Rael Delcon has created a plugin exporter for the free Albatross3D modeling software that will allow you to make sculpted prims for free. Albatross looks like  a full-featured modeler and it works on WIndows, BeOS, and Linux. It even has a pretty spiffy Sculpting mode that lets you push, pull, and smooth the vertices of your object.

For now you’ll be limited to starting with a properly formatted sphere, but Rael mentions that there will be more options for cube, cone, etc as work progresses on the plugin. You can find more info about the plugin on the SL Forums and on Rael’s blog.

Great news! Always happy to see another free sculpty tool. :) I’m downloading it now, and I’ll give it a spin tonight.

I think I have mentioned Jason Welsh’s (aka Canned Mushrooms) ZBrush tutorials in the past. Jason has an informative, casual style and I’ve learned more about zBrush from these videos than I have from any other source on the web.

He’s recently updated his zBrush 3.1 tutorials with a whole new set of videos that he’s calling Season 2. These videos cover all sorts of topics like the basics of sculpting with zBrush, creating your own brushes, polypaint vs texture, and zSpheres. These videos are not specific to creating sculpted prims for SL, but they’re a great resource for anyone who wants to learn about zBrush.

You can find all of these videos on his Veoh channel. For folks outside the US who can’t use Veoh, you can find downloadable versions of the vids on this ZBrush Central Forum thread, or on Jason’s website.

I was sloggin’ through the SL Forums a couple of days ago and came upon a question about free ways to paint textures directly onto a sculpted prim. It sort of jogged my memory and I looked up a program I remember hearing about a few months ago called Blacksmith3D. I’m glad that I looked it up again, because it turns out there is a free version of the 3D painting application that you can use to paint directly onto your sculpted prims.

This free program is a ‘lite’ version of their regular 3D painting app, but it’s is fully functional and there’s no time limit. There are no modeling functions in this version, but you could look into other free options like WIngs3D or Blender to round out your free sculpty creation workshop. Definitely worth a look if you are looking for free sculpty texturing options.

I’ve noticed comedian Drew Carey’s name pop up several times in the SL press lately. Seems like he has become an active member of our community. Here’s a sort of video introduction to SL that he has created for Reason.tv.

This is a pretty well balanced presentation of our virtual world. I really like the fact that he is talking to real, active residents and focusing on many aspects of SL - not just sex and virtual adultery.

“Most of all Second Life is a massive social experiment, and the people who come here form all kinds of communities.” I think this is the best one sentence description of SL that I have read recently. :)

GreenerBusiness 2.01: Virtual Environments from GreenerBusiness on Vimeo.

Here’s a short documentary/report on the use of video games and virtual worlds as support platforms for environmental change.  “Second Life can be one of many tools that helps give other people that insight that there’s something beyond ourselves that’s worth preserving.”

They also discuss a nifty edu-game called Venture Arctic that teaches about environmental issues and values while you play. Very nice to see virtual worlds being discussed in a postive, proactive way.