Croquet Edit and Create 3d Objects

Howard Stearns recently replied to a question from Mathieu. I thought I’d reproduce his response here. Howard gives a lot of very good information about Croquet support for third party tools….

On Dec 30, 2006, at 7:17 AM, Mathieu van Echtelt wrote:

> Hello,
>
> It’s vacation time, and I’m having fun exploring croquet.
>
> I downloaded last version from opencroquet.org. (SDK 1.0 beta)
>
> Some beginners questions I have:
>
> 1. I would like to edit and create 3d objects as a ‘user’ not as a
> developer, but can’t find the appropriate tools. Found some articles
> which are mentioning Wicket and EditObject3D. Are these the tools to
> use? How to start these? It looks like they are not in the image I
> downloaded, and I can’t find any Monticello package which would
> include these.

Croquet chief architect and Wicket author has a commercial company called Qwaq.

There are a lot of good non-collaborative tools for making 3D objects, including 3D Studio Max, Blender, Maya, Poser, SketchUp, etc. The Croquet SDK includes a reader for the .ase files produced by 3D Studio Max, and the Contrib library includes a reader for .vrml and one for Wavefront’s .obj. The latter is used by Poser, which also puts out .bvh motion files that the Contrib code can read. (Some of the above tools can read other formats and produce one of these the supported formats.)

The SDK also includes a Morphic-based TPainter that lets you (non-
collaboratively) sketch and color a 2D shape that it inflates to a 3D shape for you and puts it into the space. [also see TAvatarPainter]

The Wisconsin package in the repository also has a block-world way of collaboratively and incrementally building things from within the space. You create and size blocks or other shapes created through the above approaches, and then paste textures onto them and paste the shapes onto each other. (This is roughly similar to the in-world building tool of Second Life.) The same package lets you drag in pictures or .ase shapes into Croquet from your desktop.

One issue with creating (or placing and arranging) stuff in-world is keeping them for another day. The SDK provides some developer-level tools for taking a #snapshot of a given world and resurrecting it later. Another approach is to just connect to a space that is “up”
and which never completely goes “down”. Which brings you to your next question…

>
> 2. Is there running a croquet server where I can connect to to play
> around?

Not yet. The above-mentioned Wisconsin package in the repository is set up to let folks do that, but it still needs some debugging and tuning. Stay tuned…