OptimoMaximo

It's completely normal behavior. What you're seeing is the result of human animations playing on a completely different shape. Make a pose for it in the quadrupedal stance and you'll see that it all works. 😉

That's why I was saying that sharing the work environment might help. The fbx files found in the wiki face the correct direction, but the import settings might make Max do any sort of operations and change things in a way that uploading it back is broken. Anyway, if more info and pics will be coming along, someone might be able to help. A general answer like yours, which leaves everything to be assumed, including your correct knowledge about the topic, won't lead you any farther than where you currently are.

Sharing the work environment details and all the various settings tried so far may help people spot possible issues. My first question would be what axis is the avatar facing?

Sure, make it loop and instead of firing it on a timer, make a longer animation with few blinks here and there and a longer wait time split between beginning and end of the animation. Just play it once, and only fire a change via script for the animation to change, when you feel like to have different timings between a blink and the next ETA: If you really want to go with your timer based approach, make sure to have another animation running at a lower priority all the time, in which the eyelids are always open. Eyelids joints do not have another animation to ease over, so they stop at the last pose they were in, therefore you must provide a base animation so that the eyelids keep moving along with something, there is no autoreset for joints in the SL animation system

@AnuuubisIf you open the bvh file in a text editor, you can see what bones have been exported. Chances are that you've exported the animation skeleton instead of the deformation skeleton, which bones are named with "m" prefix ie mPelvis, mShoulder and so on. If that's the case, you should find that skeleton in the outline window. Make it visible, select its root and try to export again

In Arnold within Maya, there is a material called shadow catcher that does what you need

You're about to experience a whole lot of trouble, believe me. The excess bones are only the tip of the iceberg there. First, the whole avatar comes rotated the wrong direction, it faces y axis but it should face the x axis. Also, it is all scaled to meters as its own linear unit, as shown by the presence of a locator down on the floor. The bind pose is therefore to trash as it is and saved again when things line up correctly to the expected orientation. It's a quite long, tedious process that is also very much prone to error, even when you know what you're doing. This is all due to the fact that the devkit was made based off avastar, which does a lot of work to make the blender based mesh and skeleton compatible with SL. You'd be just better off asking the original creator to make a Maya devkit available, as things stand now, it's very improbable to get you anywhere near to something that works

Learning something is always worth per se. After you go through the process, only then you can answer your own question: Better is only what best suits you, but you can't tell if you don't learn something new, in order to compare 😉

Yeah I'm pretty much out of options... Animats suggestion is the only one viable solution, but again it's uncertain whether such feature made it to release...

Did you think of making a live on YouTube and attach the live url to a media prim?

E quindi? 😂

If the assumption is cost = 0, I'm afraid you're really short of options. The list I can come up with right now is Blender, can export bvh for free, but it needs a correct skeleton setup and that's not really easy to accomplish for a beginner. Cost = 0; optionally you can get Avastar that includes all the a I've plus anim format export, but it has a cost of approx 20 bucks DazStudio, I don't know if it comes with a bvh export option but again, as blender, it requires a skeleton setup which may or may not be available, in such case its cost = 0; otherwise it now supports anim format from @Sabrina Tamerlane and that has a cost (which I don't know) Poser, not free but can definitely export bvh for SL without extra purchases, or again anim format from Sabrina at a cost which I don't know. 3dsMax, can export bvh natively but you need a SL compliant skeleton. Definitely not free, quite pricey truth be told, and anim format available from @polysail plug in Marionette, which also provides all you need for both rigging and animation out of the box. Maya, same as 3dsMax,with both Mayastar for rigging and basic human animation and (my very own) MyAniMATE for advanced animation capabilities. Since August 2020 Autodesk offers a new license solution for both Maya and 3dsMax called Indie License at a yearly price of around 360 euro vat included, so it's no longer that pricey as it used to be.

