Gaia Clary

I did not see it, because i was already thinking too complicated, so i missed to check the most important things. But Eleanora Newell found it and pointed me to the cause :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: You have duplicated vertices on your mesh. And this caused the LOD generator to fail when it tried to generate the lowest LOD, hence the Low LOD and the Lowest LOD where identical, hence the costs went up significantly. We have deleted the duplicate vertices, then imported the meshes again to Second Life, and now the costs of the 2 blend files are similar again.

Now this becomes interesting. @Drongle: If i remember correctly you experimented with order of vertices in the exported collada file? And you found significant difference depending on that order? Anyways, whatever causes this issue, if we can detect it and if we know how to avoid it, then we probably can modify the Avastar exporter accordingly... @Amphei Jierdon: Maybe you could send me the 2 blend files, so that i can inspect them to see the differences? You can open a ticket in our website http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/tickets

We have seen this as well yesterday, but then we found that the raise seems to happen only when you use the firestorm viewer for importing. I tested the same import file with the default SL Viewer and there all was well. However, maybe it was just a temporary glitch, but in the case you use firestorm, you could double check with the SL viewer and see if the costs are still as high.

Forr rigged mesh the physics is irrelevant (as far as i know) so you can just use a simple triangle as physics mesh if you like. the physics mesh does not have influence on the mesh shape.

but we do have step by step tutorials. These 2 should be good for the beginning: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/reference/first-steps/ http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/reference/create-an-attachment/ If these are not of help for you, then can you tell what sort of information you need besides what we already provide? Maybe we can then improve the documents.

Rigging a head is in first place not different from rigging an attachment. Is there something special that you want to know? Something that is clearly different on a head compared to any other area of the Avatar? And can you give a brief descriptiopn where in the process of rigging you actually have issues? What measn "can't seem to do it correctly"? Where do you fail?

Some additional infos: Blender's User interface is constantly improved and there are meanwhile a couple of internal Blender projects aimed at improving usability even more. btw the Blender documentation undergoes a major rework as well, so things are moving toward a better future :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: Sparkles adds features that are good to have when you need to save time. Sparkles is not really necessary for casual Meshers. It is also mostly independent from Avastar. Avastar will normally work BEST with the most recent version of Blender, because we use the blender development version also for developing Avastar. We try hard to keep Avastar compatible with older versions of Blender, but this does not work always.

You probably have not attached the sliders. This is described briefly in the skinning reference on our website. Note: In more recent versions of Avastar the Slider control section has changed slightly. Instead of the button "Attach Sliders" we now have a selection for the slider type: [no sliders, sl sliders, shapekeys]. But the functionality is the same. ALso note: If the sliders do not work, even if you have attached them, then try to detach the sliders and attach them again. This situation can happen for example when you open your blend file after you moved it to another location on your filesystem. If you can't get this to work properly, then ensure you have installed the most recent version of the addon. If this is already the case, then please file a bug report to our ticket system (you find it on our website).

I recomend you read the Create an attachment tutorial. This might be helpful (not only for Avastar users) And we also have these collections: Product related tutorials in the Avastar documentation section. and for Blender and SL topics there is the Avacademy page

Hi; I have started a video series about fitted mesh. The first video in the series is now on youtube and since it is more a general insight into the topic and not strictly related to any 3D Tool, i thought it might be good to tell about it here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt6rq2G3EWU Any feedback is very welcome as always :matte-motes-sunglasses-1: thanks

See here: https://developer.blender.org/maniphest/task/create/?project=2&type=Bug However, you have to register first before you can report a bug.

Yesterday we fixed two bugs in Blender's Collada exporter which affected the export of custom normals from the Normals Modifier. The export did also not work as expected when your objects where set to flat shading while they use custom normal modifier in parallel. Both bugfixes are now available inblender's daily builds. The issue was reported 2 days ago by a Second Life resident in chat. Many thanks for telling me :matte-motes-grin:

Hi; In Blender 2.75 the Collada exporter adds a name attribute to instance_geometry nodes. This feature was requested to workaround a bug with instance nodes during upload to Second Life. The feature will become available in daily builds beginning tomorrow (3-may-2015) @Drongle: Maybe you can comment on this and explain when this becomes important and useful? thanks.

