You’ve visited Sansar and gone Atlas Hopping with Drax. So, you know how to walk and get around. What about the building tools?
Start with Managing your Scenes and Experiences to understand how your ‘region’ will be made public and allow others in. In Second Life™ we change settings to keep people out. In Sansar, we change settings to let people in. I suppose that difference has profound philosophical design implications…
Sansar has a My Experiences App. At first, I thought this was something else to download. It isn’t. The app is built into the main viewer, which consists of an update app, a login app, and the viewer app that chain together to look like a single app.
Sansar Atlas Page 2017
If you haven’t found them yet, the release notes appear here: Sansar > Sansar News and Announcements > Release Notes. There is a wealth of reference material in the July notes.
There are also tutorials or an online manual here: Creating in Sansar. I’ll point out people are asking me how to build in Sansar. I am curious too. Google was not helping. The pages I list here are not coming up in Google, which explains a lot of the problem. Oddly they pop up first in Bing and Yahoo searches. For those tired of censored search content and user tracking, there is always DuckDuckGo.com, where Sansar searches also work.
You can see the +CREATE button peeking out from behind Steam trying to connect to my Gear VR, which has problems with Sansar I have yet to sort out.
Over to the left, you see a link for My Experiences. You’ll only see Experiences there if you have published an experience.
Sansar Creation
Clicking the button you are presented with the opportunity to create an experience. If you already have, it will be shown here. If you have already created an ‘Experience’ they will be listed here. When you click this second CREATE button you have a choice of worlds to start with. Sort of basic templates.
Sansar Creation Choices
Pick one, name it, and it magically springs into being. Let there be light… well, not quite. You get a link to your new world.
Sansar Create It
Resulting in…
Your List of Experiences
You’ll notice the four icons at the bottom of the Experience link. In left to right order:
- Edit scene
- Visit experience
- Edit Atlas Info
- More options
- Link to another scene
- Rename scene
- Delete experience/scene
- Copy URL
The free accounts get 3 Experiences. Where published or not these Experiences count against the limit.
Selecting Edit scene brings you to the building tools.
The Scene in EDIT Mode 2017
Here the desktop-mouse gets funky but is usable.
Control-left-click and drag up and down to zoom in and out, drag left and right to pan. Also, the A, W, S, D, and arrow keys move the camera.
Right-click and drag to rotate the camera.
I haven’t read the manual yet… I’m winging it… experimenting…
You can open your inventory and double click an item to jump the camera to it. With a little experimenting, you’ll get control of the camera.
Uploading
Once you can edit a scene you need to put stuff in it. So, what about uploading? The instructions, step-by-step, are here: Uploading items in Sansar.
What can we upload? These file types:
There is no animation or texture upload… Is this in the FBX? I’ll have to experiment.
Things like lights, audio, and interactive are the system objects. Interactive is the spawn point, or for SL users the landing point.
More pages, link below…
Animation import support is coming soon.
https://help.sansar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003987283-Meeting-Notes-August-04-2017
That how-to link may just be simplified upload instructions excluding materials/textures stuff. Textures are part of the mesh uploads. Don’t know if they’ll make them an independent thing like in SL. Hoping they also add material assignment into the object properties post-upload as well. Here’s a link for materials stuff.
https://help.sansar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003259646-Materials-editing-and-shaders
In regards to CS scripts… I really do hope they consider having a built-in script editor within Sansar that allows you to see common code hints, error check, compile and actually test the script on-the-fly while in your layout (or scene edit) mode. I think having a similar workflow much like in SL helps productivity when trying to learn Sansar’s C# API and how that scripts works in-world. The current external editing, upload, seeing how it works in-world, then rinse/repeat can be a tedious process when trying to learn something.
Thank you for the links :))
Write, upload, compile, run, and repeat is tedious.