"pyqt5 - learning qt for python", it's about cross-platform UI building using python, "body language", about advanced rigging for production, and "Maya APIs - from UI design to vector math for rigging". Quite interesting readings, although the holidays got in the way and had to stand them by 😅

Yes that would work as well, just remember to reverse the pattern facing normals. I have experience with MD only, it's the option to reverse the facing direction of the pattern, but I'm sure it's available in clo3d as well

She's new to Blender and 3d for games, so it's unlikely she got to retopo the model with clean loops, and that dress comes straight out of clo3d with unforeseeable geometry arrangement. I'd say grab a chunk of the mesh and duplicate/reverse, but for the rest, like do not duplicate the whole dress, I agree.

Yes it needs to be done in your dcc of choice, in your case Blender will do just fine.

Meshes are one sided only, so what you're seeing is expected behavior. You need to duplicate the offending faces and reverse their normals, at least if not give it some thickness too in addition to the aforementioned duplication.

It works exactly the same, I've tried it a few times. It gives back a triangulated mesh that keeps all manipulations you've done inworld

Uh I missed this one. Although it may seem that simple, animations use absolute position values for joints relative to the avatar root. That doesn't take the shape sliders into account, which work by scaling joints on one axis, and that gives the illusion of joints location change.... BUT there is such a thing like scale, rotate and translate specific pivots, and that's where the issue explained above kicks in. The animated position takes all pivots and places them somewhere, regardless of the fact that they don't have the same coordinates and, as result, you'll get your shaped bones repositioned in their scaled form using the scale pivot location, causing an awkward stretch - compression of the mesh. This is why, when making a custom avatar that has nothing to do with the default human, like a quadruped for example, the only way to avoid issues is to always start from a neutral shaped female skeleton.

Where exactly is the question, as I don't see question marks in your post? And what exactly is the suggestion?

Well I think that the final model could be exported from SL by saving the file to disk and then re-upload it? At least, using firestorm that can be done

Yes, as I was saying, cook Torrance model is still a flavor of the basic blinn. The difference with what the Disney bdrf implements, and that the unreal engine implements, is the so called specular tail, which in cook Torrance is set to gaussian, while the Disney and derived model instead set to a particular model called ggx. Now, the fact that the fully fledged renderman model, with clear coat, sheen, bells and whistles was stripped of the excessively resource demanding features doesn't change the fact that their shader model is a lot different from the ordinary cook Torrance, especially for their implementation of specular level input. Don't take my comment as an opposing argument, it's not. I would welcome a shader change like that as the messiah! It would automatically work with the content I've been making so far, so please keep going and associate with one of the main viewers devs!

It is still relevant as no changes occurred in the meantime. The OP also states that he could not notice any broken content from the shader changes because cook torrence model is another flavor of the same type of shader mentioned in the light model page you pointed at, both are a lambertian diffuse and specular gaussian mixed shader. The difference sits in the exposed properties, their name and their interactions with each other. I really would welcome a shader change like that, seriously. Metals kinda suck at current state, and other materials are less than convincing. Probably true physically based shader models are too expensive and prone to break older content, but a good brdf shader flavor could do very good to this platform, also offering a more standardized base for a little bit more modern workflow

I've been trying to advocate for a better use of glossiness and environment maps since when materials were introduced. Nobody ever listened. Anyway, since Cook Torrance model is NOT the industry standard, in order to get decent metals from the base shader model it is based on (blinn, aka old gen) the diffuse component should be full black and the color should be transfered over to the specular map. The environment map you can use as metalness map is useful to achieve the black diffuse if you use it as a subtracting map to alter the base diffuse. Why isn't cook Torrance model the industry standard? Because it is and has always been a flavor of the Blinn model. Blender has always had that shader since its inception, when there was the Blender render engine, waaaay before cycles was ever even thought. The fact that Blender still uses it as the base model on which the current bdrf models build upon doesn't make it an industry standard. Indeed those that use it (unity and Sansar for example) are usually subpar in comparison to the others using the actual standard model (unreal, redshift, Arnold, to name a few) originally developer by Disney for their renderman render engine.

Make a mesh plane that has the same geometry of the underlying body part and rig it. This way you can get the full resolution. However, as per usual, this leads to a lot of texture waste, for what in the end?