Quarrel Kukulcan

Changing those in vanilla Blender never made a difference for me.

I don't have to enable glow to activate emissive masking, at least in the default client. OP: If SAI can export PNGs with transparent areas (and it looks like recent versions can), you can use it. Make sure you're producing 32-bit PNGs, not 24-bit. EDIT: For this particular piece you could also just click "Full Bright", since every part of the original texture is either black (which won't emit anyway) or something you want to be fully bright (judging from your alpha mask layer). MORE EDIT: I don't see a difference between your first and second pictures. I also don't see a problem with emission levels. They look like I'd expect them to with the mask you're showing. (Dark blue will stay dark even at full emission. "Emission" is really "what would this look like if it were in the game's brightest possible external lighting", not "what if this object gave off its own light".)

Yeah. In Blender you can selectively Shade Smooth or Shade Flat individual edges, and those settings are retained through export and affect SL appearance. (I learned this the hard way after assuming they didn't since they don't when you export for 3D printing.) If you can rely on that alone, you don't need a normal map, which helps your object's Land Impact and rendering performance.

Something else that would be useful: a rundown of the different side effects of setting transparency via Edit Panel UI and alpha channel.

I have no idea how to solve your problem. I just wanted to say that's amazing. 🤯 Did you use one of the existing non-Avastar fitted mesh rigs or build your own? What bones are you weighting your mesh to? (There's a tiny chance this is relevant. Tiny.)

Is there a version of the extended Bento skeleton with these settings incorporated? If not, could things like the finger bones be copied over in straightforward fashion, or would the differences in rest poses cause incompatibilities?

It will only work as a mesh body if it uses the SL skeleton bone names and relationships. You may just need some bones renamed, or you may need more extensive rework. But separate from that, there's the issue of texturing it (unless you want it to be a single solid color everywhere, which you probably don't). You can't texture it properly unless it has a UV map associated with it. It might already, or it might not. That's another thing to check. Finally, there's body shape sliders. Even if you're making a custom AV and never intend to tweak your body shape, some sliders influence ANY mesh body. You'll have to track down the neutral settings for those and set your personal shape to them or your AV will get pulled out of shape. (This is for you to do, not the modeler.) Definitely find someone familiar with SL, not just someone who can export .DAE files.

I tried this myself, using the "SL rigged" Collada export presets with no changes and LL's viewer. I'm making sure only the cube is selected before I export. If I parent the box to the armature with no weighting, I get this error. If I parent it with empty weight groups, I can upload without error but only as a static mesh (the "skin weights" option is grayed out). If I parent it with auto-generated weighting, I can upload it just fine.

Is the physics LOD on mesh AVs/clothing ignored, then? I should make it a single triangle?

It's not that it's animesh specifically. (I don't know why shoes would need their own, separate, internal animation skeleton anyway.) You get the same behavior from a mesh with no skeleton at all, as well as prims. An avatar-rigged or -fitted mesh, while worn, swaps down to its lower-detail versions at vastly greater distances than standard. Other creations drop down normally.

Is there an established best physics LOD mesh for an AV? Perhaps even a stock standard one someone uploaded somewhere? I presume it's something like simple boxes around each major limb. The "collision bones" in the Bento skeleton aren't used for any collision purposes, are they?

1. How many materials is your mesh using? 2. Are you generating your own LODs or having SL make them? (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's the second.) 3. Do you have any vertices weighted to more than 4 bones? SL doesn't allow that. (On the one hand, this should NOT give you the error you're getting. On the other hand, it would explain why uploading as unrigged doesn't bomb out.)

How so? I thought "animesh" referred to mesh items that have their own custom skeleton. An animesh sweatshirt wouldn't bend with the avatar as it moved its spine or arms.

Your emission mask will be your alpha layer, which normally gets used for transparency but gets used for emission level instead when you want that feature active. (SL can't do both custom emission and custom translucency at the same time with one texture.) Add an alpha channel to your image layer if it doesn't have one (Layer -> Transparency -> Add Alpha Channel). Add a mask (Layer -> Mask -> Add Layer Mask..., then select the most logical default mask to start editing from). You should see a second micro-thumbnail appear in your Layers toolbox. Edit the mask like any other grayscale image. You can change whether you're editing the image or the mask for that layer by left-clicking the appropriate micro-thumbnail. To see the mask itself, rather than the image with the mask applied, Alt-left-click the mask thumbnail. (It'll turn green.) To see the image without the mask, Ctrl-left-click the mask thumbnail. (It'll turn red.) It'll be a little confusing at first, since both options toggle but one takes precedence. And you can also control these things in the main Layer menu or the layer's right-click menu.

When you create new vertices via mirroring in Blender, the new vertices have the exact same weights as the ones they were copied from. You need to mirror the weights too. Go to Weight Paint mode. Show vertex selection. Select just the newly-created vertices. Weights menu -> Mirror. Any vertex group name that ends in "L" or "Left" or "R" or "Right" will get flipped to the other.

What is the difference? Weighting to collision volume bones vs. just original skeleton? Also, this 1 cm³ rigged mesh -- I assume it's rigged to an equally tiny armature?

Classic avatar clothing is all just painted-on, skin-tight textures. Accessories like belts, holsters and shoes can be add-on objects but there was originally no way to make things like a hanging vest or puffy snow pants -- articles that stuck out from the body and bent with the joints. We can make mesh clothing now that flexes with the body, but since all clothing is built for one particular base shape and because your body shape sliders affect mesh clothing slightly differently than they affect the classic avatar, you generally can't mix the two.

So any mesh object attached to an avatar renders using the most-detailed mesh (if it renders at all)? At least currently?

There's a wiki! it hasn't been updated in eight years. Probably not that.

How important is it to manually create your own LODs? How bad are the auto-generated ones? How much do the answers depend on the environment? On whether it's an avatar? On what viewers and settings other residents are using?

Upload the normal and specular map images separately, rez your object in a sandbox, then assign the textures to it in the appropriate edit panel. You don't necessarily need a specular map, by the way. If the whole thing has the same shininess you can give the entire object one setting straight from the panel. If you've set different "faces" by using multiple materials, you can even set them individually.

Also, if you use a dev kid or reference model that was created using the Avastar add-on (which is not free), you will not be able to export a usable model using basic Blender alone.