Total disappointment with Avastar

[Yardie London]

I will probably get my account removed from the forum for speaking what I see it true. Most of us end up buying software from the money that we work hard to get. In my case 12 hours of standing, loading and unloading machinery to earn the £22:00 that I paid for Avastar. A lot of the time the videos have information that is incorrect. When I have experimented with Blender and Avastar I have often found solutions. Just to show you what I am talking about I tried the Giants and Tines tutorial and found some fundamental errors. For a start selecting all the mesh parts and exporting is what it shown in the video. But when you do this you can not apply skin texture to the mesh. I However found a way of uploading and with the added ability to apply skin textures. The videos do not show this and when every I offer the advice it is ignored or my comments removed. Most of the tutorials go of on tangents and are hard to follow. In the Tines video tutorial  a totally unnecessary and complex  procedure is used to get the avatars feet to be level with the ground. When I upload an avastar mesh body to SL I fix the avastar feet to level with the ground just by using the -> Edit shape - then I used the Hover slider to level the feet. Yeah I used to get maddened when I used the some process over and over to do some thing that never goes right and then even madder when I am presented with a simple solution. So in the end I choose to grow up and listen to other peoples solutions no matter how simple they are because often the simple solutions work. Since the fitted mesh version of avastar was announced they seems to be a constant daily new version of the addon being available to download. Their is not coherent notes on what has changed. Only one version has ever produced usable results in SL and I should have kept to it. However the new version of Firestorm does not support that file any more for fitted mesh.

I recently tried to point out in the video about the "Issues with official fitted mesh blend file" that the problem shown with the upload to SL might have more to do with Firestorm not being compatible with the blend file used. I found this out from someone that had used the same file but uploaded their mesh using the SL viewer. It makes sense for SL to make their viewer compatible with a file they made for themselves 1st than to make it compatible with Firestorm. Other viewers it appears are working well with the SL Blender file. And I feel Avastar  are making to many unnecessary updates to the addon and giveing no clear documentation. I also think the new Firestorm has not been made compatible to any of the Avastar  addons that I have been painfully trying. So my next step is to start using the alternative viewers to Firestorm. For all we know making fitted mesh work with Firestorm might never happen.

[Gaia Clary]

Hi;

I am very sorry about your case and actually i even can understand your complaints. I am not trying to give an excuse for this. However please let me briefly answer your post to explain why things are as they are (as i see it). You find my detailed answer on our Blog at: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2014/03/15/state-of-avastar-1-1/

About Avastar

• Avastar 1.1 is not yet released.
• Avastar documentation is for Avastar-1.0
• Testversions are for testing new features.

About the Videos:

• yes, many videos are very outdated, i am sorry for this.
• The Tinies and Giants is on my list for a complete rework (among many others as well).

About issues with official fitted Mesh blend file:

• We have added a fix for this into Blender 2,70 (Avastar never had this issue).
• The official linden lab zip file does not yet contain the updated blend file that works with Blender 2.70
• You can get a working version from http://blog.machinimatrix.org/fitted_mesh_survival_kit/

About customer care:

• We are open for any feedback positive as negative.
• I am not aware of having dropped any complains from anywhere. I never do that, except...
• In Youtube sometimes complaints get removed actually because i remove an outdated video.

What currently goes on with Avastar:

A few weeks ago we found an issue with the presentation part of Avastar, that creates a wrong display when you try to use the Avastar slider system together with your own custom fitted meshes. The visualisation of classic weighted meshes is almost precise except 2 locations around the mouth and the left foot. There is currently no other serious issue (of which i know) with the software.

Our aim is to let the Avastar character in Blender behave as close as possible to how the SL Avatar behaves in SL. That is i am testing for the exact same behaviour on the level of vertex locations, to provide a consistent solution that works for any given shape, for fitted mesh as well as for classic weighting, for female and for male, and also for your non human meshes.

We will release Avastar-1.1 only after we have reached a visual compatibility for all situations and after the documentation is updated. Right now the fitted mesh visualisation in Blender works "almost" good for female, not so good for male, and certainly not good enough for me. And i am picky about this. Therefore i try to understand what causes the visualisation issue and how i can fix it.

[Gaia Clary]

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Yardie London wrote:

For a start selecting all the mesh parts and exporting is what it shown in the video. But when you do this you can not apply skin texture to the mesh. I However found a way of uploading and with the added ability to apply skin textures. The videos do not show this and when every I offer the advice it is ignored or my comments removed.

