Export Avatar for Modding

[NativeTo]

Hello, I was wondering if there was any way to export my avatar shape, including ears, tail and everything into Blender so that I may use it as a base to make clothes for him?

I read about exporting it to .xml but surprisingly there are like, no scripts for importing .xml into Blender. Anyone got any in-depth walkthroughs? Because I'm just about at my wits' end with this.

 

Thanks!

[NativeTo]

Hello, I was wondering if there was any way to export my avatar shape, including ears, tail and everything into Blender so that I may use it as a base to make clothes for him?

I read about exporting it to .xml but surprisingly there are like, no scripts for importing .xml into Blender. Anyone got any in-depth walkthroughs? Because I'm just about at my wits' end with this.

 

Thanks!

[Sassy Romano]

The avastar plug in will import xml as exported from SL but the export only includes the SL avatar and morphs.  You mentioned a tail, assuming that's an attachment (or ears), they will not be included.

[NativeTo]

Yeah I've looked into avastar and am hoping to find a free plugin. It seems a bit silly to me that you have to pay for a plugin for this sort of thing.

So since ears and tail won't be imported, is there a way to export just the body from SL and import it into Blender so I can make clothes for the specific shape? I see on the market that people make clothing for specific avatars all the time, and it's starting to frustrate me that I can't get it working.

Would the easiest bet be to contact the original author of the avatar and ask for a format that Blender can read natively?

[Sassy Romano]

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NativeTo wrote:

Yeah I've looked into avastar and am hoping to find a free plugin. It seems a bit silly to me that you have to pay for a plugin for this sort of thing.

So since ears and tail won't be imported, is there a way to export just the body from SL and import it into Blender so I can make clothes for the specific shape? I see on the market that people make clothing for specific avatars all the time, and it's starting to frustrate me that I can't get it working.

Would the easiest bet be to contact the original author of the avatar and ask for a format that Blender can read natively?

---

I don't see that it's silly at all that someone has put in a tremendous amount of effort to produce what is probably the single most useful plug-in for blender for use with SL.  It's a small price to pay for a huge amount of functionality.

Good luck contacting the original author of the avatar, I doubt LL even remembers who it is and even if they do, they've probably long since gone and even if they haven't, if they wanted to put out a method for blender to direclty import, they probably would have done long ago.

People who are making things for avatars will use the appropriate tools, there are others such as Avatar workbench http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avatar-workbench/ and another that I can think of but which is no longer actively supported and remains only for an older version of blender.

Choice is out there.

(There is one other thing you *could* do which is to ask someone who owns avastar to import your xml and export you a .obj to model around)

[NativeTo]

Yeah, but we're probably looking at it from two different angles.

And I have a notecard I got from the owner when I bought the av with contact information, so I was just gonna use that.

[Sassy Romano]

If you bought a full mesh avatar then it's a 99.999% chance that the creator won't be readily open to giving you a model to work with in blender.

Since you appeared to be exporting the xml shape of an SL avatar, the above does not apply so now i'm confused as to exactly what it is that you're exporting

If it's an SL avatar, Avastar is your friend unless you can find a friend with Avastar.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

The TOS actually forbids you from exporting any content out of SL other than content you entirely create yourself and own 100 percent of the IP rights for all parts of it, including textures, scripts etc..

The only thing you can export out of SL is your default avatar.  If you didn't create your own shape you couldn't legally export that either.

I would be VERY surprised if the creator of your avatar would give you the files you need to work with it in blender and if they did they would charge you a substantial fee many time more than you paid for it to grant you a license to use it, as essentially they are giving the avatar to your full perm.  You may be the most honest person in the world but, no offense intended,he or she doesn't know you.  What assurances would they have that you wouldn't take it to another grid, mod it and resell it or even just import it back again in your name and sell it with different textures? None.  From their standpoint, to much mischief could occur.

Your best bet it is to create your own avatar in blender from scratch since you know how to use it.  If you aren't advanced enough to do that or don't have the time, hire someone to do it for you.

There is an old version of the Phoenix viewer that was able to export the basic avatar out of SL, I just forgot which one.  Search in the Mesh forum for what version it is and what, if anything, you need to do to convert it to a file usable in blender.  Its been discussed there in the past. Old versions of Phoenix are still available in the Phoenix viewer wiki.

[Aries Hausdorff]

I just ran across this topic.

At this time I am trying to make a 3D printout of my avatars as figures for my cupboard.

So far I got frustrated by programs like avastar which, basically just work with bits of an avatar, and with websites that talk about companies that retreated from SL like 5 years ago.

In the real world we use a series of 2D photos to make a 3d model out of them, or we use a fixed 2-points of view approach plus structured light.

Whilst the structured light approach might be too difficult to handle, I think it should be possible to reconstruct an avatar into a 3D model from a series of pictures. That way, and that's the most important thing I guess, we don't touch the scritps or the inner structures of an avatar, which ought to satisfy the initial designers wishes.