One reason for "missing required level of detail" is due to using ngons (polygons with 5 or more faces) in your mesh. Avastar does not check on that. So what you can do is: go to edit mode Select -> Select Faces by Side Then in the operator panel (at bottom of the the tool shelf) set: number of faces: 4 type: Greater than Now you get all ngons selected. If your mesh contains ngons, then you can proceed as follows: Mesh -> Faces -> Triangulate FacesNow all your previously selected ngons have been changed to triangles. When you export again, then the problem of missing required level of detail might have been fixed. Mesh density However, as others also mentioned before your mesh is extremely dense and you should fix that in first place. There is one caveat that is often overlooked and which could cause the "missing required level of detail". That is: A texture face in Second Life can have no more than 21844 triangles. Because of that the SL Importer splits texture faces into separate submeshes of appropriate triangle count. Each of these submeshes actually represents a separate texture face. And here is the problem: The SL Importer by default calculates the levels of detail (LOD) for your mesh. It can happen that one or more of the calculated LOD levels have completely removed all triangles which belong to one texture face. In your case your mesh might have 2 texture faces in high LOD but only one texture face in lowest LOD. Then the SL Importer stumbles over its own calculated inconsistencies. So your best way to fix that is by reducing your mesh face count to less than 21844 triangles. Blender has a Decimate Modifier for that. This might work in your case, but honestly i would work directly on the mesh and in first place i would remove unnecessary edge loops. Especially the collar and the sleeves look extremely high polygon to me. A rule of thumb Check how many triangles are used by the area of the avatar that is covered by your attachment. This gives you a rough idea about how many triangles your mesh should have. Following that rule, your shirt should be doable with about 3600 triangles. However i personally believe that you can do this with less than 2000 tris.

BlackCrow23 wrote: is there any way to make some Linden currency to get started, without having to put any real money in to it? You could begin with offering services of whichever kind you can do. For example you could create things for others and get payed with Lindendollars for this... However according to this page: https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Uploading-a-mesh-model/ta-p/974185 you have to provide payment information before you can upload mesh objects. So you need some valid bank information first (credit card, paypal account or so...) And i also remember you have to do at least one transaction (buy linden dollars) to verify your payment info. So, maybe you just create your payment info, buy some lindens (5 US$ gives you about 1300 Linden$) and then you have plenty of room for uploading content before you have to begin making money with it...

Well, here is a working patch: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/OpenCOLLADA/pull/304 However this patch first needs to be accepted by OpenCollada, before it can be officially used by Blender. Sadly OpenCollada never was performing in a speedy way, which is part of why collada has become so not beloved :matte-motes-dont-cry:

In Blender each shape key is a full copy of the original mesh but morphed into a target shape. That is what i meant before when i mentioned "i am sure this could be drastically reduced with a better data house keeping" because most of the mesh data is redundant (especially for keys that only change a small portion of the mesh). However there is one way how it could work efficiently: The creator could send a mesh with all its shape keys to the SL Server. Now whenever a user is changing his/her shape, the necessary shape key data is sent over to the user's viewer, where he/she can adjust the shape in the appearance editor. When the appearance is saved, then the shape is baked into the mesh and now all is as it was before. No shape keys needed while running around with your avatar The only issue that i see is, that editing the shape potentialy moves a lot of data from the server to the viewer. But maybe that can be optimized... another idea pops up...

Actually you need to provide one additional mesh for each shape key, so you can quickly get a huge amount of extra data. For example the SL Avatar has about 130 shape keys. In Blender this sums up to something like 40 MBytes of data. I am sure this could be reduced drastically by a better data house keeping, but nevertheless you would have to provide 130 meshes to create a replica of the SL Avatar with shape keys...

