Quarrel Kukulcan

Keep every group that has the same name as a deform bone you're using. If you remove an entire weight group, the bone with that name will stop affecting your mesh. If you click on each weight group one at a time while in weight pain mode, you will see which parts of your mesh are weighted to it. Any group that shows solid blue on everything might be safely deleteable. Can you explain what you mean by "the weight system duplicates everything"? I don't understand that part.

Head would be most stable. Attaching the fire emitter to the jaw will make the angle change as the jaw moves, including shooting up through the snout if the jaw is closed. I wouldn't attach it to any part of the tongue. That's even less predictable.

I followed the instructions at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Aditi. It took a couple of days. I also had to verify payment info there separately to enable mesh uploading.

Model an avatar, staying within SL's technical limits on vertex & material counts. Rig it to Second Life's armature, again staying within the limits of 4 weights per vertex and 110 weight groups total. You can move bones but not add, reparent or rename them. FILE A SUPPORT TICKET TO ACTIVATE YOUR TEST SERVER ("ADITI") ACCOUNT. You don't want to burn real Lindens uploading avatars and find out they're buggy the hard way. I mean, simple, right? EDIT: It sounds like you already have the basics down. From here it will be more a matter of learning SL's hard limits and good practices. As for rigging the face, there is no universal standard set of animations AFAIK, but if you don't move bones too much your head could easily end up compatible with animations created for mainstream heads...if those are something you have access to. If you don't use Fitted Mesh bones, you'll avoid a lot of headache and be able to make something with Blender alone. (You will probably have trouble fitting into mainstream clothes; then again, you'll be able to deform them with some shape sliders without affecting your body, so you might get lucky and be able to make them fit.)

For the fundamental material look across the entire object, there are infinity free images on the web for basic textures like woodgrain, fabric, sand and brushed metal. Just hit up your favorite search engine. You'll need to tweak your UV maps and/or rotate/rescale the image to get the details the right size and running the correct direction. Another option is custom-building your own procedural textures, which is its own rewarding-yet-nigh-bottomless pit of learning and experimentation. That won't give you burned-in shadows and highlights, though. For that you also need to learn how to set good lighting up around your object and then bake a finalized version of its appearance to a separate image, which is the one you'll actually upload to SL. You can do this with Blender or with another, more specialized tool like Substance Painter. On top of all that, SL itself allows you to make materials shiny and skybox-reflective in-world, at the texture-pixel level if you so desire (though this won't be visible to people who've turned Advanced Lighting off for better framerates, so baking in highlights is still incredibly useful).

If every object used its own texture originally (which is not efficient for the renderer and something it'd help to unlearn), you shouldn't have to remap anything. And you must have UV mapped things at some point if you're using textures at all. (Unless you're modding an existing model, maybe, or using a tool that produces a default UV map for every primitive shape you add.) If the things you've joined into a single mesh each used to have its own separate material, you do need to ensure the joined version contains all of them and that you've assigned the right ones to individual faces. As far as uploading textures with your model, frankly, the simplest solution is to upload them separately and put them onto your object post-upload in SL's object editor.

Not just link it. Join it, so it's all one mesh object.

You need to weight the clothes and the body using the same mix, or else shape sliders will affect them differently. If you're fitting for a target body, you're stuck with whatever they decided to do. Also, collision bones don't give you collision. Ignore that name. It's bad. When LL created Fitted Mesh they apparently repurposed some bones from a more-accurate collision detection system they had experimented with but ultimately never implemented. For some reason, LL kept the term "collision volume bones" even though they aren't actually used for collision detection now. Avatars still have their original, simple, predefined collision shapes that ignore all attachments. SL totally ignores your avatar's collision volume bones and all your attached items' physics meshes in figuring out whether you've bumped into things. For this reason, all mesh bodies and clothing should have a simple cube or even less for its physics mesh -- it doesn't matter anyway, so it may as well be just a few bytes.

