Primstar-2 Status
Primstar-2’s sculptie features are almost complete! We are planning an early adopters program that’s installable on the official blender-2.57 Release. Of course this only has a small subset of the full features of Primstar-2 but is certainly enough to consider migrating to Blender 2.5.
Currently we have the following features implemented:
Sculptie Creation:
- Basic shapes creation (plane,cylinder,sphere,torus,hemi)
- U and V rotation on wrapped shapes (shifts the seams)
- Support for oblongs (sculptmap ratios n:m)
- Import from File (includes all basic shape creations settings)
- Two UV Layouts (for sculpt map and texture)
Baker:
- Single sculpt map baking (produces optimised and finalised map)
- alpha channel preview (improved version)
Additional sculptie features we are currently working on (available when done):
- Support for tiny sculpts (color range settings)
- Multi object bakes (with optimised and aligned options)
- Keep center (for both single and multi object bakes)
- Build import and export (multi prim import and export)
We also have planned to support the creation, import and export of mixed builds, which may contain full textured regular prims and sculpted prims. The details about how mixed builds can be imported to Second Life (or other compatible environments) are not yet fixed.
We are aiming to be ready to release the feature complete version against Blender 2.60 but please understand that we can not yet guarantee that. We are to some degree dependant on the Blender Foundation to implement required features in Blender and until those are done, not everything we have planned can be implemented.
Primstar-2 Early Adopters Program
Shortly after the availability of Blender-2.57 we will offer access to the development version of Primstar-2. This development version is by no means feature complete and it will be given to you at your own risk and with minimal support. Nevertheless you may report problems and suggestions and we will be all ears.
The development release will be available from the JASS-Shop in Second Life. You will get a permanent Link to the software. You will find all future updates of the development release under that link and the final release will be handed out as soon as it is available.
The following is included with the early adopters program:
- Get primstar-2 development release shortly after availability of blender-2.57
- Get primstar-2 final release when ready
- Get Jass-Magic for free now (needs blender-2.49b)
- Get all upcoming Primstar-2 related basic Jass-training tutorials for download in HDI quality.
- Buying now will directly support the development and documentation work!
Pricing for Early Adopters Program
Get 1000 L$ discount on final price(*):
- New customer (6000 L$)
- Jass-Pro customer (4000 L$) upgrade fee
- Jass-Magic customer (2000 L$) upgrade fee
This offer will end one month before Primstar-2 will be officially released.
(*): The final price for Primstar-2 will be 7000 L$
i agree Domino …a blender version that includes many other factions i think is a great asset and as you say a long term investment ..and lets be honest its not exactly a fortune when you look at what some women spend on shoes in sl..lol.
Lovely =)
Cheer up guys, the price is reasonable to the amount of coding and code, the features it would bundle are awesomely useful for content creators who look beyond just sculpties but mixing all together to take advantage of all its possibilities getting to a next level of creativity and its expression.
Imagine…
Domino & Gaia keep it up!
The upgrade cost is US$16.37 to Jass Pro users. While you certainly deserve to be compensated for your hard work and I am sure many who choose to continue making sculpties will benefit from it, the cost is too much for me personally given the limited use I would derive from it. Of course mesh won’t rule out sculpted prim creations but I have been laerning how to create meshes during the mesh beta and find them easier to make than sculpties and more efficient so it would be foolish to pay that much for something that may quickly become obsolete.
well done to you and domino for working so hard at getting primstar 2 working…i’ve already downloaded 2.57 ..although i am a little concerned about meshes ,i do hope all your work wont be in vain if peope switch to meshes.there’s bound to be a pricing policy from LL for uploading thats something else that may work in favour of sculpty’s …
That pricing is too much for those additional features, even for early adopters. With mesh within sight, the product lifetime is also too limited to be considered value for money. Thank you for developing Jass anyway because it has been very useful.
I am not sure if mesh release will realy rule out sculpted prim creations. But despite of that, primstar-2 will add a lot of new features where mixed prim builds and seamless transfer to Second Life are only two of them. Note that the features we have published here are sure to be implemented. many other features have not been mentioned, because it is not clear how they will be implemented at the end.
Note that mesh support will be on its way too. Right now LL still has not given out any valuable details to work with. So the mesh support has been put on hold for now, but there are a lot of potential support themes for meshes around 😉
About the pricing: The final price will be about 25 US$ (exactly 7000L$) which includes a lot of support and services. I do not think that this is too much regarding what you will get in return. And please note that your purchases of Jass-pro and Jass-Magic will be fully counted, so if you have already jass-magic, then the update fee is 7 US$, which still sounds like nothing to worry about too much.
The additional features represent a massive amount of coding. In terms of functionality (and amount of code), I estimate that the sculptie features are only about 20% of the final feature set. There will be full support for normal prims, that means path and profile cuts, holes, twists etc. There will be support for Second Life style texturing, so all the necessary textures can be baked in Blender for normal prims and sculpties. You’ll then be able to export these into XML and image files. I’ve been discussing things with third party viewers makers to agree on a common format, so you should be able to then import those directly in a lot of the 3rd party viewers.
So it’s not just sculpties, it’s a complete offline prim creation kit. Personally I think there’s a very long lifetime for that.