Avastar and Sparkles? with blender sensei for blender

[Tenly]

okay so Im using blender sensei to get more comfy with blender and have also decided to get avastar. but have a few questions and not sure who to ask. first is there any conflict between sensei and avastar? they are both add ons that change the UI..so Im thinking they can not both be on at the same time? and second question...what benefit is sparkles? I see both on the website. I see that sparkles uses quads instead of triangles. but I thought SL needs the triangles? and I want to create clothes, shoes, feet...is it better to have sparkles or avastar of both? Im kinda confused because I noted someone else asked if sparkles came with avastar so you do not need to buy both...but the question on the website was never answered. so...thinking that Id find themost users of either of these tools here since its all about SL.

[Gaia Clary]

Avastar Adds pannels to the User interface. This is the normal way to add new functions to Blender, so it should be ok when you enable sensei and avastar. If you run into issues, we are available to fix them.

Sparkles is a somewhat independent toolset mostly for riggers. We tried to keep Sparkles independent from Second Life, but at the end we decided to make a tight integration between sparkles and Avastar. So you can see Sparkles as an extension of Avastar.

Sparkle's features are all documented here:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/sparkles/

If you have no idea where and how to use the tools, then you most probably do not need Sparkles at all. But don't get me wrong, Sparkles solves a few esotheric issues and not everybody will run into those problems. So if you don't see its usage for your projects, that is absolutely ok.

Regarding questions on the website: we are a bit under pressure all the time, so the questions on the website are often overlooked. But you can get a lot of support from the chat group in SL:

Blender Avastar

And if you need more info, then just ask here

[Nalates Urriah]

The Blender AvaStar group Gaia points to is a great source of support. You can often get immediate answers. But, not all answers are accurate. It is a user group and users of various experience levels participate.

Often the mornings (SLTime) you can catch Gaia in group.

also the Machinimatrix blog/site has lots of good information and tutorials.

[Tenly]

Thanks for the feedback. I tried to join the group from the island but it didnt add me to any group and just kept giving me a link to the website. the website has a number of links that are going to error 404. so I was not able to follow everything when I was trying to learn about these products.

I watched Medhues video on avastar from earlier this year which is why I decide I need Avastar. However he said go to Gaia Clary on youtube to get more avastar videos but when I went I only found two on bento. so was kinda hard to figure some things out.

I am going to get Avastar but I just ordered a new computer today so going to wait until that gets here next week. so many things Im going to have to transfer from old computer to the new one. so Ill come back to avastar then. I think its going to help me a lot.

Deleted all my comments about the website etc as I felt I was being TOO helpful to put it politely.

[Gaia Clary]

hi;

First of all thanks for your detailed feedback! I really appreciate that since we only rarely get any feedback about the documentation and the website. We will check the website issues in the next few days, so hopefully when you get back to us things should look much more pretty

About Youtube:

Yes i have hidden all videos from public search. They are still there, but hidden. So you are right, we have cut away one important tool for marketing. But on the other side many videos do no longer match up with the current software. And furthermore all videos are meant as supporting material for the reference documentation.

The reference documentation itself has been reorganised and can be found here:

http://avastar.online

Actually our main website ( http://blog.machinimatrix.org ) does not yet refer to the new documents, however we are about to change that over this weekend.

About broken links:

Which browser did you use? I am astonished... i know we have a couple of broken links to images, but i am not aware of broken links to pages...

Anyways, thanks again for your summary. That helps a lot!