Avastar, making a Mesh Avatar?

[Amphei Jierdon]

I bought Avastar exported my shape from SL, created a mesh of my SL-ava and uploaded and wore it on Aditi beta grid. Everything worked nicely, and I really start, getting a fan of Avastar - thanks Gaia :)

 

But when i applied my skin, I did discover transitions between the head-mesh and the upper-body and between upper-body and lower-body. I'm rather sure, the meshes are correct. I applied a blank texture and took photos and marked the transitions with red arrows: 

I know, the difference of brightness depends on the environment-light. It really doesn't look good. Next thing I will try, is joining the meshes of head, upper and lower body, but I don't know, if this is a good idea :o

 

Anybody got any ideas, how I get rid of these transitions?

[Amphei Jierdon]

OMG! When I joined the meshes, my boobs collapsed and other weird things happened. So this really seems to be no good idea. I suspect, the boneweights get totally deranged by joining the meshes. 

But I took a closer look at the normals in the transition area. It seams, at the border between head and upper body, the normals of the mesh-faces don't point in the same direction, so this maybe might cause the different reflection of light... but I don't really know. 

[freston]

Hi Amphei,

The reason we havent joinned the meshes is that it would break all the shape code (may explain your boobs collapsing ). If you want to do this I'd freeze the meshes first which removes all the shape morphs, then join them together. This will lock in the shape, which you still have to wear inworld. I think you would also have to redo the UV maps so wouldn't be able to use normal skin textures, though you might get away with creating a new UV map that has all the usual ones stacked one above the other and do the same for the skin texture.

Another idea: with a mesh set to smooth, it's the vertex normals not the face normals that are used, so maybe matching the vertex normals for the overlapping vertices along the boundaries might be all you need to get smooth shading ... I'll play with this too and see if it works.

[Gaia Clary]

The reason why you see the seams is that the imported mesh is made out of 3 independent objects with normals calculated independently from each other. I guess that the SL Avatar uses modified normals to fix that (just guessing).

You have 2 options to fix that:

 

Keep with the SL Avatar (Do not use a mesh character)

This is the recommended fix if your character has been made by importing the shape from SL (via new archetype.xml) and you only have used the Avastar shape sliders on the model (you have NOT edited the mesh and you have NOT edited the armature). In that case the shape that you used in Avastar can be recreated with the shape sliders in world. There is no need to upload the character mesh.

typical usage scenarios:

 

• You only make character attachments for the SL Avatar.
• You only make skin textures or texture based clothing for the SL avatar

 

Merge the 3 body parts:

This is the recommended if you have edited the Avastar character mesh or the Avastar armature (or both). ( Or if you use your very own character instead of the Avastar character of course, but the following applies only to mesh characters derived from the Avastar character.)

In this case you will have to do:

 

• (optional) if you want to preserve the UV mapping for head/upper/lower on your final character, then you have to assign a separate material to each of the body parts which you want to join. Just assigning a new material will do, but also see Avastar - 2- : Add cloth textures for details
• go to object mode
• Select all parts of the mesh that you want to join. typically you will select only head, upper body and lower body here.
• in the tool shelf locate the "Custom mesh" section.
• in the Freeze Mesh tab enable the check box "Hide original mesh"
• now "Freeze Selected"
• with all parts still selected, do: Object -> join
• go to edit mode
• "w" -> remove doubles

The resulting mesh object contains only one single mesh and it has no seams. It also will contain exactly the needed SL bones. It is attached to the rig and fully weighted. However it does NOT contain any shape keys, so it will no longer react to the Avastar shape sliders. (But see my tip top tool tip 1 for a trick how you can get them back

Furthermore if you have assigned separate materials to the different body parts (see first step above), then the resulting character now contains 3 texture faces which can be texturised with the SL skin textures. (Warning: The collada exporter in Avastar-500 only supports one single texture face. This limitation will be removed as soon as possible).

This may look complicated, but its realy only a matter of a few mouse clicks once you have understood the workflow.

[freston]

Might be possible to fix this though it would require some trickery:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?246027-Vertex-Normal-editing

would only be applicable at export time ...

Would there be much need for this kind of fix? See Gaia's suggestions.

[Amphei Jierdon]

Thanks for the help... atm, I don't really know, how I will solve this, because I'm still learning. But I'm happy, that I now know, what is the reason for those different light reflections. 

[Dora Gustafson]

Thank you very much for this work flow instructions.
It works well for me:)
I may add: At this time the collada exporter is allowing me to put three SL textures on the three texture faces correctly, the limitation is removed:smileyvery-happy:

[Bhakti Mimulus]

 

Gaia Clary wrote:

The reason why you see the seams is that the imported mesh is made out of 3 independent objects with normals calculated independently from each other. I guess that the SL Avatar uses modified normals to fix that (just guessing).

You have 2 options to fix that:

 

Keep with the SL Avatar (

Do not use a mesh character)

This is the recommended fix if your character has been made by importing the shape from SL (via new archetype.xml) and you only have used the Avastar shape sliders on the model (you have NOT edited the mesh and you have NOT edited the armature). In that case the shape that you used in Avastar can be recreated with the shape sliders in world. There is no need to upload the character mesh.

typical usage scenarios:

 

• You only make character attachments for the SL Avatar.
• You only make skin textures or texture based clothing for the SL avatar

 

Merge the 3 body parts:

This is the recommended if you have edited the Avastar character mesh or the Avastar armature (or both). ( Or if you use your very own character instead of the Avastar character of course, but the following applies only to mesh characters derived from the Avastar character.)

In this case you will have to do:

 

• (optional) if you want to preserve the UV mapping for head/upper/lower on your final character, then you have to assign a separate material to each of the body parts which you want to join. Just assigning a new material will do, but also see
  Avastar - 2- : Add cloth textures
  for details
• go to object mode
• Select all parts of the mesh that you want to join. typically you will select only head, upper body and lower body here.
• in the tool shelf locate the "Custom mesh" section.
• in the Freeze Mesh tab enable the check box "Hide original mesh"
• now "Freeze Selected"
• with all parts still selected, do: Object -> join
• go to edit mode
• "w" -> remove doubles

The resulting mesh object contains only one single mesh and it has no seams. It also will contain exactly the needed SL bones. It is attached to the rig and fully weighted. However it does NOT contain any shape keys, so it will no longer react to the Avastar shape sliders. (But see my

tip top tool tip 1

for a trick how you can get them back

Furthermore if you have assigned separate materials to the different body parts (see first step above), then the resulting character now contains 3 texture faces which can be texturised with the SL skin textures. (Warning: The collada exporter in Avastar-500 only supports one single texture face. This limitation will be removed as soon as possible).

This may look complicated, but its realy only a matter of a few mouse clicks once you have understood the workflow.

---

Gaia,

Would this also work as a means to import my avatar mesh and maintain a pose that I have established in Blender? Currently, if I rez the avatar, it always returns to its T pose. I would like to freeze the avatar in its pose and I do not wish to wear it.

 

Thx,

Bhakti