Tutorial - Rigging & Weighting in Blender with Avastar

[Medhue Simoni]

Just a quick video on how to rig clothing or avatars using Blender with the Avastar addon.

I actually used Blender's video editing to put together this video, which is why the sound is off in the intro. There is also this weird kind of pulsing slight blur, but it's not that annoying and I didn't have time to figure out why and then rerender.

[Stefanosje Sellers]

Great tutorial. I followed Gaia's videos although they were a little hard to follow sometimes due to the text-to-speech explanations.

[Nalates Urriah]

Pretty good video. Thanks.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Stefanosje Sellers wrote:

Great tutorial. I followed Gaia's videos although they were a little hard to follow sometimes due to the text-to-speech explanations.

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Thanks Stefanosje! It's kind of a tough 1, as there are so many things I could show or talk about. The key thing I don't want to do is confuse people tho. That said, I always have a hard time with names and labels, lol. I actually prefer Gaia's videos, just because of the technical nature of them. Plus, I use text to speech all the time, so it's not strange to me.

[Medhue Simoni]

Thanks Nalates!

1 thing that I noticed after I uploaded the video was that few other people have SL tutorials on the subject. Many of them are linked to this video on the side where suggestions are, or at the end of the video where it shows other videos. The few related to SL are not in english. So, my point is, that I would love to see more people doing tutorials. To anyone interested, I will confess that, although I do these video to help people, I also make a little money every month from Youtube/Google. It's not alot, depending on the subject matter, but it is a good incentive to make tutorials. I would especially encourage creators that work in Maya or 3Ds Max to make tutorials, as there aren't many for those.

[Medhue Simoni]

Oh, another thing I want to mention is that this vidoe was recorded using ShadowPlay by Nvidia. It is totally awesome to use to record your desktop, and it doesn't slow down your frame rate much, if any. I know the pulse in the video is not from ShadowPlay, as the video was perfect before I dropped it into the video editor. I will say tho, that I could not drop the video from ShadowPlay into my Sony Vegas video editor, although I could probably find the codex for it. This is why I tried editing the video in Blender, which was not all that enjoyable compared to Sony Vegas. If you have a newish Nvidia card, you should definitely give the Nvidia GeForce Experience a try, which includes ShadowPlay.

[Ssmiles]

Thanks Medhue!  Nice tutorial!  Very helpful.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Ssmiles wrote:

Thanks Medhue!  Nice tutorial!  Very helpful.

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Thanks Ssmiles! I hope so! I'm always afraid that I left out something major, like in this 1 I shoudl have talked about the red to blue nature of weighting, but I think people understand that right away.

[Ssmiles]

I think most folks who know a bit about weighting would get that and if they don't, I'm sure they will ask.

I have a slight request.  How about a tutorial on exactly how you made the wet suit?  I bet it would be REALLY helpful for people new to this.  I know I would appreciate it. 

[Medhue Simoni]

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Ssmiles wrote:

I think most folks who know a bit about weighting would get that and if they don't, I'm sure they will ask.

 

I have a slight request.  How about a tutorial on exactly how you made the wet suit?  I bet it would be REALLY helpful for people new to this.  I know I would appreciate it. 

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Sure, that is an easy enough tutorial, and it is not obvious to do, although it might seem to be. I gotta finish some dang bird flying animation in Unity, and I've been putting it off for days now. It's a contract job for a game, so I can't procrastinate any longer. I just hate having to animate directly in Unity. I'll try to find some time to do the tutorial this week.

[Ssmiles]

Awesome!  Thank you!  And I hope your animation project goes smoothly!  

 

[Gaia Clary]

Hi, Medhue;

I just wanted to mention that i have added a link to your video on our "Avastar, start here..." page. Thanks for this nice contribution

[Medhue Simoni]

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Gaia Clary wrote:

Hi, Medhue;

I just wanted to mention that i have added a link to your video on our "Avastar, start here..." page. Thanks for this nice contribution

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Thank you, Gaia! I'm always happy to help promote such a well made product.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Ssmiles wrote:

I think most folks who know a bit about weighting would get that and if they don't, I'm sure they will ask.

