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Alternative to Avastar?


Anastasia Trefusis
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So I used to have a pose shop but have been out of SL for a long time due to rl.

Coming back everything is new, and I was interested in getting back into making poses, but now they need to be bento and work with mesh bodies/heads.

My trusty old qavimator is not up to the task. I see a lot of talk about Avastar and Blender and I'm frankly nervous about the learning curve! 

Also the cost. I do realise that it's not much in software terms and that the creator deserves to be paid for their work. 

But to me just returning to SL it's a lot to pay on spec ($54 CDN will feed my family for a few days) so I am wondering if there are any other alternatives like qavimator that also work with bento?

Costs are racking up as I guess I need to get a mesh body, head, new mesh clothes etc even just to ensure that poses I make would work with those things. 

I've tried some of my old poses with demo mesh bodies and they seem to work fine, aside from not being able to change the fingers. Is that the only real difference with bento poses?

Do people still use non bento poses? I still sell a few on the marketplace but not many these days, but I haven't made anything new in a long time obviously.

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Altamura has a full bento body on their sim for 1L that gets refunded to you after purchase. You need to join the group (50L) to take advantage of this but that's incredibly cheap for what you get and will take care of the mesh body and head issue.

There is a TON, a true TON of mesh clothing out there for 0L (alongside accessories and such), whether they're directly in the MP, given as gifts during sale events or hunt gifts. Plenty of it is high quality, too. There's also the wide variety of daily sales such as 60 Linden Weekends, 25L ones, 30L ones and 50L ones depending on the weekday.

With that taken care of you should be able to invest into Avastar. I highly recommend it as I use it myself to make animations.

Edit: Hit enter too early lol.

SL market moves fast and unless you dominate a niche...if you want to make poses, you should really get with the time. Your target audience is people who use poses....those people take screenshots for blogs, or their flickr...as such they are the most likely demographic to HAVE a bento body, so yes, bento poses matter a whole lot. Go with the times or be left behind.

There's plenty of pose makers out there, poses are incredibly easy to make, they take only the fraction of time an animation takes to make as a pose is nothing but a single frame of an animation. So if you want to sell, you either need to devalue your work and sell dirt cheap, or stand out among the crowd. I wish you good luck either way!

 

Edited by Syn Anatine
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Thanks so much. I've been out of SL since late 2012 and of course everything has changed. I used to love making poses and sold enough to finance my SL as well as giving myself a lot of variety for blogging. I'm not sure if I am going to dive in so much to be trying to run a business again, RL still has work and family so I don't have the time to spend in SL that I used to.

Thanks for your help, I will look into those things and see where I go, if I'm still wanting to be in SL a month from now then maybe I'll invest in Avastar.

 

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27 minutes ago, Anastasia Trefusis said:

Thanks for your help, I will look into those things and see where I go, if I'm still wanting to be in SL a month from now then maybe I'll invest in Avastar.

Just to note, Gaia Clary ( owner of Machinmatrix  and Avastar) said that they had a refund policy (30 days maybe?) so you could always write and find about about that since there isn't a demo.

Meanwhile I still use Qavimator .  Some Bento poses are just fine, but some are NOT so good and if you have a mesh body you DO have hand options in with your body, so personally I don't get all that excited about Bento poses.  I am still using MANY poses  from a decade ago and that is one reason why it is difficult to sell poses -- most of us have a whole library of favorites from over the years and they don't go out of style like clothes :D.   

I mostly make pose PROPS (with the poses in there of course) so while fun, I wouldn't expect to make a lot of money from poses. Of course they cost almost nothing to make, just the upload if you use Qavimator (Blender  has some repoorted  issues with import but I haven't tried Blender animations in SL). 

Good luck and have fun!!!  And -- Qavimator is (in theory) working on a Bento version, but they have been working on that For-e-ver so I wouldn't hold my breath for an unveiling *wink*.  

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Ok, for some reason it seemed like you needed bento poses from what I could see. 

