Chip Midnight

I stand corrected. The render quality looks pretty good too.

Good to know that it's storing path position in Body instead of Hip. I wonder if there's a way to copy the position tracks from the body to the hip. Then you'd just need to correct for the height difference between then which could probably be done with a single key on a new layer. I didn't measure the final walk but didn't seem to hit any limitation on travel distance. Maybe I just didn't go 10 meters. Poser's manipulators for posing in the viewport are hard to use since they work relative to the camera position instead of on the bone's local coordinates. You end up having to do every pose with the numerical inputs and spinners to get precise control which is very slow. Not having bezier controls in the animation curve editor is also a major drawback. It's a really cumbersome app to animate in. That interface is in desperate need of a major overhaul. Doing it in Max was a heck of a lot easier. I did the whole thing as a single animation and then used a poseball script in the runway so I could easily tweak height and position relative to the stage.

Hair textures are usually created in an image editor like Photoshop or Gimp. Gimp is free so it might be a good place to start. A quick way to make a hair texture is to fill the image with grasycale noise (like television static) and then apply a directional blur to it so it blurs the noise into long streaks that look like hair strands. Color, shading, and specular highlights can then be blended into it. Hair textures can also be rendered with 3d software hair plugins, like Max or Maya hair and fur, Hair Farm, and others, though as far as I know you won't find any for free. I don't think Blender does hair but I could be wrong. Rather than try and paint hair textures for the unwrapped UVs of your model you're probably better off creating the hair texture first and then editing the UVs to fit the texture.

The walk designer creates a key in every track on every frame so it's mystifying that the position along the walk path isn't being stored. Setting additional hip keys on a new layer might do it. Hadn't thought of trying that. I ended up creating a second avatar, reimporting the bvh onto it, and then was hand keying hip positions every few frames to match the first avatar. A tedious endeavor. In my searching around to see if anyone had found a workaroud for the problem I stumbled across Abu Nasu's BVH exporter for 3ds Max which somehow I'd managed to miss when it was created years ago. It's buried in the forum archive now. I grabbed that and got it working so I've moved the project over to Max where I'm much more at home. Animating in Poser is just painful. Thanks for the suggestions

You can't upload a boned object to SL unless it's rigged with the avatar bones and meant to be worn on the avatar. If you want to save it out of Blender in a certain pose you need to bake the pose into the mesh before export. In 3ds Max there's a feature called snapshot which will create a new mesh from the selected one including any current deformations from skin, morphers, or other modifiers. I would imagine Blender has a similar tool.

I think I figured it out. The walk down and back up the runway were created with the walk designer and two paths. The pose and turn in the middle were keyframed by hand. Only the hand keyed portion registered hip movement. The walk designer portions only registered rotations, even though it created keys for the position tracks. I tried resampling the keyframes hoping that would bake the path animations into proper keys but no such luck.

I'm trying to create a full catwalk animation that causes the av to walk down the runway, pose, turn, and walk back requiring just a single click of the play button. I have the animation created in Poser but when I export as bvh I'm getting all the bone rotations but not the actual movement across the floor. What am I missing?

You might want to search the SL online marketplace for mesh items and when you see something you like pay a visit to their in-world location. Most listings will have a SLURL you can click on to go directly to the store.

If you want to make sheer mesh clothing your best bet is to do it with baggy items, or make your clothing item have basically the same polygon structure as the underlying avatar with all its limitations so that it more closely matches its deformations as it moves. It's very difficult to rig mesh clothing, especially if it's tight or if the polygon structure is very different from the avatar, that avoids poke through. Making it high poly won't necessarily help. In most cases if that extra poly detail isn't needed for wrinkles and small details you're just making it harder and more time consuming to do the skin weighting.

It depends on how the skins are being made. For someone using 3d paint and baking the waist seams can be minimized and made very difficult to see, but for those painting skins in photoshop it's a real challenge. The reason is that the texture scale doesn't match across the seam, or even between polygons on the same side of the seam. That makes doing fine details that cross the seam like skin pores extremely difficult to do without it causing the seam to show. Some skin makers do this by fading the small details out on either side of the seam so that they're just matching the base color. That's probably why you saw a skin with a slight blur below the waist seam. The UV mapping on the SL avatar is pretty horrendous.