Detail and quality. The system avatars aren’t well-sculpted. They are relatively low-poly and have bad topology that makes them bend poorly at many joints. Their hands and faces also aren’t Bento-rigged. (They can play a small, fixed set of poses and expressions, but we can’t customize them or add more.) Collada/DAE files only store bone heads, as singular pivot points. You need to check all the “Auto Connect”, “Find Bone Chains”, and “Fix Leaf Bones” import options if you want joints brought in looking like the kind of bones Blender was designed to work with...and even then, Blender might not make all of them the way you expect. You will have to go in and tease out the tails by hand. Believe it or not, bones sticking out has no effect on animations once weights are painted. You’re getting deformations because the Fitted Mesh collision volume bones — the ones with names in ALL_CAPS — contain extra, custom scaling and positioning information. You need to start with a skeleton that has that information and check the “Keep Bind Info” option when you export. That’s one option. A tool that automatically handles the extra requirements of these bones, like Avastar or Bento Buddy, is another. (If you’re working with a mesh body dev kit, you probably need to use whatever it was made with.) I don’t think there’s a difference. Short version: Weight your clothes exactly the way the mesh body you’re sculpting around is weighted at that spot. Long version: When LL originally made avatar shapes customizable, they used a mix of techniques. Length/height/position changes were done through rig deforms and curves/muscles/bulk changes were done through shape keys. When mesh uploads first got added, clothes got properly adjusted by the rig deforms (because they were rigged to the same bones) but the shape keys did nothing to them (because shape keys are mesh-specific and can’t be used or even seen by others). So mesh clothes couldn’t be shaped as freely as the system body and didn’t fit right except on avatars with near-default sliders (or on avatars wearing a full mesh body that was likewise only partially adjustable). Linden Lab fixed this by inventing Fitted Mesh. They added a bunch of bones to the skeleton and made them scale and shift in ways that imitated the curves/muscles/bulk shape key changes. Those are the ALL_CAPS bones. If you add these bones to your weighting, mesh clothes can get scrawnier/bulgier too, not just shorter/longer.

I and others have recently had trouble importing when there were any parent/child relationships in our objects. (In my case, the mesh was the child of an Empty in Blender. In someone else's, it was the child of an armature that they were importing as UNrigged because they just wanted to see how it looked.) I remember reading somewhere that you need custom LOD and Physics meshes if you're uploading a multi-object linkset, and they have to be named appropriately or the uploader will error out. I admit I've never tested it out myself.

It could be a number of things. You might be in the wrong cursor mode. You might have selected some vertices (which means you can only paint those, not the rest). You might have locked that weight group. Unfortunately I can't say for sure. I don't actually think it's any of those based on what I can see in the UI, but you don't show all of it. Separate question: you say you're assigning automatic weights. How? Did you just do it once when you originally parented the armature, or did you reassign them after every Edit Mode skeleton change? And a suggestion. Set aside the dragon for a bit and go through some basic tutorials first. It will be easier, it will possibly be faster, and you will get a better end result. Aquila has posted one video already. I just found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkiWBSSuxLw. There are tons more. You can even ignore everything about inverse kinematics/IK for now. Make or download a simple head or person any way you want, add an armature, do automatic weighting, then improve the weighting manually. Then come back to your dragon.

Oh, it's there. But I believe none of the system avatar is weighted to it. I suspect it was either planned for use and abandoned or it was added originally to give avatars the ability to wear two different head items (like a hat and also glasses), back when each bone allowed only one attachment.

In the general case, it's a bad idea to have bones for central features, like lips, to come in from the side. It's even worse to have the top lip bones come in sharply from the character's right and the bottom lip bones to come from the left. Center the heads of the UpperCenter and LowerCenter lip bones, and make the others symmetrical. Remember the hint about eyebrow & corner bones: generally, you should angle bones like these directly into the mesh relative to the geometry around the spot they poke out of. In the specific case of a dragon, you don't have enough bones to create good animations with. It will be a serious challenge -- and rigging a face is already challenging enough! The snout is just too long, so it has a far longer lip line than humans do. And unfortunately, you can't add more bones in SL. You have to use the existing skeleton. You'll have to think hard about exactly how much of the lips you want to move when it talks and/or be reshapeable with face sliders.

Those bones are from the original skeleton. The "New Bones" portion of that link only lists the new bones that Project Bento added. (It doesn't include any of the bones added by the Fitted Mesh feature either, though it does mention them later when it explains which bones are affected by body sliders.)

And mSkull isn't even used (ref: https://avastar.machinimatrix.org/292/knowledge/the-sl-skeleton/).

