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$) upgrade fee
This offer will end one month before Primstar-2 will be officially released.
(*): The final price for Primstar-2 will be 7000 L$
On the pricing. When Primstar-2 is finalized, will the price for a upgrade from Jass-PRO still costs L$4000, or will it jump to L$7000?
The upgrade price will be the difference between the costs for the jass-product and the costs for primstar-2. Hence the price will jump from
L$6000 to L$7000 for jass-pub customers (and non customers)
L$4000 to L$5000 for jass-pro customers
L$2000 to L$3000 for jass-magic customers
So you can get any of the jass-products first. Then when you later decide to jump to primstar-2 you can upgrade and you always end up with total costs of L$7000 for the final releae or L$6000 when you decide to become an early adopter.
Personally, I can’t wait!
I find Blender 2.49 almost impossible to use, whereas 2.57 makes a lot more sense to me and I can actually make things with it. 🙂
Desperately waiting for even an unfinished Primstar 2, just so I can use a version of Blender that doesn’t drive me insane.
i feel a tingle of excitement the weekends almost here…lol
the upgrade price for the new primstar 2 for me is to much..No the L$ or the usa dollars but for the program..So i pay 25$ or 16$ or 7$ for the upgrade for a program that is UNSTABLE with many bugs and for sure with many FUTURE bugs…I use the jass basic version,pro,magic most i have all the versions on my macintosh…NONE of this is working well,only the first version of jass the simple one..i see above the comment (of price is reasonable to the amount of coding and code)
price maybe is reasonable for the coding,but when u have the older programs that is STILL after YEARS UNSTABLE,how i am sure that this version is no the same?…still i see on the magic version after when i bake the texture map,i take a blank texture without extension..and when i put in the first simple version all is normal??THAT is a very bad work from the coders..
1.) One of the reasons why Primstar-2 is created is to get better stability. The problems on Mac are serious compatibility problems with the interaction between python-scripts and the blender main program. The only correct solution would have been to hack blender-2.4. But the Blender coders refused to create a 2.49c release in favor of 2.5 development.
2.) Jass is not made by Domino but by me (i used primstar as the basis and added my own ideas to it). So whatever is not working due to errors in Jass-code is my fault basically. I have been yelling out LOUD and even LOUDER that any bug should be reported to me and i will take care of it. Please send me an email with the bugs you found and with a short description what you do and how Jass failed and how i can reproduce it. I will take care on this.
3.) You are not paying 6000 L$ for an unstable incomplete program with many bugs. We decided to provide early access because many (realy many!) users have asked for it.
– Indeed the basic features are available and they work stable on all platforms (also on the Mac) as far as we can see.
– You get Magic with the bundle to compensate that primstar-2 is not fully featured yet.
– You certainly get support. I know at least 2 people in the blender jass/primstar chat group who will give any possible help.
– You get tutorials for dowload in HDI which might not be such a big advantage but still nice to have.
– You will get the final release when it is ready.
But all of what i have written down here is only an offer. Feel free to decide on your own. It is just fine to keep with any older or newer versions of the software as long as it serves your needs. And Jass-magic and Pro are under active maintenance too.
johnn says: “(…) UNSTABLE with many bugs and for sure with many FUTURE bugs… (…) NONE of this is working well (…) is STILL after YEARS UNSTABLE.”
The first time I read it thought you were talking about your macintosh… Made me doubt if you have paid for it… I wouldn’t either in the terms you have put it.
You are confusing Primstar developed by Domino Marama with Jass and sub-versions developed by the Machinimatrix Team based on Domino Marama’s code. Your comments are pretty obscure and lack absolutely of any real fact. I have been part of Primstar’s development for a long by now and it’s not unstable at all in fact it’s pretty much stable nowadays and it was previously to me and probably most of us who really know how to use it.
Again, I repeat, the price is reasonable not only for the work it represents to get the code done but also due to the features it would bundle, honestly, I haven’t heard of any other package or application offering such functionalities.
Cheers!
May i add that i have mentioned to pay 1000 L$ for each new bug found in Jass Pro/Magic? See the last chapter of this page: https://www.avalab.org/support/
So far i have been reported 2 bugs (within the last 3 months), where one bug was due to a wrong functioning vendor in the jass-shop and the other bug was a glitch in the jass-magic previewer which BTW also would have appeared in Primstar if it HAD a previewer. All other “problems” have be recognized as “wrong usage” issues and there are far less such issues wth Jass-magic than with the other products because Magic contains an auto correction tool.
Again: ANY BUG FOUND IN MAGIC should be reported to me. I can not fix anything i do not know about!
With Primstar 1.x we had to use tkinter to get the GUI we wanted. Unfortunately, the tkinter implementation itself was buggy on Macs and Windows 64 bit. With Primstar 2, we are only using the GUI features provided by Blender itself. This means that if Blender 2.5x is running cleanly on your system, then Primstar 2 will as well.
Will it always be bug free? Probably not, Blender is a moving target, I’ve already had to rewrite sections as the Blender API changed. What will be happening is that with each Blender release, we’ll be branching Primstar, so there should always be a version that works with a particular Blender release.
I do have a little bit of sticker shock after looking at the price but I do agree that for what we get its not that expensive really. I do have one criticism though, would have been nice if you had posted either URLs or SLURLs of where to buy it in the announcement.
There will be another note about how to get access to the software when we are ready to go. For now it is only an announcement that we will make it accessible “shortly after release of blender 2.57” which will be hopefully in a few days. (Primstar-2 relies heavily on a few patches which just have been added to blender and we still wait for a few more bugfixes, so this is realy early access 😉