Revit, 3D and Second Life
There’s been a lot of talk among my friends about Second Life, an Internet MMORPG environment, otherwise known as SL. I’ve been experimenting with getting 3D geometry into SL. I’ve found other people trying to do it with Sketchup and Blender. The screenshot is from Blender. I came across this article on a Rhino plugin that might be promising;
Rhino has an internal “MeshToNurb” command. This command converts each and every face of the mesh into a Nurbs surface and joins them together. This makes the final solid object complicated and difficult to work with.
Mesh To Solid for Rhino, on the other hand, studies the mesh object and determines the features that define the geometry of the model. It then creates a single trimmed Nurbs surface for a group of mesh faces that collectively define a feature. Finally it joins all the trimmed Nurbs surfaces to form the final solid. The resulting solid contains a far lesser number of faces and is much easier to work with.
Mesh To Solid for Rhino is very easy to use. It adds a new command to Rhino called “MeshToSolid”. Simply type “MeshToSolid” at the command prompt and select the mesh you wish to convert into a solid.
I’d like to try and find a good path to get Revit data into SL. Programming the API is an option, but I think it will give you faces, not solid primitives, like those needed in SL. Rhino might be the best cleanup helper tool. I’ll keep ya posted.
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