. If you're familiar with it, please give the rest of us a summary!

Resources

Blender

Formerly a company's in-house tool, Blender is the current king of the open source modeling programs. With all the features of the expensive programs, an active development community and even some existing SL-based tools made by Residents, this is going to be the default choice for many people. Downsides: Blender's interface is not newbie-friendly. That combined with spotty documentation can make for a slow learning curve.

Resources

Plopp

A SLork sculpted in Plopp

Plopp is a cute 3D modeling tool designed for little kids. The makers of Plopp have now put out a free version for SL users (the full program can be bought for US$19.50).

Imagine one of those new mylar balloons. You paint the one side with an image, and then paint the other side with an image represetning the other side. Plopp then blows up the balloon and shades it. You can also import graphics from other tools (Photoshop, a scanned drawing, etc.), make a "cutout" with the eraser and inflate that. You can play a little with the lighting and with rotations. The Plopp drawing tools are very basic but keep in mind, this is for little children. Then it bakes the texture and exports the texture and the sculpt map (128x128).

Even if you don't use this for Second Life, you might like to get it for your kids...or inner child. It just looks like a lot of fun.

Resources

trueSpace (Caligari)

TrueSpace and its companion products appear to be aimed more at the independent developer and hobby market. Today now that it is owned by Microsoft they are giving it away with the training videos, a fully featured program now absolutely free! Your on your own for support ever since the acquisition but there is still an active forum see the resources below for the link. However it lacks support to export Sculpt Maps directly, you'll need to use another program to import the .obj files you create. A unique feature TrueSpace 7 and on offers a virtual collaborative work environment without working in the Second Life sandbox.

Resources

Wings 3D

Wings3D is a subdivision modeler that is easy to learn and is well suited to making sculpted prims. The sculpt import and export for Wings is easy to use. There are also numerous tutorials that are specific to making sculpties.

Resources 

*) The SL servers seem to be having trouble sending the zip files from the forums.  Use the alternative site,
http://pkpounceworks.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=28&func=fileinfo&id=119 for now.

POV-Ray

POV-Ray is a renderer - you have to do all your modeling in another application, or by describing in plain text the mathematical shapes which make up the model. It may seem an odd inclusion in this part of the list but merits mentioning up here instead of burried at the bottom with the "Other" section because it actualy can produce sculpt maps. Some other programs like AC3D (below) can also call on POV-Ray for texture baking.

XSI Mod Tool

The Autodesk® Softimage® Mod Tool software is a free version of Softimage for non- commercial game creation. It was designed for use by anyone needing a powerful 3D application to make and mod games. Most of the features and functionality of the commercial version of SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6 are enabled in Mod Tool, without the hassle of licensing.

Commercial 3D Suites

It has to be said: most professional 3D software is (understandably) expensive, anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of dollars for a single copy. They're marketed at big professional studios with thousands or millions of dollars to budget for this stuff. There are ways to reduce this expense so that it's within the reach of an average person: some legal, some not.

Under $200

Archipelis Designer (Archipelis)

With Archipelis Designer you just draw an outline from a background image(s) to make it a 3D textured model. Or you can use a blank view and just draw the shapes you want from scratch. it's an intuitive approach to sketch the shapes out that can then be enhanced with textures and photographs and then exported to a set of sculted prims.


Resources


Amorphium (Electric Image)

Sculpting is what Amorphium is all about. If you have a pen tablet (even a tablet PC), the pressure sensitivity will control the pressure applied to the current brush to morph the sculpture. It gives a very natural feel to being able to sculpt 3d models easily and intuitively. Amorphium has won 14 awards including "Best Graphics Software" from magazines like Computer Graphics World, PC World, and Macworld for its breakthrough real-time approach to creating 3D graphics.

Resources


AC3D (invis)

AC3D is an inexpensive polygon modeler with SubD support designed to be easy for novice users. The sculpt map plug-in will export any model that has a perfect uv space. Several pre-mapped starter shapes are included with the plug-in, including a cube that can be used as basis for complex objects by artists familiar with the popular box modeling method using sub-division surfaces. Invis recently gave their official blessing (as well as hosting) to the plugin, making them the first vendor of this kind of software to put their backing into sculpy development.

Resources


Curvy 3D

Simply draw the outlines of shapes to create 3D forms, then you paint on the surface to sculpt details. No need for UV unwrapping, the coords are all set up automatically by Curvy


Info in English : http://curvy3d.com/info.html

Free modeling tutorial English: http://www.curvy3d.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=28

Free modeling tutorial French: http://www.avatars-3d.com/tutoriels-curvy-3d-francais

Hexagon 2.5 (DAZ Productions)

Hexagon 2.5.0.5 rolls out official support for sculpted prims which shoots it from the "other" section into the main list. By itself it appears to be a very capable program - the full range of expected modeling tools plus 3D painting, ambient occlusion baking - in short, all most sculpt makers will need for not too much money. The program was originally developed by eovia and was purchased by DAZ.