("pre" post-script: I'm not Aquila.) You have a lot of "outer" and "inner" eye bone pairs reversed. Inner ones go toward the center of the head. I also see big angle misalignments, especially with the eyeball and eyelid bones. The eyelid bones work best if their heads are at the eyeball center, and the eye bone itself has to be rooted there. That way, when the bone rotates, the eyeball simply rotates in place. (Eyeballs are easier to rig & weight manually than any other part of the face. That's good because automatic weighting won't get it right. Make the eyeball a perfect sphere. Put the eye bone base exactly at the center. The tip is generally pointed through the iris because that's intuitive. Weight every vertex in that eyeball at 1.0 to its bone and to nothing else. Done.) The eyebrow and corner bones could benefit from re-angling as well, but it's less crucial there. (Don't worry about keeping every bone forward-pointing. They all point forward-ish in the original Bento skeleton because human faces are flat. Your face is very non-human and has significantly different contours.) Think of the exact motion path that the tip will swing along when you rotate that bone. Is that the curve you want the skin to follow? Most of your bones don't have their tips near the places they will have the strongest effect on. This will screw up automatic weighting. Here's a big point I don't think anyone has mentioned yet: you're going to have to make your own animations for this face. There is about a 0.000% chance that other people's face animations will work right on yours. So you should arrange your bones and paint your weights in whatever way makes that later step easiest for you to do good work with.

(misread the question)

Basically. There is no easy way to use both. If you weight an eyeball to both the system bone and the alt bone, it will play a blend of a half-strength system animation and a half-strength custom animation. That will probably look bad. The simplest solution is to use just one bone pair and ignore the other. Combining automatic and manual eye motion needs complicated trickery. One option might be weighting to both bones and building your custom animations so the bones rotate twice as far as you want so they look right when only half the angle happens. Another possibility is creating two eyeballs in the same position (one using the system bone, one using the alt bone) and then making one of them invisible, with some scripting and a HUD to switch to the other when you want.

They go in the same place as each other, and you only rig your mesh to one pair or the other depending on how you want your eyeballs to behave. The mEyeLeft and mEyeRight bones are controlled entirely by Second Life. If you've ever noticed how default avatar eyes flick around and follow your cursor, well, that's what your mesh eyeballs will do if you weight them to these bones. They are immune to custom animations. The mFaceAltEyeLeft and mFaceAltEyeRight bones are normal animation bones. Weight your eyeballs to these instead if you want full manual control of their movements. (The downside is you have to create and play animations for them or your eyes will just stare in one direction all the time.)

There are also text descriptions at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Skeleton_Guide#Face. It's a good way to see what does and doesn't exist so you can make a checklist of what you want to use. Another important list is later on the same page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Skeleton_Guide#Sliders_that_affect_Bones. Why is it important? Because face shape sliders will also move Bento bones. In fact, a few bones only exist to ensure that all the face shape sliders work as expected on human faces, and generally aren't ever animated (like mFaceTeethLower and mFaceTeethUpper). If you don't care about letting people have full customization control over the face you're rigging, you can leave a few of those bones out. However, most of the bones that are used for face animation are also affected by head & face shape sliders, so there will almost certainly be some distortion or misalignment between what your model looks like in Blender and what it looks like in SL unless you Edit Shape in-world and set all your face shape sliders to their neutral values from that second list. (If your eyeballs bug out, this is why.) You may also need to use the "Lock scale if joint position defined" checkbox during upload. This stops some shape sliders from affecting bones you've slid to different positions from the Bento default. Good luck and don't get discouraged. Rigging a face in SL is hard.

What about the skirt? 😁

I don't know how many more ways I can say this. It's not a bug. It's how it's supposed to work. You're trying to use the tool wrong. Edit Mode sets where the bones really are. Where they start, before any animation happens. The "rest pose". Pose Mode is for making animations that get added to the rest pose for display purposes but don't alter it. (That said, I have no problem when I use "Pose -> Apply -> Apply Pose as Rest Pose" except for bone octagons no longer looking like scaling squashes & stretches them, but that's because bones are never scaled in the rest pose. EDIT: Wait. Did you try Apply as Rest Pose? I thought you said you did but I don't see it in your posts now.)

Edit Mode is for setting where bones start. Pose Mode is for setting an alternate, temporary position where you want to move bones to so you can take a nicely-arranged snapshot. It makes no sense to want the second kind of change to affect the first kind. That's like saying you want your personal mailing address to change to the supermarket every time you go shopping.

1. This is a Blender issue, not a Second Life issue. 2. An armature is a foundation. It's much less of a headache to set it all correctly in place before you start using it, just like you need to get your mesh right before you UV unwrap and (to a lesser extent) get your UV right before you texture. 3. Changes in edit mode do carry over to pose mode. Changes in pose mode do not carry back to edit mode because if they did, you wouldn't be able to pose anything.