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I am very interested in your solution because i tried so often to find a workaround for this and always failed. So if you have a way to upload textures together with rigged mesh then please please tell your solution here !

[Yardie London]

Ok 1st of all thank you for asking as I also need to document my work with Avastar. The uploading of the of the mesh is the easy part. The problem is I have I have agiant body shape on SL and I am not sure which version of Blender or avastar I used.

But anyway here goes the theory.

1) after you open Blender go to the add menu and add a fresh Avastar rig. Don't delete the cube. Instead use the move tool to move it away from the rig. Then position it and scale it so it is the same hieght as the rig.

2) Pleasr note this is next step works only with the latest versions of Blender and Avastar.

a) make sure the cursour and origion of the rigg are at x=y=z=0

b) then Right click the Avastar rig.

c) hit S to go into scale mode and then scale the rig to your deiserd size. Note the cube will give you an idication of how tall your rig is going to be against a normal avatar.

3) Next Right click Select all the mesh parts, This should the Both Eyes, Eyelashes, Head, Upper Body and Lower Body ( that is all in total 6 mesh parts

4) then in the Export to Second Life panel make sure the Apply Armature scaling and Apply Rotation and Scaling boxes are ticked. Leave the other tick boxes as they are. see image 

5) then left click the Collada(avastar) (.dae) button or go to File -> export menu and choose Collada(avastar) (.dae)

6) once in the Export page you should see the same Export to Second Life panel at the bottom left of the page with the same boxes ticked.

7) give you file a name making sure you have the dae extention at the end of the name.

8) Once your load up Firestrom and are logged on to SL Go to the build menu and upload and then select mesh/ modle .

9)Find your mesh and click the OK button

10) Then below the Preview Panel tick the Skin Weight box. You mesh rig should go onto the rest pose

11) then in the "This Model represents" drop down choose the "Avatar Shape"

 

12) Next switch to the Upload Options Panel.

 

Tick the Include skin weight and Include joint positions tick boxes.

13) Cick the Calculate weights & fee button

14) once the calculations is done and your happy you can then click the upload button.

15) once you have your rig in your inventory click it to wear on an avatar that you have prepared to test the rig.

16) once you have the rig on your avatar Left click your avatar and choose edit Outfit

 

Then take your mouse coursur to the icon that looks like gear wheel.

17) go to New Body Parts and then select New Shape

18) once your in the new shape panel you can use the sliders to adjust the avatars feet level from the ground. You may wish to make other adjustments but they will be limited.

19) Give the shape a name and you should see the new shape in your envontory with the shapes icon. You can now delete the mesh shape you uploaded as you will not need it any more.

20) your avatar will now look long and spaggeti like because it does not have the right body mesh.

 

21) Next go back into Blender and Select any one of the mesh parts. 

22) Split yout screen  and make one of the screens the UV editor.

23) in the 3d view switch to edit mode and then hit 'a' on your 

[Coby Foden]

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Yardie London wrote:

 

For all we know making fitted mesh work with Firestorm might never happen.

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Umm... what do you mean by that?

 

I have the latest, just recently released, Firestorm (version 4.6.1) installed and fitted mesh works perfectly. I have tried some fitted mesh clothes using this Firestorm version, and yes fitted mesh does work in it.

 

[Yardie London]

Are you using Avastar to make your mesh. I tried the last testversion and the slilders do not work on Blender. with the other versions the uploaded mesh turened the avatar into a mess. It would help more to know how you got your mesh to work because at the moment  it's hit and miss with Avastar. I might need to reinstall Blender and find a version of Avastar that works. Mabye the 1-1-998_blender-2-65. I might have swapped and changed to many times that Blender is confused

[Gaia Clary]

Import with Joint Positions

Please note that importing a fitted mesh with joint positions seems to be utterly broken, even when you try to import the Collada files provided by LindenLab. This isue is not related to avastar nor to Blender. This is an inability of SL as far as i can tell. From your image i see you try to import with Joint positions...

Avastar sliders for Custom meshes

I guess that your issue with the latest Avastar is due to an improvement that still needs a bit of tweeking its user interface before its usage becomes "intuitive". Here is the issue:

When you hit the "Fitted Mesh" Preset, then earlier versions of Avastar have reset whatever weights have been on the Mesh and added a set of default weights (actually a copy of the SL Avatar weights). This resulted in lots of complaints from users who actually wanted to keep their existing weights intact.

