With the AC3D Tri Creator, you can load almost any 3D model into Second Life.
Watch it in action ("can you see guess what it is yet?"):
How it works A special triangle creator object works inside Second Life and converts an AC3D model into Second Life prims. This means that you can take almost any polygon model and upload it into Second Life.
How to use it You need to get hold of the AC3D Tri Creator object in Second Life. You can get this from:
After you've bought this object (it's free L$0), it will appear in your Second Life Inventory.
In AC3D, load or create your model. It can be anything, and there's no need to triangulate. The diffuse color of each surface material is used too, so you can color your objects before exporting. As there's no need to triangulate (Surface->Triangulate) models before exporting, you can keep working on your polygon models in AC3D. Be aware that models with huge numbers of surfaces will lead to huge numbers of triangles in Second Life.
To export a file ready for theTri Creator, use AC3D's menu File->Export->Triangle. This will create a .tri file.
Start up Second Life and go to a world where you have permission to create objects. A sandbox is fine for testing.
Open up your Inventory and drag a copy of the AC3D Tri Creator object into the world. Don't left-click on it yet.
Right-click the object and select Edit. If you see a 'More >>' button, press it. Press the contents tab.
Right-click on the 'triangles' note and edit it. This is where you will be inserting the box information from your .tri file that AC3D generated. Select all text and delete it. Paste in the full text of the .tri file (you will need to edit this with Notepad (under Windows) or some other text-file viewer. Save this text note and close the edit window to stop editing.
Now you can click on the AC3D Tri Creator and watch your model asemble in front of your eyes!
Notes
Remember, some worlds will have restrictions on the number of prims. Each triangle must be less than 10m in any dimension. The notes have a maximum size which limits the number of triangles you can insert as text. The AC3D Tri Creator object is best for models with a small number of triangles. Many objects can be made more efficiently from a small number of prims- this Tri Creator object should probably not be used in place of this technique 8-).