I recently worked on a shape key copy tool for one of our blender addons (Sparkles). This tool actually is capable to copy shape keys from one mesh to another mesh with similar shape but different topology. I wonder since a while if this idea could be applied to Second Life as well: idea: copy shale keys from defautl Avatar So first it is important to know that the SL Avatar has all its shape keys distributed with the Viewer. Because of that it is not necessary to send the shape key data of the avatar over the network. Now lets say we had a shape key copy tool that would work similar to what i made for Blender. Then the mesh creator does not need to create the shape keys, but the sl viewer would create the keys on the fly when needed by doing a copy from the existing Avatar shape keys. I know this is not a perfect system, but maybe it could be helpful when combined with fitted mesh and classic bone rigging. And while i type this i just got another idea :smileyhappy: ...

Drongle McMahon wrote: What about object names in <instance geometry> name attribute ? See here :matte-motes-sour:: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/OpenCOLLADA/issues/303

The support for Custom normals in Blender has ben requested since a long time. This request was partially fulfilled since Blender 2.74 And with Blender 2.75 we will add also the export of Custom normals to Collada. If you are impatient, then you already can get the custom normal exporter in daily Blender builds. Here is a Video that demonstrates an example where you need custom normals. Please note the free editing of custom normals is not implemented (yet). However Bledner provides some tools whcih allow to modify normals to some extend. Note: The video also demonstrates a generic welding Tool that we have added to the Sparkles Addon for Blender. This tool is not part of Blender. However, the Blender Collada exporter supports custom normal exports out of the blender box.

Material Slot reorder can be very helpful for preparing your exports to Collada. Until today you either had to take care a lot when creating the LOD's for your meshes, or you had a bit of work to fix the material order for your LOD's by hand. Now with the upcoming Blender 2.75 the material slot reordering can be done in a snap:

Amphei Jierdon wrote But changing shapes inworld seems to have no effect. Well, this is another issue, that is your bikini is not weighted to fitted mesh bones (collision volumes). Because of that the breast sliders won't do anything in Second Life. However, some sliders should woirk, especially the sliders for Body Height and Body thickness should work (and some of the torso sliders should work as well).

Well, this is was fatal decision :matte-motes-dont-cry: The fact that your bikini had shape keys may be because you had enabled the SL Appearance sliders on your mesh. So the right way to fix this would have been to disable the sliders before applying the mirror modifier. I also suspect that there is a huge misunderstanding with how to use Avastar. Actually the Sliders are mostly used for testing your mesh and for creating variants of your mesh. If you want to design a mesh clothing for exactly one shape, then the recommended workflow is: Create new Avastar Apply the SL Shape to it (load the XML Shape file) Model your mesh to fit the shape (and keep sliders disabled) export/import/done To fix the problems in your case, you need to go a rather long route, but actually you can do this in less then 5 minutes after you did it once or twice (its not complicated): Freeze the bikini as standalone. Use the freeze tool in the tool shelf. But do NOT check the remove weights option. You want to keep the weights intact! Delete the entire Avastar character and its rig. (it is completely broken anyways after you removed the shape keys) Now you should have only the "frozen version" of your bikini in the scene. Save this as a new blend file (just for backup) Check that the mesh has no armature modifier (just to be sure) Add a new Avastar character Import your SL Shape. Now your blender character should have the exact same shape as your Second Life Avatar. Take care: do not yet bind the bikini to the Armature! First you fit the bikini mesh (in edit mode) to the new character (if necessary). Also keep the Avastar shape keys as they are! Also do NOT enable the SL appearance sliders. (You do not need the sliders in your case!!!) When the bikini fits nicely, then bind it with KEEP weights (tool shelf avastar skinning panel) export to collada, import to SL, and enjoy. i hope this fixes your issues. Should you still encounter any other problems, then please consider to use our ticket system (on the Machinimatrix website)

Did you test the attachment with differnet poses in Blender? From first appearance it looks like your bikini is not weighted correctly. You probably have weights from the collar bone spreading down to the breasts. Just to have mentioned it: did you use the same shape in SL as you used in Blender?