So i changed the default behaviour to keep the weights and only activate the Collision Volumes as Deform Bones. Now this leads to complaints from users who actually want to just start with an initial weight set.

So what you will do in the current version of Avastar is this:

 

• Press the button "Fitted Mesh" as before
• Then in the Operator panel (at the bottom of the tool shelf) locate the "Weight" Option. From within this option select whatever weights you want to see on your mesh. Most probably you will want to MOVE your existing weights to the collision volumes, or you want to generate fresh weights from your AVASTAR.
• Below the weight option you find a button "Generate weights" Which generates presets weights for the collision volumes for BUTT, HANDLES, PECS, and BACK bones.

Now you can attach the sliders and all should work. However as i pointed out the sliders still suffer from some unprecisions. I am working on a fix for that. But in principle all works with an "acceptable" precision, but its not yet perfect.

I hope that helps a bit. And as i pointed out before, all of this has not yet been documented because it is still changing.

[Yardie London]

The steps I showed are not for making a fitted mesh they are for making a giant avatar. What I was pointing out was the creating of the body shape for your mesh parts. I was really just experimenting to see what would work. The theory being to recreate the Avastar rig used in Blender in SL as your body shape in SL. So hopefully the mesh clothing you make with the same rig in Blender will fit your Giant or tiny rigged body parts in SL. But the only way to see if my steps work is to try them. I had tried uploading with all the possible options. I will however try the suggestions you have made in your reply to my post in the latest test version for fitted mesh.

I was going to suggest removing the Belly deform bone used for the changing belly size as both bone envelops create a distortion that is hard to smooth out. However I will be trying to make the fitted mesh with no weights from the Belly deform bone. I think the Pelvis bone should be able to do the job better on it's own to give a smoother belly shape when it is enlarged.

The fitted mesh might work better with fewer deforming bones in the hip and belly area. This is because I think one bone should be enough to make the belly larger or smaller while also changing the love handles. Just a theory ok no big deal.

[Gaia Clary]

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I only wanted to point out that since Fitted mesh seems broken when you try to import with joint positions, then this is relevant also for making giants and tinies. this is because for those avatars to work as intended, you MUST import with joint offsets. But if your mesh also uses Collision Volumes, then you will get a mess when you wear that in SL. I had the impression that this was part of your issues...

however, for now i believe that the only way you can make giants or tinies is by using the normal (classic) SL bones. And keep fitted mesh bones (the collision volumes) out of your giant or tiny.

If that is not relevant to your point, then please apologize. then i misunderstand your issue. I just try to figure what possibly could go wrong in your case.

[Yardie London]

I finally got to upload a fitted mesh dress to SL using Firestorm. I made the mesh in one version of Avastar not sure which one probably the avastar-1-1-938_blender-2-64 version. But I did a final test and upload using avastar-1-1-998_blender-2-65.

The shape sliders worked OK. The only problem is when breasts or torso muscles are made bigger the actual mesh moves further away from the body mesh. With small enlarging say Breast size is 65 on the size slider the breast area looked OK. With the low cut top part of the dress showing half the breast the dress looked OK with the buoyancy set to lowest value. The dress mesh even reacted will to low values of the SL physics. The scaling issue might have something to do with me havening used different versions of the avastar test versions. So not I feel tempted to stick with the avastar-1-1-998_blender-2-65 version for at least a month. That is how long it should take me to make a decent mesh I guess.:smileyhappy:

[Eleanora Newell]

Yardie, with regards to working with the sliders, have you seen Gaia's new video on fitted mesh workflow with Avastar 1.1?

The latest avastar test version (as of 03/20/14) is 1-1-1024.

[Yardie London]

Yes I have and I have tried the 1-1-1023. addon. My original complaint was that the addon was being updated nearly everyday without any update information on what is new in the change. This new update only

 Removed the obsolete refresh shape button 

Also many of the updates were not being supported by Firestorm. Some creators have being making fitted mesh that works on SL for sometime but they have been using Avastar or Firestorm. So I was pointing out that it was frustrating to work with an addon that had current update documentation. I have to admit I would not have been able to get the 1-1-1023 addon to work with the sliders had I not watched the video. However I have only been using the 1-1-1023 for a day and I am not sure if I should switch to the 1-1-1024 without further information on what has changed. Thanks for the reminder anyway M8.:matte-motes-wink:

[Gaia Clary]

The reason why there have been so many recent updates was mostly because a few users are actively helping to test the ongoing development. There have been days where i uploaded 3 or 4 new versions even, in parallel to online discussions about a feature or bug.

