Gaia Clary

Alex Carpenter wrote: The avatar dummy mesh I'm trying to work with is likely liquid mesh, as some parts of the mesh do change when appearance is edited, but not all of them, and it was created before the introduction of fitted mesh. I understand it works on basically the same principle though. Additionally while in Blender everything looks perfect thanks to the import options you mentioned. But upon upload, the mesh becomes a stick figure (after being rotated to face positive X anyway). When you see a stick figure when you export your mesh to SL, then your problem is exactly what i mentioned in the document about Fitted Mesh. Then the bind pose matrix is missing! The following custom parameters define the bind pose (and it is not at all easy to get the exact parameter values for all bones) . Here are the custom parameter names (and each parameter needs to be set differently for each collision Volume Bone): restpose_loc_x (default=0.0)restpose_loc_y (default=0.0)restpose_loc_z (default=0.0) restpose_rot_x (default=0.0)restpose_rot_y (default=0.0)restpose_rot_z (default=0.0)restpose_scale_x (default=1.0)restpose_scale_y (default=1.0)restpose_scale_z (default=1.0) However the fitted mesh kit should be good for your purposes as well. Because it actually DOES define the bind pose matrix for the collision volume bones of the female default character.

Well, Avastar would certainly help to get things done. And sure you can use it to get your mesh rigged with its original weights and later imported to SL without need to calculate matrix parameters for bone scaling or so... Admitedly using blender for fitted Mesh without a tool like Avastar is imho a bit of a complex thing. The Mesh survival kit IS a blend file that only uses pure Blender and it is capable to export fitted mesh, but it is also not as flexible as Avastar. Avastar works well for classic rigging (to the mBones) and for fitted mesh (collision volume bones). However, it isn't a cakewalk when it comes to fitted mesh. There are still some gray spots where our documentation is not yet as good as it could be and our tools still can need some improvements. But all in all it seems like the tools do pretty much what users expect them to do. I do not hear many complains. And just to have mentioned it, Avastar's real benefit is that it provides ways to animate your creations with IK- and FK- animation, use of control bones, export to .bvh and .anim (and our animation files conform to what the SL importer needs) , eye animations, and it even includes a retargeting tool. oops, i get carried away. i better stop :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

it is already fixed (new label is "only selected UV Map". It should be available tomorrow in the daily blender builds.

Drongle McMahon wrote: ETA - checked and discovered that it is selected, not active, map that gets exported in Blender 2.71 !! Indeed. It is the selected UV Map that is exported when this checkmark is set. This was wrong in the Label. Thanks for pointing this out.

Have you tried the Operator Presets for Second life ? Blender has 2 presets, opne for Rigged Mesh, one for Static Mesh. The Presets can be found in the Selection box named "Operator Presets" at the very top of the export panel. I'd recommend you always use these presets. After all we made them for your convenience :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

The Avatar is fully defined in the viewer as far as i know. So when you see differences in aditi and in agni then maybe they are changing that to distribute the avatar description from the server? Which sounds like a pathway towards custom skeletons (but this is a WILD wild guess). However, maybe its just as simple as your RenderVolumeLOD is different for agni and aditi ?

So in first place Blender should import Second Life Rigs without trouble. Especially in Blender 2.73 we added a feature to find the "maximum connected bone chains" of the rig, which works nice for the SL bones (not so nice for the Collision Volumes) The Rig comes in with a 90 degrees rotation because SL wants the character to look at positive X . While Blender's "natural" character looks towards negative y (using the X axis as mirror axis). Futhermore Blender does not have a bind Pose. So the Rest Pose is the only neutral pose that can be used. In the Rest Pose all normal bones have a scale of 1, and a rotation of 0. However, Collsion bones have very weird scale values (in restpose) and there Blender chockes a bit. But see below in the q/a section: Here are some answers to your questions: Is there detailed documentation anywhere about the latest collada importer and exporter for Blender? Blender uses the OpenCollada libraries and the Collada-1.41 specification. If Blender does not conform to the specifications then please report this to Blender. Why would a rig work well iun blender and not so well in OpenSim? Can it be that you use fitted mesh (weighting to collision volumes? If that is the case, then you need to do a very special extra step, as described in the last chapter of the fitted mesh survival kit When a file is imported that uses Y_UP, what is Blender doing to the data to convert it to its native Z_UP space? The UP Axis is normally specified in the Collada file. Blender reads this and rotates the object in world space. If this does not work as expected, then its a bug (please report to blender in that case) For the other questions i am not sure what you mean by "props" and "restpose values".