A biped rig won't be compatible with the SL avatar rig. You need to use regular bones. The easiest way to get a functional SL rig in Max is probably to use Wiz Daxter's SLAV plugin. Physique is a legacy module that's not much used anymore. It has a few features not found in skin but nothing that will translate to SL (like muscles). Use the skin modifier. It's more efficient and you won't have any compatibility problems with it. Edit: Should have read the whole thread since I just repeated everything that Marielle said

The only differences I can think of that might make one program easier to use for making mesh clothing is its tools for painting vertext weights, or better evelopes for generating starting weights, or better modeling tools. Beyond that they all pretty much work the same way as far as skinning a mesh to the SL rig. Blender is plenty good enough to make items for SL every bit as good as something made in a program like Maya or Max.

Yeah, I think ICE looks amazing, though I imagine the learning curve is pretty steep. Max users got a six month license for mudbox a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I was really busy that six months and didn't have time to use it much but I liked it a lot. I've been doing mainly product viz work the last 15 years so haven't had much use for sculpting (doing all hard surface modeling) but the client I was doing it all for has started doing stuff in house so I'm back on the client hunt (yikes!). Hopefully I'll get to work on some more varied projects in the years ahead. I really liked the simplicity of mudbox's interface compared to zbrush.

Yeah, I think ICE looks amazing, though I imagine the learning curve is pretty steep. Max users got a six month license for mudbox a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I was really busy that six months and didn't have time to use it much but I liked it a lot. I've been doing mainly product viz work the last 15 years so haven't had much use for sculpting (doing all hard surface modeling) but the client I was doing it all for has started doing stuff in house so I'm back on the client hunt (yikes!). Hopefully I'll get to work on some more varied projects in the years ahead. I really liked the simplicity of mudbox's interface compared to zbrush.

Chosen, my sub for max is up for renewal before mid December and I've been toying with the idea of upgrading to the suite with mudbox and Softimage. I probably won't this year since I don't have the budget, but for me the reasons I'd want SoftImage in my toolbox is ICE. Max is pretty lacking in the physics sim and particles areas without investing in expensive plugins. Lagoa Multiphysics looks pretty amazing, and the ICE environment looks incredibly powerful. Plus there's automatic lipsynch with Facerobot. Here's a 50 minute demo of ICE:

If what Chosen suggested doesn't work you can also try going through FBX with a Maya or Blender rig.

My guess would be it's a weighting issue. It looks like thos center verts are weighted to the pelvis when they should probably be 50/50 on the upper leg bones.

The SL mesh uploader will occassionally do that when yuo have two vertices on opposite legs that are too close to each other, like on the inner thigh. The first thing to do is check your weights in max and make sure you haven't allowed any verts to be influenced by the other leg bones. Next thing to do is try to upload with the current beta or mesh project viewer. It seems to have fewer issues. If none of that works, move the verts father apart before you export to collada.

What SL client are you using to upload? I recommend using the beta or mesh project viewer and not the regular release viewer. In my experience the latter is a bit flaky and unreliable.

Thanks for the mention! I'm still around but I haven't released any new skins in a few years. I kinda got burned out on them. Most of my skins are still available at a greatly reduced price.

The only part of the regular avatar that isn't hidden and replaced by the mesh avatar is the eyes. When I say I'm making different shape variants I mean each will be a different available mesh object and there will be a version of each clothing item or accessory specifically for each body variant. There is no way within SL to alter the shape of a mesh avatar or clothing item. The trick is finding a way outside of SL to adapt the clothing items to each variant so that they don't have to be remodeled and reskinned for each one. I already have that worked out and am now just streamlining my workflow. Edited to add: I should clarify because that isn't completely accurate. When using a mesh avatar some appearance sliders do still work and affect your shape. Any slider the alters the length or position of the underlying bones will still work, so you can still adjust height, length of arms and legs, width of hips, etc. The appearance sliders that depend on morphs to work like that alter the shape of the head and face, adjust breast size, etc, do not work with mesh avatars.

No male version yet, but I may do those also. Depends on how this first one is received if I can justify the time involved.

I made the skins custom for the avatar since its UV layout is very different from that of the default av.. I wouldn't count on anyone making custom shapes since the amount of work involved is pretty huge, but I will be offering a variety of different body types, bust sizes, etc. The clothing is also all custom made for the avatar so I'm currently working on a way to adapt them to different body variants. And yes, I did make sneakers once

Thanks The lashes are part of the mesh but each lash isn't individually modeled. It's an alpha texture on curved surfaces.

Here's a few shots of a mesh avatar I've been working on.