Mesh - Blender 2.62 - Avatar Rigging

[meriilion Vyper]

Hopefully somebody can point me in the right direction, I am new to making/ rigging avi's but have made my first mesh avatar in blender and used the simple bot to provide the rigging, and the boneweight  copy plug in. Apart from some teething problems with the bone weights making parts of the mesh move that I didnt want, I have managed to work around that and load the avi fine.But I would like to take things further

Do you always have to use one of the existing SL rigged avatars for your bone weights and rigging, or can you build a clean armature from scratch in blender and then I assume use the painting method for the weighting. Is there any guidance on this anywhere or onm scaling exiting rig bones, i assume the bones have to be named in a certain way,

 

Thanks

[Gaia Clary]

You should name the bones like you see them in the simplebot example and you should create the same bone chains (parent child connections)  Otherwise you are free to get fun with blender's rigging system.

Take care that the character looks towards the positive x direction when you export the mesh for Second Lif. With Blender 2.62 it is:

File -> export -> COLLADA

take care to select the buttons: "selection only" and "export for secondlife" otherwise you will see distortions or parser errors during upload.

 

[Ashasekayi Ra]

As Gaia said, you can make your own armature, but it would still need to have the same dimensions and bone names. You can't add extra bones since we don't have support for custom armatures yet. (Although, some people have experimented with weighting to SL attachment point names.) 

You can most assuredly paint weights manually. It is sometimes better to use that instead of copying weights for certain items like a skirt for example. 

When it comes to joints, you can move their locations around but the SL uploader doesn't recognize bone scalling and rotation.  If you do offset the joints, make sure to select both the model and the armature when you go to export to .dae. Plus, you need to check "joint offsets" in the SL uploader.

[meriilion Vyper]

thanks thats great help, will give it all a go, i also noticed something when i uploaded my first avi, i am used to using the eight colours in blender to block out sections for texturing to aid my uv unwraps, I noticed for normal building objects the colour blocks uploaded fine, but loading an avi just get the white default