Making Mesh Avatar Add-ons?

[Tenzin Knickers]

This should be the last post I need to make, hopefully. Unless I'm just terrible at wording further queries. I was trying to find out how to make 'replacement' parts for existing avatars. I was given access to one's devkit, but outside of clothing and animations, I wanted to take a shot at making completely new parts for it. Again, not very good at wording things, but good examples I can think of off the bat are Found Footage's TWI fuzzed parts, as well at the Hellhund's fuzzed mane and assorted head shapes, which all replace the normal parts with a small spot of modding. Any ideas?

[Quistess Alpha]

It should be the same as making clothing, just with the added hurdle that you will (probably) need to find a way to hide or remove the 'normal' version of the part, which is (obviously?) very part and avatar-model specific.

[Tenzin Knickers]

11 hours ago, Quistess Alpha said:

It should be the same as making clothing, just with the added hurdle that you will (probably) need to find a way to hide or remove the 'normal' version of the part, which is (obviously?) very part and avatar-model specific.

True, but I assume it's possible! I'll just have to toy around and see what I can do.

[OptimoMaximo]

17 hours ago, DemeaningDog said:

True, but I assume it's possible! I'll just have to toy around and see what I can do.

Yes it's definitely possible. A few points you should make sure to pay attention to:

Make your replacement attaching edge the same vertex count of the area it is intended to plug onto. This way you can copy the vertex normals and avoid the attachment seamline to be visible

If it's a non human body part, use joint positions also on the collision volume bones, trying to get them at the same offset (or at lest very close to) from their parent as the default. This will help with fitting clothing, although it may not work 100% well in your 3d app while testing, it will inworld

After the removal of unused joints from the skincluster, make sure to add back one joint in the upper hierarchy at 0 weight. This ensures better position retention at high altitudes, avoiding the issue of visible gaps between meshes. Example: you make a replacement pair of hands. Included joints would be all the fingers, the wrist joint and the elbow. The shoulder gets removed by the automatic removal. Add it back with weights at 0,it will act as a reference for the system to more precisely determine the attachment placement.