Quarrel Kukulcan

Being triangulated will stop loop cuts from working. That feature only works on quads. The warning is because your mesh has an armature bending it. You can ignore it. Blender puts up that warning if you have any type of deformation modifier on a mesh. (An armature is one kind but there are others.) It depends what the flaws look like. A sharp bend is probably due to having too few polygons. Adding loop cuts or subdividing (and then weight tweaking) will fix that. Distorted bending is a weighting issue. Blender's automatic weight smoothing will help some -- that's how I fixed picture #3 below -- but you can fix it manually too if you start developing the skill. Eventually you will get a feel for how fast your weights should fade to 0 as you get away from the joint.

Exactly. Yeah, .anim files force you to specify looping, easing and priority details in advance, and you can't see a preview before uploading. So you have to pay to upload (use the test server Aditi!), and if you need to make any adjustments you have to go back to Blender and re-export the file. .anim files are really annoying to work with that way. I thought Avastar could export BVH files too? Your settings look good except for the 100->40 time remapping. Remapping an animation speed is really fussy in Blender and produces all kinds of side effects if you try to edit animations. What purpose is it serving? Does it actually affect exports?

The basic Linden Lab viewer's BVH uploader only allows percentages (which is annoying and requires extra calculation). Firestorm's BVH uploader can take percentages or absolute frame numbers. I'm guessing Avastar only allows frame numbers. If you want to freeze motionless on frame 300, you'd use 300 and 300.

I just played with it some in 2.92. You don't need to hide anything. (You can if you want to. It can make the important parts easier to see and click on.) Select just the bones you want to re-do the weighting from (in pose or weight mode). Every other bone will be ignored. Select just the vertices you want to re-do the weighting on (in weight mode). Every other vert will be left alone. Pick "Weights" -> "Assign Automatic from Bones". The new weights aren't normalized with the bones you aren't redoing. You really shouldn't be doing this to only some of the bones affecting an area, but if you have to, you should then also do "Weights" -> "Normalize All" (and go down into the recent operations modifier popup to make sure the options are "Deform Pose Bones" and turn OFF "Lock Active" before you do anything else). NOTE: "Normalize All" also affects only your currently selected vertices, so you should keep the same verts selected from step 2.

Check "loop" when you upload the animation and set both Loop In and Loop Out to 100%. The animation will play everything up to the last frame once, then hold the last frame until the animation is explicitly stopped. A looped animation has an optional one-time intro, the loop itself, and an optional one-time outro. The Loop In and Loop Out numbers tell SL where one part ends and the next begins. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Animation_Upload_Loop_Controls

Not to fix this problem, no. Your mesh is moving wrong because you have extra weights belonging to bones you don't want to be following.

This is a fundamental shortcoming of SL's rendering engine (and of several other programs -- it's a difficult software problem in general). When it comes to multiple blended textures on the same object, there are sometimes ways to re-order the materials or the vertices. (I'll let others describe them; I'm not familiar enough). There is no general solution to conflicts between different objects. The best way to minimize it is to work around it by using alpha masking instead wherever possible.

This. Make a huge brush -- like 300 pixels. Instead of locking alpha, you can select the clear background, then invert selection. Now you can do either the Big Brush method or Fill Selected Area.

One more point of reference: The default avatar's head is 1,844 (which includes inner mouth but not eyes). Please don't use 81,000 triangles.

You can use shape keys and bones together to make animated movies in Blender but shape keys don't export to SL. You can't use them here. (Plus you should not be using them as a patch to fix mesh errors in different ways at the start of each animation -- you should fix the errors for real so all your animations look right by themselves.) Is the bone positioned properly inside the tongue? Make sure you check in rest position, with no pose edits, shape keys, or any other deforms on. Are the tongue's vertices weighted to just combinations of mFaceTongueTip and mFaceTongueBase (and possibly some mFaceJaw along the very bottom edge)? No other groups?

This tends to happen as a result of the model facing the wrong direction in Blender, or having unapplied rotations on the rig or mesh.

Those influence areas are too big if the weights are significantly above 0 all the way to the edge. If not, they're fine. Again, the important part is WHAT the weights are, not just "do they HAVE a weight?". You should be in weight paint mode when you select a group to check what that group affects. This will show you not just which verts are tied to that bone, but how tightly they are tied and whether the influence properly fades off to dark blue toward the outside. Looking at this in Edit Mode doesn't give you enough info. (FYI, you can clean your weights to erase all the zeros. This will avoid groups looking like they contain more vertices than they actually influence. In Weight Paint mode, pick "Weights" -> "Clean", then before you do anything else, expand the "Clean Vertex Group" options panel in the bottom left and change Subset to "All Groups".) If the auto-weighting has truly made the hot zones too big around the cheek bones, the most straightforward fix is to paint corrections by hand. (I believe Blender can auto-mirror this so you only have to fix the upper and lower on one side and the other will match.) If you are editing the cheek bone sizes and re-creating the automatic weights for just those bones, I wish you luck but I can't really help you. I personally avoid that method because I find it confusing and it sometimes erases other fixes I've made.

They can't. SL doesn't support shape keys in uploaded mesh.

