Kiramemiko

That's fine, this has been a great learning opportunity for me. I like to treat plugins, frameworks, libraries, etc as a shortcut, but only if I already understand what they're doing internally. Kind of like using a calculator after you already understand how multiplication works. If worse comes to worse, I'll just buy Avastar and take a look at the source code to get an a better understanding of how the Blender/SL workflow operates.

Thanks, for some reason it never occurred to me to just transfer weights from the mesh body. Honestly, I hadn't even checked to see that the mesh bodies I had downloaded actually had proper weights already on them. Luckily most of them do. Some of them look like someone just threw a mesh onto the provided skeleton and shipped it. I remember seeing something about exporting a cube from Blender and just uploading that in the physics tab, but I didn't understand why. Thanks for explaining.

A lot of the information in the notes I'm taking actually does come from your github, so I'm glad you gave some hints. I'm a big fan of open source, so I'll probably end up building clothes for Ruth2. My main question right now is, when would you ever choose to weight mPelvis, when you can paint PELVIS and get the collision functionality?

Ok, so I found some more information, and answered some of my questions below. If anyone knows better, please correct what I wrote below, so that I don't spread false information. I'm going to end up taking all my notes eventually, and doing a complete write up, so that someone in the same position, starting from nothing can get up to speed. So I took another look at the avatar_skeleton.xml file. It does list 133 "bones" but then it also lists 26 "collision volumes" which would add up to the 159. For the purposes of Blender, all of these would just be considered bones. This is where the numbers I bolded above come from. Specifically for my point 1.5, underlined above, I found documentation that suggests that SL only uses the armature head (referred to as the "joint" in SL), and the distance between parent/child armature heads to calculate bone length. If this is the case, it wouldn't really matter at all where the breast bones end. Might also explain why the bones just appear as dots in some of those files. Ok, so I'm still researching this, but the "m-bones" are like actual bones for movement and animations, where as the other bones are collision volumes. As I understand it, the best way to explain it is that m-bones are like human bones, whereas the collision volumes are like how much the body stick out from the bones (fat, breasts, muscle, etc...), and they specify how physics works in SL. For instance, a very fat avatar walking towards a wall will stop sooner than a skinny avatar of the same m-bone length. This can all be very confusing since everything is just a bone in Blender. The collision volumes all correspond to associated m-bones, like my example with the clavicle above. When it comes to the weight painting the mesh in Blender, each vertex of the mesh can be weighted by up to 4 of the 159 bones. For instance if you wanted to weight paint one specific vertex of the shoulder, the four bones you'd probably use are the mCollarLeft, LEFT_CLAVICLE, mShoulderLeft, and L_UPPER_ARM. You can assign any combination of weights to these bones, but they must add up to 100%, and only these 4 bones can be used. I'm still not sure the best way to go about doing this, other than manually painting everything. Automatic weights can be normalized to ensure the paint on any vertex isn't greater than 100%, but I have no idea how you would restrict it to a max of 4 bones. Also, how does one choose amount of weight to add to m-bone versus collision bones?

Thanks for responding to some of my questions so quickly Wulfie! I found links to a bunch of free/easily obtainable dev kits here and here. I'll just design for one of those, since I'm just getting started and need the practice. For some it looks like I would just have to re-weight them to the different armatures, but that would still require different SL objects for different bodies correct? There's no way to upload one mesh object and have that applicable to several bodies? Thanks, yes I see now. That makes sense, though seems like a major shortcoming of LL.

Hello I'm a Blender artist who would like to create clothes for SL, but it seems a lot of the information on the wiki is outdated, or does not reflect actual practice. Other info is scattered across third party websites, and I'm not sure what is most up to date. Please note, I don't want to rely on using Avastar. From what I see in the marketplace, standard practice is to design clothes for specific bodies ("Hourglass", "eBody", "Maitreya", "Avatar 2.0", etc...) using their "dev kits". What is the best way to make one mesh that fits the greatest number of bodies? If this isn't an option, what are the most common shapes that I should stick to designing for? I understand making new mesh avatars for animals and/or fantasy creatures, but why do creators make mesh humans at all, when SL has body sliders in the viewer itself? When designing for the standard avatar body (is this what's referred to as "legacy"?) where is the correct skeleton and mesh combination? I have tried all of the following: Bento Page August 2016 female says the rig is broken, in Blender, displays 159 bones as dots instead of octahedral, stick, etc... Bento Page August 2016 angel rig has 133 bones (same as my avatar_skeleton.xml), but also displays bones as dots (am I doing something wrong...?) Bento Page FBXs don't work in modern versions of Blender (error: version 6100 unsupported, must use 7100 or later). Apparently there's a way to convert them to modern format, but I haven't done it yet. Avatar Workbench page workbench-271 is for a super old version of Blender, and only has 26 bones Avatar Workbench page "Bento Female-2017-01-09" has 159 bones, but the breast bones extend beyond the mesh, making me think the wrong mesh is being used in the file, and if used for modeling, will cause deformations upon upload. Therefore I really don't trust the whole mesh. On the Skeleton Guide what is the difference between "Sliders that affect Bones" and "Sliders that affect Collision Volumes"? Aren't they all used to affect deformation bone size? What is the purpose of similar bones that are close to each other, example: mCollarLeft and LEFT_CLAVICLE. Should one be given weight painting preference over another? Thanks for any help that is provided.