News Blog

Read all 'user-created content' posts in News Blog
April 27, 2007 4:10 PM PDT

Big change in 'Second Life' design tools

by Daniel Terdiman
  • Post a comment

Designers of Second Life objects have some good news to cheer about this week, namely the implementation of what are called "sculpted prims."

A prim is the basic building block of Second Life, a virtual world that lets anyone create just about any kind of content they want. Until now, all prims began as cubes. You could stretch them to be bigger or smaller or more rectangular, but it was always a cube.

secondlifevoice

Kind of a Lego of sorts.

"A sculpted prim is a prim whose shape is determined by texture--its 'sculpt texture,'" Second Life publisher Linden Lab wrote on one of its official wiki pages. "Sculpted prims can create organic shapes that are not currently possible with Second Life's prim system."

This is big news, because it means professionals can design organic-looking textures and models in 3D modeling software and import them directly into Second Life.

Now, prims can have curved corners, and that's likely to result in much better organic shapes, a design improvement that could well mean more people will be able to design better content for the virtual world.

  • prev
  • 1
  • next
advertisement

15 sites that went kaput in 2009

Web sites launch all the time, but they also shut their doors. We highlight 15 that bit the dust this year.

Top 10 news stories of the decade

Let the debate begin: Was the iPhone more important than iTunes? Was anything bigger than Google finding a great business model? CNET offers its list of the 10 most important stories of the '00s.

About News Blog

Recent posts on technology, trends, and more.

Add this feed to your online news reader



advertisement

Inside CNET News

Scroll Left Scroll Right