It's more accurate if you want to completely remove some vertices from a bone or set several vertices to an exact value. It's terrible at smoothing out the blending across multiple bones so your hips, lips and elbows flex right.

Yeah. Auto-weighting is just a starting point. You will always need to correct trouble spots like faces and shoulders. Especially faces. You had problems with the teeth because you added them to one bone but didn't take them off the others. Animations act like all the bone weights on each vertex add up to 1.0 -- even if they don't. If they don't, the animation system (Blender or Unity or SL -- all of them) silently scales them all by the same multiplier so they add up properly. In your case, you gave the lower teeth a weight of 1.0 for the lower teeth bone but they still had a weight of 1.0 for the jaw bone too. That adds up to 2.0. So they animated like their vertices had weights of only 0.5 to each bone. That's called normalizing -- these are the values that keep the proportions the same but add up to exactly 1.0. Weights don't automatically normalize when you assign or remove groups with the weight panel on the right. That's why you have to manually remove vertices from all groups before you assign them weights of 1.0 to one specific bone (which I think you didn't do the first time). If you're using weight paint mode, you have the option of automatically normalizing as you paint, so that adding weight to one bone automatically takes it away from the rest (and vice-versa). It's in your tool settings, and it's a good thing to use. If you have a lot of mis-mixed weights that don't add up to exactly 1.0, you can manually normalize everything with the Weights -> Normalize All menu item in weight paint mode. SAVE FIRST. This will correct small mismatches in weight totals. Actually, it will correct all mismatches, but if there is a big mistake -- and you'll be able to tell because large regions of some bones will change to a drastically different color that you didn't expect -- it will probably be easier to correct the pre-normalized version than the one you just made. Revert to your save (or see if Undo works) and go from there.

Maybe, but maybe not. The important part is each vertex's individual weight in that group. WHEN IT COMES TO ANIMATIONS(*), if a vertex is in a group but has a weight of 0.0, that is the same as being out of the group. (And if it's very small...something random like 0.000318, it's practically the same as 0 in most cases.) So you could have a lot of vertices tracking a bone but with weights so small that they don't matter. Check the weights of those large cheek regions, either by: going to weight paint mode, selecting the correct weight group in the groups panel, and looking at the colors, or going to edit mode, selecting single vertices one by one, and looking at the list of weights in the "Item" info inset Ultimately, the real test is less "are the vertices in the group or out" and more "does the mesh change shape the way I want it to when the bone moves"? So "move the bone in pose mode and watch what happens" is a third way of checking whether there is a problem. (* Blender has many features other than animations that use weight groups, and some of those features treat zero-weight vertices differently from not-in-the-group vertices. But those don't matter here.)

Clearing transforms in pose mode is fine. That will set your bones back to their start positions. (Edit Mode changes are what you want to avoid if you are already mostly done with assigning weights.) Keep in mind, you actually want to put the bones in various positions while you are fine-tuning your weight painting and fixing small errors. You can't see all the problems if you only look at one pose. But you don't want to leave the skeleton in an altered position by accident. Clearing all transforms every now and then avoids that.

I found a Livejournal blog mentioning 1024 textures in late 2007.

Thanks. I could have sworn I'd read that in the wiki. I'm thinking now it was a bad comment in an old script.

According to the wiki, yes. It's arguably better, too, though there are more cases you need to test for to make sure you don't count them if you don't need to. (P.S. It's "attach", not "on_attach".) on_rez() triggers when the object goes from "not existing in world" to "existing in world". That means: dragging into the world from inventory attaching from inventory logging in with the object already attached attach() triggers when the object becomes attached or detached. That means: attaching from inventory, OR detaching into inventory attached from existing on the ground, OR dropped directly from being worn logging in with the object already attached

What part of your script is telling you Z is swapped for X? Are you perhaps asking for the orientation of one particular attachment relative to its bone instead of the world orientation? Z = UP is the one world direction that is consistent between Blender and SL. Also, make sure you are using the correct sim coordinates and orientation, especially the angles. These are the angles you will get if you call llGetRot() (and convert from quaternions to Euler form and then convert the Z spin from radians to degrees) to determine which way your avatar is facing.

You can do it directly? Oof. I have a better idea: use the Decimate modifier instead. Then you don't have to apply it until you need to, or let it be applied on export while always retaining the original for later tweaking.

My understanding is that standard sizing was aimed at specific system AV shape presets and predates mesh bodies -- or, at least, comes from when they were still quite rare. (I know standard sizing predates the Fitted Mesh feature by at least two years.) I'm not expecting them to fit anything else. Basically I'm looking to experiment with heavily modified humanoid shapes, seeing what advantages they might have over the alpha-and-attachments route.

Okay. Bad question. Sorry, it was late. What mesh bodies that have 3D sources available are compatible with the 5 standard sizes or system-AV-targeted "FitMesh" clothing? I know about the Ruth/Roth project and the source files on the SL wiki & machinimatrix, and I'll probably experiment with them either way, but I figured someone here already knew.

What mesh bodies are compatible with the old standard five sizes? With clothes labeled just "FitMesh"?