 

I have a slight request.  How about a tutorial on exactly how you made the wet suit?  I bet it would be REALLY helpful for people new to this.  I know I would appreciate it. 

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Here is the link to the thread with the tutorial on how to create a bodysuit.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Tutorial-Create-a-Bodysuit-with-Avastar/m-p/2772856#U2772856

[Ssmiles]

Thanks for that Mehdue.

Quick question (I know, I am full of them) you say at the begining of the tutorial that the body suit is higher poly than the Avastar avatar but when watching the tutorial on the making of the body suit, you said nothing about making the wet suit poly count higher than the Avastar from which it was duplicated.  Am I mssing something here?  Why does the wet suit in the weighting video have a higher poly count?  Does said polly count matter when it comes to weighting?  

(Bear with me, I am new to this.) 
 

[Medhue Simoni]

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Ssmiles wrote:

Thanks for that Mehdue.

 

Quick question (I know, I am full of them) you say at the begining of the tutorial that the body suit is higher poly than the Avastar avatar but when watching the tutorial on the making of the body suit, you said nothing about making the wet suit poly count higher than the Avastar from which it was duplicated

.  Am I mssing something here?  Why does the wet suit in the weighting video have a higher poly count?  And, does the poly count matter in this instance, when it comes to doing the weights

?  

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That's actually a really good question. I didn't show how to do the higher poly version, but I do mention it in the text at the end of the video. I didn't show it, because I wanted that video to be just about how to use the avatar to make clothing from it's body. All that you need to do to make the wetsuit higher poly is to add a Subdivision Surface Modifier to the wetsuit. The other reason I didn't add this to the video, is because I did not want to promote importing high poly models into SL, even tho I might do this for some items. As creators, people can make those decisions on their own, but I didn't want to promote it, cause in most cases, it isn't needed.

After playing around with things as much as I have, I do find that using a much higher poly model to transfer weight is far better than just using the weights for the lower poly SL avatar. Not only is there a big difference, but it saves you a ton of time. Most clothing that you will make is not going to match the SL avatar exactly in polygon density, so transfering weighting from a mesh that is lower poly is not going to give you the best results. It would actually be much better to create a really high poly mesh with the perfect weights, as that will be higher poly than any clothing you would make, and the gradient in the weighting should be much better than from a low poly mesh. Plus, it just makes sense that if Blender has more vertices to match up with your mesh, it will give you a better gradient in the results.

[Ssmiles]

Awesome!  Thanks for the well thought out response and explanation, very helpful!   I kind of figured that higher poly mesh would make for better weighting results but I wanted to ask to be sure.  You also covered my next question which was "Is it okay/will it work to weight lower poly clothes from a higher poly mesh?"  Thanks for clearing that up too.  

Anyway, I figured you made your poly count higher with either subdivision surface or multires (subdivision surface makes my suit look funny for some reason but, as they say, that's another show. )  but I wanted to double check in case I missed something or haven't learned some Blender tool yet.  

Thanks again for the awesome tutorial and explanation!  It is much appreciated!  

[Medhue Simoni]

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Ssmiles wrote:

Anyway, I figured you made your poly count higher with either subdivision surface or multires (subdivision surface makes my suit look funny for some reason but, as they say, that's another show.

)  but I wanted to double check in case I missed something or haven't learned some Blender tool yet.  

 

 

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When you use the subdivision surface modifier, you must make sure all your sharper edges or ends are supported. So, if you have a sharp corner that needs to stick out, you need to add another edge loop to support that corner. On that wetsuit, when I finished the open ends, if I had only left 1 edge loop, then the subdivision surface modifier would collapse that edge, or round it off. I hope that makes sense.