And to point this out again: we have still not released and there are more changes to come because the workflow has turned out to be too clumsy.

About version 1024: While making the video with vesion 1023 i have seen that one button appears twice. That's why i removed the obsolete button right after i finished the video.

About the quality of the product: We are still testing and there might still be issues and it is still not released. But at least i am confident that we can provide a new release candidate soon (well, ok, when it is ready...)

[Yardie London]

I am actively testing the addon and I would like to be able send feedback. I can't remember which forum to report to

[Gaia Clary]

• The chat group is "blender avastar".
• You can takk to Eleanora Newell
• or send notecards to me
• or email to gaia.clary@machinimatrix.org

We had a forum but it was deactivated a while back because it was not good enough. We will have a new forum soon (i hope)

Please note: There are issues with male characters (we found a few today ... grrr...)

[Medhue Simoni]

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Yardie London wrote:

Also many of the updates were not being supported by Firestorm. Some creators have being making fitted mesh that works on SL for sometime but they have been using Avastar or Firestorm.

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First, you are wrong. Totally wrong. Firestorm is only now released with versions that support Fitted Mesh. 2nd, why the heck would you complain that a 3rd party viewer doesn't work with another 3rd party tool. LL makes SL, not Firestorm. LL makes the official viewer. That is what you should use if you want to use the latest toys, not some 3rd party viewer that is generally months behind the official viewer. I don't normally use Firestorm, but I do have correspondence with some of those people and a month ago they were asking me for fitted meshes to use for testing. They barely had a working dev version a month ago.

[Medhue Simoni]

Hey Gaia,

I'll just mention, what I think is a bug, a problem I've been seeing with long sleeve shirts. With both classic rigging and fitted mesh, when I attach the mesh to the sliders, the forearm sections of the mesh stretches. This happens on both male and female avatars. I've tried everything to correct it. I made body suits for both male and female avatars to more easily transfer my weights to other clothing items, but both body suits are having issues with the forearms.

[Gaia Clary]

hmm... Thanks for pointing at this problem... Well, so its time to get to the next step and achieve compatibility on the Wireframe level. And i won't give up before this gets a precise tool (although i was warned that this would not be easy to achieve :matte-motes-impatient: )

[Medhue Simoni]

Well, I think Avastar is an amazing product, with a support group to match. You've done so much with the avatar, I'm going to start using it for characters in some animated videos that I want to make. With all the expressions and options, the avastar figure should be fun to use in animated videos. Kudos Gaia!!!

[Yardie London]

I really do not know why you are commenting like this. But I am talking from experience. 34 days ago I bought fitted mesh boobs. A few people that saw them said they were impressed. Then someone else told me my avatar looked a mess and I should remove the boobs and alpha mask. I obviously thought they were a gerifer as SL has so many of them.

The next day another 2 people told me my avatar looked a mess and I had something stretching from chest area to the floor. One of then took and snap shot and sent it to me. It was then that I asked them what version of Firestorm they were using. They said they were still on the Beta version. A lot of people do not both to update. So please do not continue this conversation they way you are because you are introducing side issues and going completely of the plot an making me very angry. I am trying to give feed back on technical issue and I hate having to get side tracked . You have your own issues and you can address them  to the appropriate people. Every one has there own kind of experience whatever viewer they are using so please do not make me out to be some kind of idiot because I pointed out some facts you are have not come across. NUFF SAID. This argument is redundant.

[Yardie London]

When you list blender avastar chat group are you refering to a group in SL. and By Notcard do you mean send you a Notcard in SL?. I try and avoid groups because of the random IM's that pop up. But it looks like I will have to rejoin the group if that is the case.

[Gaia Clary]

The SL chat group "blender avastar" is where most information flows. This is my own support chat group for online help (for blender in general as well as for our own addons). We have a couple of very knowing people in that group who are normally very helpful and friendly.

We use group notices for announcing important information about our products (for our customers, not for making advertisement), and sometimes (rarely) we spread news about topics that are not directly related to our own work but we feel are worth to be mentioned via group notices.

However if you choose to not join the group you still can send IM to me, send me an SL Notecard, or even email me. But then you need to poke me (please gently) once in a while because i am always short of time :matte-motes-impatient:

There are other SL chat groups like for example "Blender Users" and "Blender dev" where you also can get a lot of basic and advanced information.