Resources


Moment of Inspiration

This program has some cool things going for it. It's the work of a former Rhino developer and has an interface that pretty much lets you draw shapes with the mouse or a pen tablet. Original text: MoI’s sleek intuitive UI blends a fluid easy workflow with powerful tools, making it the perfect choice for someone who has been frustrated with the complexity of existing CAD tools.

Resources


Silo (Nevercenter)

Resources


Shade10 (e frontier)

Comments Now available in English through Mirye Software. All versions of Shade include support for exporting Second Life sculpted prims. Shade is available for Windows and Mac OS X, and includes modeling, rendering and animation. Features integration with most other 3D software products. Supports Poser file hosting through PoserFusion.

Resources

From $200 - $999

Zbrush (Pixologic)

Zbrush is a 3d painting and sculpting tool; instead of manipulating polys or curves, you select a brush and literally paint and chisel and mold...the best way to grasp it is to download the demo and play with it. It's pretty sweet: a ton of studios such as Epic Games use it to create the details for their normal maps and some SL designers are already using it for the 3d painting capabilities.

V3.1 adds many new features, such as Displacement Maps (and and Exporter) and the ZMapper.

(I may be incorrect, but I believe that the Displacement Maps and Exporter may be Pixologic's rendition of sculpture maps. Some with more experience needs to check, please: Displacement Exporter. -- just checked this, and is different from how sculpt maps work. Just a converter for displacement maps to normal maps. (pretty powerful in its own right, but not the same thing as sculpties) Sculpt maps are not using the normals in any way at all - they look similar in that they are RGB maps, but the similarity pretty much ends there. Rather sculpties use RGB gradients from the center of the prim to the edge of the prim's bounding box to define where the vertices are in xyz space. --Hypatia Callisto 14:47, 1 November 2007 (PDT))

Resources

3D Coat

3D Coat is, like ZBrush, a 3d painting and sculpting tool that is most often used as part of a production workflow with maya or studio max, but is extremely well suited to sculpted primitive development and texturing, even in conjunction with simpler polygon modeling packages such as Wings3D.

However, 3D Coat has some additional elements that Zbrush does not have, such as the cloth simulation engine and layers. The layering of displacement/environment shaders and painted aspects on your object can be opened directly as layers in an image editing program and live updates performed within 3D coat "on the fly," allowing for precise use of the Photoshop/Gimp/etc. toolsets and seeing the results instantly on the model in 3D Coat. Example texture in image editor


Resources

3D Coat - Video Tutorial Library 3D Coat - PDF Manual 3D Coat - Official Forums and Online Community

Lightwave (Newtek)

Some high-profile Second Life designers have been using Lightwave for quite a while to burn realistic highlights and shadows onto their skins and clothing textures. Therefore it's not a big surprise that after Blender, this was the second program that community members figured out a sculpt export method for.

Resources

Rhinoceros (McNeel)

Rhino is built from the ground up for NURBS modeling; thus if you intend to use NURBS, this isn't such a bad option. From this author's brief trial with it, it handles certain operations (like joining 2 or more objects) somewhat more intelligently than 3ds Max. A couple UI tricks make it easier to learn than the sea of buttons you're initially presented with: a help window to one side explains each operation as you select it and the command line at the top effectively lets you search for a function by typing in its name, without having to know where the button or menu option is.

Resources

Modo 302 (Luxology)

Luxology Modo is a premier modeling and UV system built to maximize the workflow of professional modelers. It has both a rich modeling and painting toolset, ideal for creating models for Second Life.

Resources


Mudbox (Autodesk)

With ZBrush one of the most powerful organic modelers out there, really easy to use and artist friendly. Its modeling is based on brushes like ZBrush but aims more to 3D like Maya or 3D Studio Max. It contains a high quality texture renderer for baking normal maps and is used be many 3D professionals and studios like WETA Digital and some artists at Raven Software and id Software.

Mudbox's creator, Skymatter, was bought by Autodesk in October 2007

Resources

Carrara (Daz)

Like Hexagon, Carrara was an Eovia product that is now owned by Daz. Carrara is full-featured 3D application, supporting polygon modeling, spline modeling, "metaballs", and terrain modeling (it is sometimes compared to Vue). This app seems fly under the radar consistently, but Daz does seem to be serious about maintaining it as they have recently released a Mac Universal Binary version, free to registered users. Carrara also provides animation and particles.

Resources

Cinema 4D

One of the more affordable 3D applications, excellent learning curve. Uses COFFEE script for plugins.

Resources

Sculpt map tutorial part 1 for Cinema 4D Loosely translated from Klaus Strifler´s original german KS-3D sculpt map tutorial into english by a finnish 3d artist Kraphik 3D.

