J4ckrabb1t

Thats reassuring to hear hehe. Anyway I think I might have hit the nail on the head and have now successfully rigged the jacket from what it seems...its all moving PERFECTLY with the avatar and armature. All im doing now is continuing with the tutorial from Asha on making alphas for the jacket and downloading a plugin called Python to export it. Fingers crossed it works... One last thing I had concerns about but didn't seem relative at the time since no one said anything about it. Whats the business with the LOD's? Are they paramount for a successful rigged mesh upload in SL? On her tutorial Asha exports each LOD individually which she had from the beginning oh her third of fourth video but didnt explain how she got them. IS it something I should be concerned with?

I never have been very good at explaining more complicated situations like this but from what your saying here you make it sound like the first thing I did was pretty much in the right track, creating its own armature and t-posing the jacket...however I was very much unaware of this 'armature modifier' your talking about and I never even thought about deleting the vertex groups once id done that. Basically I didnt get past your first point because I ended up removing the armature I made myself for the jacket and rigging it to the avatars bones. I guess I should look into it some more...I feel like a pest truth be told but...i will conquer this and then youll never hear from me again, ha.

Okay so thanks to the rapid responses from Rahkis I have been able to make ALLOT of progress on the jacket..I'm no longer having problems with the jacket clipping or stretching it flows perfectly, but now a new problem has risen and I didn't want to keep spamming Rahkis' inbox everytime I got stuck. The new problem that has coming up is when im trying to actually copy the bone weight of the avatar to the jacket so I can finalise it to make sure it works for exporting. Somewhere along the line ive made a terrible mistake which I can only assume most experienced blender users will now laugh at me for explaining but here goes. The first thing I immedietly did was manually create an armature on the jacket layer and applied vertex groups for each section of the jacket to each bone which in a result make the jacket move nicely with the bones. After that I tried to find out if there was a way to like merge the bones at all but I felt this was wrong, I dont know...so i ended up removing the armature and since i now knew about vertex grouping I actually thought grouping the jacket to the avatar bones might help. A few more problems then rose which for a few moments i thought I had fixed when the mesh was actually moving faster than the armature itself, I parented the jacket and at first in its default position it suddenly worked like a charm. Naturally as a newbie to the programme I got dead excited and really chuffed with myself thinking I had cracked it. Yeeeeah, so much for that. I've been at it all day and alot of things have happened so I cannot remember the exact details of what happened first but at present the position of the jackets arms are in their default down position in edit mode while having changed the pose mode position to that of the t-position. For some reason when I apply pose as rest pose the arms either drop back down into the jackets defaults mesh position or suddenly fly up like their cheering. The other thing which i mentioned earlier is when im trying to copy the bone weight of the avatar to the jacket it says 'more than 1 mesh has vertex weights, only select 1 mesh with weights, aborting' ...I tried unparenting the jacket from the armature and it just doesnt want to...the arms drop down into the jackets default pose but when i move the bones its STILL attached to the armature. Also the avatar mesh's arms are up in the air and only drop back down when unparenting. I'm so damn confused I dont know what to do anymore and I just KNOW im doing something so wrong but i dont know...

Not a problem at all I appreciate whatever help you have given me so far. Admittedly the main reason I decided to pick up blender and try it myself was solely because of this jacket simply because it doesn't exist in second life yet and id kill to get it for several reasons. Not afraid to admit I have pretty much hit a wall and I'm a little impatient with it already ha >_< I'll see about putting up the file somewhere quick and sending the link to you via PM when I can so you can do your stuff whenever you're free

I'll give that a blast thanks ) One thing I failed to point which I tried was actually changing the rest position of the bone to the pose but for some reason when I apply it my char jumps straight back into a T-pose while it clearly shows the armature/bone is actually in the rest position I set...got a little confused at this point...again why im here.

(Oh my frikkin god I have to re-write this because I lost connection as I was posting) Yeah thats right, pretty much the second thing I tried...its been a sort of trial and error from this point...and quite frankly I dont know what the hell i'm doing anymore hahaha, cant fidn any tuts to help so its why im here. I haven't tried actually manipulating the jacket itself yet because my "3DS MAX PRO" friend seems to think its not possible in blender...naturally as the more experienced one of the two of us I took his word for it. But if its possible id rather not be breaking my guys arms as you put it...id just kill to have the jacket working and into SL even if it takes a week to learn and do myself. If you could point me in the direction of a tutorial on how to manipulate the jacket maybe or explain it here if it isnt a deathly long process to do if its possible? Thanks again

Hi guys, I recently decided to start using blender to try and get this pre-made jacket I like into the game through blender I found from one of those free websites that lets you download them. I did a few tutorials first hand and got the basics of it and now im pretty okay with it...its just this jacket im having a problem with. For starters the jacket by default start of in a sort of relaxed position, arms sort of half way between completly resting and the T-pose. I immedietly though "Hmm, never ran into this before" but figured it was probably manageable. Turns out the jacket doesnt want to play ball or im doing something terribly wrong. I started off thinking for some reason that maybe when I copy the bone weights the jacket would automatically align with the avatars arms since ive never worked with an item of clothing thats not in the t-pose before. Turns out I was wrong...so i ended up changing the pose so the arms were inside the jacket but it was doing the same thing....the outer section of each of the jackets upper arm for some reason is the only section of the jacket that will actually move with the upper arm armature while the chest area actually connects itself to upperarm itself but stretches since the wrist area of the jacket is connected to the stomache bone and the arm hole itself is connected to the upper leg bone...this applies to both sides of the jacket by the way. The only things that work are the legs and the chest...they are all connected perfectly...its just the arms giving me some problem. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make it so each section of the jacket properly goes with the correct armature bone? Or is it impossible with a jacket like this? Thanks