Sculpties Made Simple: App makes sculptie making WYSIWIG, drag-and-drop process

Sculpties master Qarl Linden recently passed along this link to Plopp Second Life, an external application that's supposed to make sculptie creation a user-friendly process.  "Also interesting," he adds. "The tool was original a part of Croquet-- but the devs ported it to SL."  I am too much of a building noob to give this a fair evaluation myself, so if you've had experience with it, please share in Comments.

Image credit: SecondPlopp.com.

Update, 10/5:  Some interesting Comments worth reading-- one of the apparent creators of Plopp offers some inside info, while Geuis Dassin gives it a try, and comes away unimpressed.

Comments

[csven]

That looks familiar... same thing?

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

Hmmm... There's a Linux version of Plopp, but not of Plopp SL? What's going on here?

[Michael]

Although Croquet has a painting tool that is based on the same algorithm as Plopp, there is nothing else in common. Plopp is in no way based on Croquet.
We are working on Mac and Linux versions, give us some time.
And donations :-)

Michael

[Geuis Dassin]

Man, I feel bad for saying it, but... I got excited and downloaded this right away. I spent about an hour with it, and unfortunately it really turned me off. I felt like I was playing with a program written from the software division of Fisher Toys. While the interface is very cutesy, its not very usable. There are generic icons to define Ok and Cancel that don't indicate what they are. The drawing tools are sub-par. It took me back to the days of playing with Macpaint in 3rd grade.

[Elle Pollack]

Geuis, it *was* written for the Fisher Price set; Plopp started life as a kids program and is being retrofitted for SL a bit. If you want more sophisticated drawing tools, you can import pictures from about anywhere else, i.e. Photoshop.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

I have a Taiyaki and a metal flower thingy out of SecondPlopp. it's no Sculptypaint, but is IS good for prototyping some sculpty designs...

We can't all be Starax, you know? just being generous here.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

Having said that, I'd really love to see something like a "multi-sculptie" tool in there. SL's limitations make detailing stuff with only one sculptprim hard, and the inflation algorithm used to puff images out isn't good at creating detail in the sculpt itself.

I would love to see a version that allows for different levels of puffing out (approximately) based on pixel values. I do realise this would be dramatically more complicated (it's something that ElectricImage's Amorphium did), but I'd be prepared to actually pay for SecondPlopp if it started reaching that level of ability.

[Torley]

I'm using PloppSL right now; I heard about it early on via fellow Lindens and am enjoying using it. What's really preventing me from being effective are some of the ugly jagged artifacts that happen when importing even relatively simple-looking shapes (e.g., a heart). I hope those can be fixed as it mentions on the website.

Michael's been really helpful to me and I grew up with programs like Kid Pix — the kiddy interface may be a turn-off at first, but I recommend sticking with it and giving it a good try. I just wish I could turn off the sound effects, I really don't need them. :)

/me looks forward to PloppSL getting better, we need easy sculptie creators because the process is still so daunting!

Cheers. ^_^

[Nock Forager]

I love this! Sure, it's too simple to make detailed sculpties, but it's fun! Making something, even if just a sofa cushion, creating is fun! :)

[followmeimthe Piedpiper]

OOh got all exited when I saw this and had to try it. The interface is too simple for its own good ie some words might help but I can live with that. However, the imported sculpties bare no relation to what you see in Plopp and are in fact unuseable :(( What a great shame.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

@followmeimthe:

I don't believe this is really a replacement for more powerful tools, but sometimes, you don't really need much detail.

and attempting to cram tonnes of detail into a 64x64pixel sculptmap is always going to be seriously tricky. Credit SecondPlopp with trying to do it from a purely 2d image right away, and stop savaging it for not having the same quality and flexibility that a full utility like sculptypaint offers: you'll be a tad happier that way.

[Torley]

@Patchouli: I'd value if there was some way where PloppSL could then recognize that it'd be better to have multiple sculpt maps — breaking up a single inflated object into segments — and then letting you import those into SL and position them with a script (similar to the Maya work Qarl did). That would allow more creative freedom and preserve a greater degree of quality detail.

[Vlad Bjornson]

I've been having fun with PloppSL and thought it might make a good subject for my first tutorial. So I made this casual, walk-through style video where I explain what all the buttons do and show you what you need to do to turn your 2D drawings into 3D sculpted prims.

You can see the video here:
PloppSL Video Tutorial

I agree that the sometimes jaggy edges can be a bit frustrating, and I'm hoping that the creators of the program will continue to work on the project. I've had some success creating an initial shape in PloppSL then importing the sculptmap into Wings3D for further editing.

Torley: Exporting multiple sculptmaps from separate parts of the drawn image is on the PloppSL to-do list, so there may be hope for this feature in the future.

From the website:
ToDo list for PloppSL

* improvement of the conversion to Sculpted Prims
* sculpture preview within PloppSL
* see how your sculptures will look in SecondLife™
* automatic generation of sclupties for each part in the original image
* currently we only support closed models without holes

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

I hope that this project does well... the thought that there's a program for free with a UI designed to be usable by children that makes it easy to create sculpted prims--or even just first-order approximations that you could pull back into another program to refine--kind of gives the lie to the notion of building in SL becoming the province of an elite of 3D design experts, doesn't it?