When you export an object as .obj then some of its data gets stripped, most apparently .obj does not support rigging, so any weight maps and skeleton definitions get removed. When you import an object from a .obj file then you have a couple of import options to control what parts of the object get imported in which way. So you might have removed the troublesome part of the object without noticing or imported your object such that LL likes it more. So your problem is solved... However your workflow can not be the right way to solve this issue in general. I would recommend that you find the true cause of the problem and avoid the export/import trick.

Your solidify trick is very cool! I like btw: The freeze tool always moves the frozen Object to the same layers where the Original Meshes (the Avastar meshes) are located. The layer 9 comes into play when the new Avastar is created (at around 1:28). However this was unintentional and i just fixed it. Thanks for mentioning it in your video.

While Blender's tri to quad converter gives rather good results, it still does not recreate the exact SL Avatar configuration. It took me a while to teach Sparkles to do this in the right way :matte-motes-evil-grin:

The LL Avatar meshes are here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Clothing_Tutorials http://static-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/avatar/avatar_mesh.zip These meshes mostly use Quads. Note for Sparkles users: The mesh topology of the meshes mentioned above has been used to generate the Sparkles "Quaded Avatar".

When you rig your mesh eyes to the mBones then you end up with exactly the same issues (eyes can't be placed right relative to the mesh when you use fited mesh head and sliders)

Use specific Shape If you create a specific mesh character (head) for a specific SL Shape, then you could load your shape into Avastar, then adjust the mesh to that shape. Then just keep that shape when you export. Then the mesh will fit to your shape in SL. Adjust the eyes with Eye sliders For the eyes we have 4 sliders which can be of help to adjust the eyes to the mesh: Eye Size Eye Spacing Eye Depth Face Sheer These sliders can be used to adjust the eyes to the head. BUT: the problem is when your head height changes, then the eyes get out of place on the vertical axis (as you show in your image) and we have no way to fix that. But see below for an idea... Use Referrence Shapes If you want to keep your head affected by the morph sliders, then the next best solution would be to create a couple of reference meshes for different head sizes which is not very cool but doable with little effort. Then your customers would probably need to select the correct head shape for the head mesh. Use Mesh eyes Another option would be to use mesh eyes and weight them properly (you could add the eyes to the head mesh and use a different material for example). But then you loose eye movement. An idea... (needs LL activity though) Right now the relative eye hight is bound to sliders which also affect the Collision Volumes. Because of that we can not adjust the eyes to match a fitted mesh face. But if we had one extra slider for "Eye Height" then we could use this together with the 4 others (see above) to get the eyes to the right place. I am sure this is only a small change in the avatar definition files. Maybe someone from the viewer developers could take a look at that and see how easy that would be ?

Maybe this article clarifies the rumours: http://www.blender.org/foundation/history/

Think like this: You can't play Bach within your first Piano lesson. Even if you know where the keys are and what they do, you still need to practice a lot before you hear music instead of tones.

I guess you have more than 21844 triangles on 2 of your 3 texture faces. Can that be?

You could open a ticket at http://blog.machinimatrix.org/tickets/ then we will take a look at your issue.

Greatings from the Blender Outer Rim: btw: saving a file in Blender: via Keyboard Shortcut: CTRL +S via Mouse: File -> Save Blenderheads always thought that this was standard in earth made gadgets. Blenderheads have a hard time to figure out how earth people think.

just curious: From the screenshot it looks like you have installed Avastar. But you try to use the workbench. Is there a particular reason for that? Does Avastar fail at some point for you? Avastar handles the eye socket issue...

Cathy Foil wrote: Blender is a good choice. YOu can create polygon models and rig in it and some painting from what I understand. Be warned though Blender's user interface is pretty bad making it one of the most difficult programs to learn though the interface has improved a lot over the years. It is probably the most popular program for mesh creators here in SL. Blender's user interface has been designed with the complexity of the topic in mind. Blender's developers have taken a long way to master this and i believe that currently Blender has one of the best user interfaces in the world in its category of software. IMHO the main problem is that Blender is not as consistently documented as it is developped. And that is why it is still not so easy to learn its usage. But the documentation is about to be improved, see here (work in progress): http://www.blender.org/manual/

You can do this manually as you descroibed. Or you can let the Viewer and Blender do the tedious part as follows: Get the Marketplace shapes into SL (as Avatar shapes) For each shape create the Appearance to XML (shape files) You can do this with any viewer. open Blender and create a new Avastar Locate the Avatar Shape panel (in the Armature's Object properties, see image) Now Setup the presets. You need to do this only once. As soon as the presets are defined you can recall them at any time from the Preset Selector (also after you restarted Blender). For each of the just stored XML Shapes you will do: Load the Shape File into your Avastar Rig Store the Shape as new Preset Once you have done this you have your Standard sizes defined as Blender Presets. Then in the future you can switch the Avastar shape to any of the Standard sizes in a snap (by selecting the appropriate Shape preset from the Avatar Shape panel).