I tried a lot of my old poses and they work fine with the mesh body demo from Maitreya, some could be adjusted a bit and reuploaded even just for my own use.

Even my old AO from Vista "Perfect Lady" that was last updated in 2010 seems to work ok for now.

I would say that I think while pose making is ostensibly "easy" there certainly used to be a lot of not great poses out there with breaks because people didn't take sufficient care when making them and preview / correct before uploading. 

Perhaps for now I'll just get my avatar looking current before I get too excited about creating again. 

Having a hard time finding a mesh head that looks like "me" though.  

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2 hours ago, Anastasia Trefusis said:

Having a hard time finding a mesh head that looks like "me" though.  

Be  sure to try a variety of demo skins on the different heads as that makes a big difference -- also changing the shape of course on any head that is Bento.   

And yes there are plenty of not great poses out there and always have been LOL.  So I go through all mine and put the good ones in categories for easy blogging.  

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I never claimed old poses do not work, why shouldn't they? But when creating things no matter what it is, it's always smart to look at your target market. Poses are most often used (but obviously not only!) by bloggers. Most bloggers (obviously not all!) show off the latest trends, the newest clothes, newest hair, newest everything, so applying logic, they would want the newest poses, too. Most of them have a bento avatar, so why wouldn't they want bento poses to work with their bento avatar?

While hand positions do come with mesh bodies, they're extremly limited as you just get several choices and that's it, while it may work and sometimes be even preferable, a bento pose has tailored finger positions to work perfectly with the pose, no fiddling needed.

Furthermore, I've uploaded poses and anim's using Blender Avastar for the past five years in both .bvh and .anim format and have not once encountered an issue importing or exporting so I am not sure what those reported issues were. User error perhaps? Or a bug I somehow didn't have? I don't know but it works just great for me.

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I didn't mean to imply that you had said that old poses would not work. After a week back, looking around at what is available, I had gotten the impression that

old style poses have gone the way of system bodies and skins. That was just my impression based on what I was seeing.

Definitely if I intended to get back into creating even to the extent I used to, it would be worth getting into creating bento poses.  

Probably best to just enjoy puttering around SL and seeing all the changes for a while first. 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Anastasia Trefusis said:

Probably best to just enjoy puttering around SL and seeing all the changes for a while first.

That's a good plan. Check out the competition, check out all the sales events we have nowadays. www.seraphimsl.com is the best source to see what's on right now. More has changed in the past couple years than ever before.

Bento poses are just the way to go because they make everyone happy. Bento body users get beautiful hand and finger poses along with the pose and non-bento avatar users can use the bento poses no problem, they just don't get their hands/fingers posed, it will be like a normal pose to them.

Going bento is a win-win on all fronts.

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On 2/21/2019 at 8:41 PM, Anastasia Trefusis said:

So I used to have a pose shop but have been out of SL for a long time due to rl.

Coming back everything is new, and I was interested in getting back into making poses, but now they need to be bento and work with mesh bodies/heads.

My trusty old qavimator is not up to the task. I see a lot of talk about Avastar and Blender and I'm frankly nervous about the learning curve! 

Also the cost. I do realise that it's not much in software terms and that the creator deserves to be paid for their work. 

But to me just returning to SL it's a lot to pay on spec ($54 CDN will feed my family for a few days) so I am wondering if there are any other alternatives like qavimator that also work with bento?

Costs are racking up as I guess I need to get a mesh body, head, new mesh clothes etc even just to ensure that poses I make would work with those things. 

I've tried some of my old poses with demo mesh bodies and they seem to work fine, aside from not being able to change the fingers. Is that the only real difference with bento poses?

Do people still use non bento poses? I still sell a few on the marketplace but not many these days, but I haven't made anything new in a long time obviously.

Ive posted an in-world alternative in this topic just a sec ago.

I just started a pose store myself using that tool, used Qavimator before that. I don't think poses is a booming business, but since making poses is something I enjoy and do anyway for photo's, why not put them in a store :)

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