Modify Avatar Workbench bento female rig to make male?

[Ricky Shaftoe]

HI all,

I'm trying to extract a male bento skeleton and mesh from the Avatar Workbench, but I can't seem to do so. The documentation says there's a male figure in the file, but I don't see it. Am I missing something?

Alternatively, could I modify the model somehow? If I broaden the shoulder joints, narrow the hip joints, and make the model taller, is that enough? I'm not even sure how to do this.

FYI, my ultimate goal here is to import a male bento rig and mesh into Cascadeur for rigging there. (I think I can manage the rigging of finger bones and other body parts in Cascadeur, thanks to @Aglaia's excellent guide here.) At this point I don't really care about eye or mouth or face animations -- just fingers and the male body.

Thanks!

[Aglaia]

Hi,

I remember now, the Avatar Workbench works with shape keys. If you select the head (for example) and go to the Properties Data Tab, Shape Key section, you can apply the value 1.0 to the male head:

Same for upper body and lower body:

This works with the file workbench-271.blend, which sadly doesn't have the bento bones (so no fingers). Sadly the bento workbenches don't have shape keys.

You can add finger bones manually. Or even better: separate the fingers from the bento workbench rig and add them to the non bento one, that should work. 

[Ricky Shaftoe]

Hi Aglaia,

Thanks so much for taking the time to help. I know you've got more important things to do than offer free help to animators like me!

Your post on shape keys has gotten me a lot closer to where I need to be! But I'm not quite there yet. I can rig the model in Cascadeur, and it works pretty well there. (I had one odd glitch with elbows bending the wrong way, but I was able to sort that out. I think. Long story.) Unfortunately, when I export back to Blender, the resulting exported file is not divided into channels -- it's just one giant "Female" channel, containing the pelvis and other joints. Your .anim explort plugin can't cleanse this file because its format is different.

To try to fix this, I did figure out how to extract layers 3 and 13 from the workbench file. (I just had to right click on them to turn their visibility on, doh.) These are the layers that contain "male" data. If I just export these two layers, it works great in Cascadeur -- but again I can't cleanse it with your plugin after re-export to plugin.

Next I tried making a "clean" blender file like your avatar.blend -- just the bones and the mesh, no cameras etc. This gets me closer to the separate channels your plugin needs, but not close enough. I'm unable to reproduce exactly the very spare hierarchy you have in your avatar.blend file for females. I get extra junk cluttering it up that I can't remove. I'm trying to read the Blender documentation to help me with this, but gah.

I'll keep trying. I'm hampered because I am not very good with Blender. I do appreciate your help. I'm getting closer. Worst case, I'll learn how to write my own plugin to cleanse the file.

[Aglaia]

hi @Ricky Shaftoe,

Today i've released a new  version of the .anim exporter. It should fix your issue. Now it doesn't require anymore that bones be grouped in some groups of channels. That also makes it compatible with older versions of Blender (starting from 3.0) It will also just ignore all bones that are not part of the SL rig.

Latest release: https://github.com/aglaia-resident/blender-anim-exporter/releases

This week i will also release a male rig/model ready to be animated in Cascadeur. I will make it from the non bento Avatar Worbench male shape, and i will add the fingers to it.

Edited May 2, 2023 by Aglaia

[Ricky Shaftoe]

Thank you so much, @Aglaia! You are my hero! It’s wonderful that you have donated your time so generously to this community. 🙂