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That does help quite a bit. Was having trouble finding a easy and up to date breakdown like that. Might look into MayaStar this weekend.

Glancing through several of those videos it appears that they're about clothing rather than rigging the avatar itself? I saw mentioned in another recent thread that you have to use the default SL skeleton anyway and just move the points around so I guess that kind of partially answers/solves my issue. I was hoping to find a Maya tut to make sure that I would move things around properly and help with making sure the model doesn't distort weirdly when the joints move. Which is the one issue I've been having when I've done small experiments on my own. I suppose I could just make the stuff in Maya and export to Blender for rigging since Blender has so many SL tuts but I'd rather stay in Maya as I prefer its interface...

So for awhile now I've been dancing around the idea of making mesh/fitted mesh avatars for SL. Primarily what I am worried about is rigging, though a tut that walks through building a avatar for SL would be nice as I'm still beginner tier, which leads to my problem. Namely I seem to repeatedly run into an issue where the only tutorials I can find seem to either be for clothing, other objects, or Blender. For example the video link on the wiki (Mesh/Uploading and wearing a rigged mesh page) for Maya on rigging for SL is a dead link. Can anyone point me at Maya oriented tutorials for avatars themselves? Secondly I've come across a Maya plugin called MayaStar. Is this something that would be useful for avatar designing or is it also oriented towards creating clothing? I've got Maya 2013 at the moment.

Very true... I was debating about that as well. I am somewhat stemmied by the fact that I don't have much money to spare between possibly not using any models I purchase myself and especialy if I get the Avastar mod for Blender as its reputed to help with making SL models. Any other people/groups besides DSD you'd recommend to check out?

Very true, I was just curious as to whether there were any oriented towards SL that wasn't just about clothing or rigging. Perhaps another way of phrasing would be is it better to take a model from SL (like the default one), modify the parts, and import it back in? Create the parts separately then import? Stuff like that.

So rather than trawl through the marketplace or hunt through the in-game stores I was interested in possibly creating my own models. Problem is most of the tutorials I'm finding skew more towards creating either objects like furniture or clothing and whatever I can find for the avatar itself is about the rigging. Are there any tutorials slanted towards the actual creation of the avatar models? I'm open when it comes to program, I have Maya and Blender right now for example. Primarily I want to focus on the face/head, the feet/ankles, tails, and maybe wings. In that order.