My 3D Enterprise in Second Life

[Malic Tolsen]

I have been working in the free to play game of Second Life.

For 3D work, it is very basic, however, they are working on introducing meshes later this year. When that happens, I will most likely be redoing a lot of what I currently have.

For now everything and i mean EVERYTHING is made using the base primitives that the game offers. (cubes, sphere, cylinders) that due to limits are only allowed to a max size of ten meters. They are supposed to be upping that limit to 64m when they introduce meshes.

This is one of the reasons it has a very faceted look to it.

The other is that the "sim" only allows up to 15000 primitives in it at a time, and this already take up just about 3000 for the outer hull. I will be using sculpts (a very limited mesh in SL) for a lot of interior details.

The hallway I have below is one of my early tests.. I am unhappy with the way it turned out, but it shows what a sculpt can do in SL ( the entire ceiling and wall are considered one primitive)

i also made a couple videos when i was bored

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWlecRjKjG0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdtkl732bik

It is still a major WIP, but anyone can come and see it. If you make an account on the Second fife web site, visit the sim of Vanadiel and you can find it in the air above the ground.

(The little black specks on top of the impulse engine area are myself and a friend of mine, both sized to how tall we are in RL as well, so yeah it is full scale)

 

[Kaiser]

really awesome Ship you got there

 

[GilmourD]

That's freakin' awesome!

 

[Psion]

It is pretty amazing. I spent some time tonight walking around on that ship. It's actually too big for the sim it's on and you can't walk all the way back along the nacelles. It gives you a sense of scale when you stand on the hull and the ship itself becomes the horizon.

A tremendous amount of work went into this project. Some years back, I built a small-scale model of the original Enterprise in SL, within the size limits of the prims. I used a single cylinder for widest part of the primary hull, and that set its diameter to 10 meters. The finished model was fun to look at up in the sky over my property, and I'd frequently do "fly-bys" of it just for fun.

Malic's effort goes way beyond this. He's assembled the hull from smaller plates -- hundreds of them -- carefully arranged to fit together almost seamlessly. The bridge details aren't finished, nor is the detail on the bottom of the primary hull, but enough is done to make the build feel like a complete starship. Peeking in through the hull, I saw he's got the beginnings of the ship's linear intermix stretching from the bottom of the engineering hull up to the impulse deflection crystal and back to the pylons. The split up into the pylons hasn't been built yet.

I can't wait to see this thing finished. I looked around for a donation box, but didn't see one. I'll do a more thorough search and leave a tip when I find it; this build deserves support.

I did get the sense that the primary hull was a bit small or too thick around decks five and six. That could be the camera optics deceiving me, or maybe it was necessitated by cramming a 305 meter-long starship into a 256 meter-wide sim. Regardless, it's still phenomenal.

 

[mattpiper]

I just created a Second Life account to check out this Enterprise. It is remarkable, actually walking around the Enterprise. Much of the cargo bay has been started, and to echo what's been said, it's amazing to get a real sense of scale for this ship. I hope work on it continues.