how to rig long dress to respond in sl to avs movements?

[megadude Frenzy]

Hi Im new to sl content creation, have been a 3d modeller animator for a few years now. Im trying to learn how to rig long loose fitting cloting to respond to an avs movements in sl? any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated and ty in advance

[Lindal Kidd]

If you're making mesh clothing (modeling it in Blender, for example), it can be rigged to the avatar skeleton to bend and move.  It will not, however, be flexible and move like realistic cloth.

Ordinary prims created with the Second Life building tools can be made flexible.  Actually, they only appear flexible; flexiprims take advantage of your graphics card to produce their flex effect.  A skirt can be made out of a ring of slightly overlapping flexiprims.

Flexi skirts move and sway quite realistically.  But they have one serious drawback.  There's no avatar/cloth collision system in SL.  So, when your avatar sits, the skirt hangs straight down and your legs stick out.  A partial solution to this is use of "glitch pants," a pants clothing layer with the same texture as the skirt.  Except in extreme cases (like sitting) it appears that the cloth is draping over your legs, when in fact your leg is poking through the skirt.

The better SL clothing designers mix mesh, clothing layers and flexiprim attachments to create quite lovely and realistic clothing, using each type of object to do what it does best.