The SL Importer unfortunately always uses a human stand pose for displaying your rigged meshes. Your creature has its arms bended by about 90 degrees relative to the human pose. That's why the default stand pose now crossed arms on your creature. You proceed as follows: Ignore the crossing of arms and import the creature to SL In Avastar create a stand pose and export this (either as .bvh or .anim file) Import the pose to SL Now play the pose and see that your creature now stands correct.

Somehow you sound a bit like you dislike what we do. I am not entirely sure about what makes Avastar an inconvenient tool for you. However... I apologize if i made a mistake. But please can you tell me where on our website we name this "The free Avastar Avatar" ? Then i will correct that document. what are "Seria A" and "Seria B" Kits ? Regarding SLAV: We do not know how Wiz interprets the Data. I guess that he does it the same way as we do. We have verified dozens of times that our system behaves just like SL behaves except some parts on the lower legs where we see very small deviations from what we expect. The weights provided in the SL Wiki are made as an example for a fitted Mesh character. Those weights are no definition of any officially to be used weights. it is just an example. The weights we use in Avastar and in the Workbench are the official weights coming from the Avatar definition files and those weights are meant to be used for the SL Avatar itself. Our recent fixes do not affect the weights. They affect how the Avastar sliders interpet the weights on custom meshes. So we have fixed Avastar's slider system and not the Avastar weights. The weights used by Avastar have never changed. About the implementation of the Slider system: Avastar's main purpose is creating precise animations for Second Life. In order to get this supported we must implement the entire slider system. This comes to benefit for Avastar's fitted mesh support. Because now you can use Avastar as a test tool for your fitted meshes. I also do not say that you MUST get Avastar to make fitted Mesh.It is just a huge time saver. I also do not say your tool is bad or whatever. And for sure i am all positive about supporting Blender and the Blender Community. Actually we put a lot of effort into Blender itself. Since 2 Years we (the makers of Avastar) also take care that Blender's Collada Exporter is capable to export for SL. Last year we added the important fix for Second Life fitted Mesh in Blender 2.70. And the recent improvement in 2.73 for Importing foreign rigs was my idea and i even implemented this part. So we do all that we can do to provide SL support right in Blender. And it is not our fault that fitted Mesh is complex. We try to make it easier. And again i am not so sure about where we do wrong.

Hi; First of all thank you for your huge effort to uncover the bits and pieces of Fitted Mesh development. From your post it becomes very clear that fitted mesh is a complex thing. However, since you also mention Avastar as a comparison to your tool, please let me add some information to clarify a few points: The Avastar free Avatar 270 ... is one of our Avatar workbench downloads. Your document is a bit unclear about how this relates to Avastar. So here is clarification: The Avatar Workbench is not directly comparable to Avastar. The only similarity is that both tools use the same Skeleton, namely the Skeleton provided by Linden Lab. The weights ... Avastar uses the exact same weights as the Second Life Avatar. Indeed we use the Avatar definition files from the SL Viewer as reference. These weights have never been meant to be useful for fitted mesh. Indeed we do not (yet) provide any weights for fitted mesh because there are no such weights defined. Actually these "fitted mesh weights" depend highly on the users mesh creations. Using weight copy tools can only provide some "starting point" which needs more or less tweeking and the final weight maps must always be optimized for the particular mesh attachment. Relation between the Avatar appearance sliders and mesh. This is complex, however it can be broken down to this: The SL Avatar uses 130 appearance sliders About 100 of these sliders control "Blend Shapes" (Shape keys in Blender) about 30 of these sliders control the Skeletal animation. The SL Avatar uses all 130 sliders for appearrance settings Mesh items can only use about 30 of these sliders Fitted Mesh tries to simulate the 100 blend shape sliders which can never be precise. Note that Avastar handles all of this exactly as it is handled in the SL Viewer. Hence we can provide a true What you see is what you get tool. However, it can still be very easy to break things because of the sheer complexity of the system. A tool is just a tool Of course any tool based on Blender will make use of what Blender offers. And then it will add its own improvements to this. In most cases these tools are meant for making things easier. Looking from this perspective, any Addon is just a set of helper functions which aim to make creator's life easier. And of course you would not need any of those tools in order to get your tasks done. At the end its more a question of time and efficiency. So you can use pure Blender and get perfect Meshes, but it might be easier and/or faster to use dedicated Addons as well. Blender Optimizations Thank you for mentioning that we have improved the Collada Importer. Indeed we wanted this to work exactly for making it easier to import collada files from other sources like Maya for example :matte-motes-grin: The FBX Addon is still moving a bit as well. But overall it looks pretty good meanwhile.