Quarrel Kukulcan

Weight the hood to a head bone. Either mHead or HEAD should work. HEAD is smarter because it will respond to more shape sliders. You'll need software that can handle Fitted Mesh bones, but if you're working with a dev kit you probably have the right kind.

That is a perfectly valid method. Using fewer textures means both a lower upload cost and better performance for everyone seeing your object. It's a win/win. Your texture image files don't need to match the .dae file name but they do have to be in the same directory or the SL uploader won't find them. It also only works for the diffuse textures, not the normal or specular textures (and Blender doesn't use compatible specular maps anyway).

Creating floating text is a one-line call to http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetText. Unfortunately, the text always floats above the prim that ran the script, so if you make that call in a HUD, the text will appear above the HUD object on that one resident's screen and nowhere else. (Objects attached to a HUD can't be seen by other people.) You will need people to attach another prim (something simple, like an invisible box) to their avatar and have the HUD object communicate with it via standard talk/listen() events.

The OP may not be using a custom typing animation, since they only joined 4 months ago and the default typing animation does this.

Avastar has the full Bento skeleton built in. You shouldn't need to import one from anywhere.

Strange. That option doesn't exist in 2.92. On the other hand, the Copy option seemed to be all that was necessary. Having the image files in the same directory as the .dae was apparently all that was needed all along.

I don't know of a way to upload textures automatically along with the mesh. Tama Suki claims to know how to do it. I'm waiting to see what that is; it would be awesome if it's actually possible. You shouldn't have any problem aligning images, though. The UV map in Blender is the UV map in SL. The diffuse texture will align the same unless you've accidentally given it an offset or scale in SL. You do have to make sure your Blender object only has one UV map holding all the materials, not one for each. If you see something like this in your object data, some of your UV mapping will be lost on upload. Quick question: how are you approaching texturing? Are you UV unwrapping onto a blank image and then painting, or do you have an existing texture image that you're aiming to use specific pieces of?

"Well, ackchally..." Fitted Mesh is still around and heavily used by mesh bodies and their associated clothing. The goal that Fitted Mesh failed at was making mesh clothing that fit the default system body well at all body shapes and sizes. Mesh clothing on a mesh body doesn't have that problem because the two can be given the exact same weighting.

Anything too far away simply isn't drawn, and how far is "too far" is different for each resident depending on their viewer graphics settings.

Max draw distance and LOD swap distances are different things. You can't override the former by designing your LODs in a special way.

Also, all rigged mesh objects attached to an avatar swap LODs based on an unusual calculation of the avatar's bounding box rather than their own individual boxes. They all swap at the same time, and at much farther distances than if they were unrigged or placed directly in the world.

I don't know everything.

Hmm. Avastar is one of them. That's probably not the issue then.

One: What tool are you using? If it's vanilla Blender and you're using Fitted Mesh bones like R_LOWER_ARM, you'll get distortions. There are add-ons and other software that handle these bones correctly. Alternately, you may be able to get away with not using these bones if the jacket is puffy enough and the lesser shape customization isn't a deal-breaker. Two: Putting armature customization into a piece of clothing is a bad idea because any clothing or body part you put on after it will probably reset your avatar to the skeleton in the new piece. Much better to rig the clothes to the same t-pose as all the other clothes and craft a simple one-or-two-frame animation to play in a high-priority loop to pose your arms how you want.

SL only accepts Collada DAE files for mesh upload (rigged and unrigged). Animations have to be BVH (or Second Life's own .anim format, which only one third-party Blender plugin supports AFAIK).

There are some at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Resources_and_Information. I'd use the angel DAE file. It looks like Cinema 4D can't natively export any animation files that SL can use, though.

I'm confused. 11-sided polygons are just as symmetrical as 12-sided ones if they are also aligned with world coordinates and regular -- which this one probably is, given how most software generates arbitrary N-gons by default.

LI does affect upload cost, though. And SL ignores the physics shapes of worn objects, so you should just use a cube or single triangle. There's no advantage to more detail there.

I think I got it from http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Animation_Upload_Loop_Controls after another member pointed me there. Sorry for not linking it earlier, but I had to hunt for it a second time today (the wiki is not well-organized) and I was slightly sick yesterday.

When you stop an unlooped animation, it continues playing either for its EaseOut time or to its natural end, whichever comes first. When you stop a looped animation that doesn't have an outro (that is, Loop Out is 100% or the last frame), it continues playing for exactly its EaseOut time. If it reaches the loop end during that time, it will hold on the last frame instead of looping. When you stop a looped animation that does have an outro, it continues playing either for its EaseOut time or to its natural end, whichever comes second, so it always finishes to the end of its current loop and plays the full outro (though possibly very muted by outbound easing at that point). It will also hold its last frame instead of looping if it reaches the end during this. According to the wiki, there is also a weird corner case where if your avatar is playing exactly one animation, and it loops, that trying to stop it doesn't stop it. It only flags the animation as "leftover" and keeps it going until another animation starts.

You found most of the issue yourself! The Fitted Mesh(*) bones need custom bind pose data (which it sounds like you understand better than I do). If you're using Blender, any rigged mesh object you make that's weighted to any of the bones with ALL_CAPS names either needs that data added as custom properties on the bones (and an extra export checkbox) or an add-on such as Avastar or Bento Buddy that adds it behind the scenes during export. (* Fitted Mesh and Bento are actually two separate features, but since they both added more bones to the original rig, people usually just refer to the whole thing as "Bento".)

Probably something simple, like not saving the baked file from Blender or uploading the wrong image. How are you seeing the image in SL? Uploading for real? (Don't do that until it looks good!) Previewing a local image? Uploading to the beta grid?

SL doesn't allow custom armatures. You have to use theirs (or at least parts). You can move bones but you can't add, rename or reparent any. Plus there is only one armature per avatar. If a resident wears a mesh body and mesh clothes that expect the same bones in different places, one will distort the other. See if you can swap out the Ruth armature for the one in the fitted_mesh-270.blend file at https://www.avalab.org/fitted_mesh_survival_kit/ while keeping the Ruth body mesh. If you use that, and you also take the extra step of checking "Keep bind info" in the DAE export options, you might get things working. There are no Bento bones in that armature (so you can't do gloves) but it will export Fitted Mesh bones without distortion.

Have you applied the downscaling to the master armature & mesh body? Unapplied transforms cause problems with SL import (and with many Blender modifiers), especially if the armature is actually larger but being treated as downscaled but your clothes are modeled small in the first place. Also, what software are you using? If this mesh body uses Fitted Mesh bones (and it looks like it does), you need more than plain Blender to handle them. The github repository I found for Ruth 2.0 looks like it has a .blend file meant for Avastar.

Do you have the right template mesh for the body you're making clothes for? If you're shrinking the armature, it sounds like you don't.