$1000 and Up

Maya (Autodesk/Wavefront)


Why was Maya the first to receive sculpted prim support from Linden Lab? Because it was what Qarl Linden, the main developer on the project, learned to use while creating kick-ass movie SFX like these and the tech for sculpted prims was adapted from tricks he learned in the process. Maya has been a growing force in the movie industry for some years and a strong presence in the video game industry as well.

Resources


3d Studio Max (Autodesk)

Formerly Maya's main competitor, especially in the game industry. Then Autodesk (the makers of Max) bought out Alias (the makers of Maya) a couple years ago. So far the company is developing both products separately, marketing Maya at the movie industry and Max at the game developers, but they have long had comparable feature sets, and in the future it's likely that there will be tighter integration between the two. A choice between Maya and Max generally comes down to user preference and (particularly in our case) plugin support. Some users have said that Max is easier for a newbie to learn than Maya and certain basic controls share similarities with SL's build tools (such as shift-drag to copy).

Resources

SL Prims to 3ds Max - A prim building plugin and export system for Max. Open source.

Prim Composer for 3ds Max - Prim Composer is based on SL Prims and SculptGenMax. 3ds Max offline building plugin for both prims and sculpties. Open Source.

Unofficial Prim Composer mirror - The official prim composer site is down. This blog will stay alive until (and if) it is back up. The latest (unofficial) version of Prim Composer can be found in this post: http://maniacsl.blogspot.com/2011/02/basic-installation-of-prim-composer.html.

Softimage (Autodesk)

Billing itself as "the most advanced 3D animation and character creation software for next generation games & film", it does that, modeling, baking, film compositing, and it makes toast! All kidding aside, they seem to be going after the largest slice of the market they can and their client list includes everything from Half-Life to Howl's Moving Castle. Pluses? It's one of the few commercial programs that uses non-proprietary languages for their scripting...yes, I said languages, because apparently you have a choice between several. However it's unlikely that it has a significant user base within the SL community at the moment.

Softimage XSI was bought out from Avid by Autodesk in November 2008, did away with the $495 "foundation" version and reset the price at $2995. C'est la monopoly.

Resources


Other 3d Programs

These programs are free or cheap, but are not well supported or necessarily suited for sculpt making. They are listed here because they are popular for other applications and their absence from this list would be confusing to those who know about them otherwise.


MilkShape 3D

Resources

Google SketchUp

SketchUp is a 3D drafting program popular among architects for its conceptual similarity to manual drafting and physical model-building. It has a very low learning curve, but is rather foreign to most established suites other than AutoCAD.

Hypothetically, SketchUp could be used to reduce the number of prims used in structures already possible with Second Life's built-in tools, as its use of edges and faces allows the creation of efficient compound geometric forms.

On the other hand, SketchUp's "bring your own geometry" approach makes it not particularly suited to the creation of mesh-based organic shapes.

Sketchup's surface modeling paradigm currently makes it difficult to translate SketchUp models into Sculpted Prims. The paid "Pro" version of SketchUp does, however, allow export to OBJ which, via obj2sculpt (or, of course, Maya), may allow sculpt-map export. It also exports to 3DS, Collada, XSI and VRML, et cetera, but these formats may well require software more expensive than SketchUp.

SketchUp uses image textures about as basic as those found in the Second Life build tools. Its texture capabilities would therefore likely not be useful to Second Life designers other than for previewing existing textures.

Resources

[3] - A rudimentary Sketchup to SL prim exporter plugin.

Ayam

Resources

3D File Formats

If you're using software that cannot export to sculpt directly, you might still be able to succeed. You can always give the file to someone with access to the appropriate software, or you could export your model into another 3D modeler. To do that, you'll need to export the model into a format the other program can handle. Here's a brief rundown of the file formats that SL developers will generally find the most useful.

  • .OBJ: Probably the most common cross-platform export format for polygon models; it's fairly open and any 3D program worth its bits supports it. It's also well-documented and easily hackable.
  • .3DS: The default polygon export format supported by 3D Studio Max. Because of this, it is widely supported. However, it doesn't have as many export options as OBJ.
  • .FBX: Another Autodesk format that is good if you need to export whole scenes: objects, animation, lights, cameras, etc. More importantly for our purposes, it preserves NURBS objects in some programs. Especially useful if you're trading files between 3DS Max and Maya; it's also supported in some other programs but Blender isn't among them ...yet.
  • .3DM: a.k.a OpenNURBS. This is the native format of Rhino3D and MoI and, as the name suggests, is a NURBS export format. It's gaining some popularity; unfortunately, it's not currently supported by the big three (Maya, Max and Blender). However the format documentation and code libraries are open-source, tempting those brave enough to try and write tools for it, such as 3dm2sculpt.


Other Resources

Useful places for anyone interested in 3d modeling:

See also