Mesh Clothing Rigged in Blender?

[Wyona Steamweaver 5]

Can you still rig mesh clothing with just Blender? If so which Blender version and do I need anything else? I am playing with Marvelous Designer but not sure I can afford Avastar plugin. Any advice is welcome! 

Wyona.steamweaver

[ChinRey 6,512]

43 minutes ago, Wyona Steamweaver said:

Can you still rig mesh clothing with just Blender? If so which Blender version and do I need anything else? I am playing with Marvelous Designer but not sure I can afford Avastar plugin. Any advice is welcome!

Yes, you can still rig in Blender with or without Avastar. You don't really want to do it without though. Avastar doesn't actually add any new functions to Blender but it makes the ones you need for rigging so much easier you really, really want it. You can pay for an Avastar license with L$ on the Marketplace btw, in case you don't want to spend RL money on it.

[Wyona Steamweaver 5]

I couldn't find it on mp, but either way I'd have to use RL money. Just not sure I can afford it for a while at the 10k lindens. That's why I was hoping for a way to do it without until I can afford it.

[OptimoMaximo 1,661]

9 hours ago, Wyona Steamweaver said:

Can you still rig mesh clothing with just Blender?

Yes you can, but the avatar orientation assumption collides with Bleder's default "front" direction, so if you need mirroring features, you'll have to use Blender's native orientation, then before export you'll have to rotate both the skeleton and the mesh, apply the rotation and then export.

However, if your goal is to make fitted mesh, plain Blender won't work for the collision volume bones on a generic SL skeleton. Your meshes will come into the uploader either heavily shrunk or exploded, because collision volume bones (what makes the garment "fit") are assumed to have a specific scale within SL while Blender's architecture doesn't natively support this (called bindpose). You should get the free Avatar workbench from the Machinimatrix website in orderto have the correct scale value be written to file.

7 hours ago, Wyona Steamweaver said:

I couldn't find it on mp, but either way I'd have to use RL money.

You can purchase Avastar from the shop (the sim is called JASS, easy to find from the inworld map) or go to the Machinimatrix website. They accept paypal payments too.