Gaia Clary

First of all: The Blender Default exporter is not complete rubish. It is completely working for Second Life purposes. If there is anything wrong with the default exporter, then please report this to blender. Any report related to Second Life dificulties will be seen and resolved (if possible). However i haven't heard any complains since at least a year. Then Second: You do not need to get Avastar for making content for SL. Blender can do all of this on its own. You might consider to use Avastar only when it comes to rigged mesh. Then this tool is just a huge time saver. Should you ever step into rigged mesh making, then there is still the Avatar Workbench (which is a simple blend file) that you can get for free and which will help you to start. Now to the issue: You have created this object with 10 Faces and you used a Subdivision modifier to smooth it. You have set subdivision to 6, and you have kept the modifier in its default settings, which means: It shows you your original model (the low poly pyramid) plus the resulting model (the high poly ghost object in the middle of the pyramid) that shows you how the model will look after the modifier gets applied. Now your model has 10 faces. The subdivision modifier subdivides each of the model faces into 4 subfaces with each level of subdivision. So your final model ends up with 4*4*4*4*4*4*10 = 40960 faces = 81920 Triangles However, you say that in SL you still see the pyramid, and not the bowl. This indicates that you did not export with the "apply modifiers" option. You find this option in the Exporter's export options panel. There you also find 2 Operator presets specially made for Second Life. For your Bowl you would need to use the Preset Export for SL/OpenSim static or Export for OpenSim rigged depending which version of Blender you have (the label has changed a bit over time, but the function has kept as it is) If you do not know where to find the export panel, then please check here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Data_System/Files/Import/COLLADA Some remarks Warning: If you try to import this bowl with the subdivision modifier applied, then you will create a monster object which probably will give you a surprising high land impact. Actually your bowl is an extreme example for a high polygon object . Tip: use smooth shading (in the tool shelf) instead of flat shading. Then your model starts looking smooth with much less subdivisions. Tip: Add some more details into the model to form your bowl. This will also help to reduce the final amount of faces in your exported object. Tip: Find some decent tutorials about how to create "low poly objets" for game engines. This is what you need to learn first besides how to master Blender. (really, i am not kidding)

What would you think is the easier way to go for LL: Either: Step into SL (or marketplace if you prefer). Collect all nice items (btw: how to decide which ones to select?). Create a new SL2 market place from those items. Offer for free or sell the items to users and let the users alone with what they bought. Sit back and watch how nicely their new economy will develop based on old content from SL1 Or: Offer current creators a better place for selling. Let creators do the job to create nice® items for SL2. Let the creators do maintenance and customer support. Take a percentage (5 percent maybe?) from the sellings. Sit back and watch how the users new economy develops and participate in their success. For me the choice would be VERY obvious. really... However, LL can decide what they want. If you/me/us dont like their decision, then lets go to another place ... Or create something new even Who knows... But honestly i am rather confident that the new world will be based on similar principles like SL.

Lets take your idea as granted for a moment. then lets ask these follow up questions...: Who will be doing upgrades and maintenance for the items that will be sold by LL? Why would LL actually put any effort into a new virtual world at all? They could just sell the items here and now... Why would Creators step into the new world when LL is already taking over the entire market? Why would Creators even stay in current SL if their work will be grabbed by LL and resold in the new world? Why would users step out of SL and enter the new world when it is made from stuff that already exists in current SL? Actually LL has stated that the compatibility of the new world to the current world is limitted. So who will adjust all the millions of LSL scripts to whatever will be provided in the new world? Can you give any example where Linden Lab has taken user content and resold that content within the past 12 years?

It should "just work" if your weights are exactly the same for each 2 adjacent vertices along the part seams. With Avastar-1.2 you can use the weight copy tools to ensure this: Select one part (an arm for example) and go to EDIT mode Select only the verts along the seam to the adjacent part (for example the body) In the Tool Shelf search Avastar's weight Copy tools panel and there call "Copy from Rigged" This ensures that only the seams are made equal for both parts. Note: The Blender Weight copy tools can do something similar, so you can do partial weight copy also without Avastar. And in Blender 2.72 all blender's own weight copy tools are available also in edit mode.

hi; In your first post in this thread you mentioned: The big bet was now allowing anybody who used a software that was not Maya to bring in sl their riggged meshes. This confuses me a bit, because haven't there be many tools around since a long time which where able to create SL compatible rigged mesh Collada exports ? You also mention: Now it's possible to rig by your software of choice and then use blender just to obtain the dae file compatible with SL as maya already did before.I'll startr my tests later ( I've just got the news of the blender plugin). Why wasn't this possible before ? I must admit that i am very focused on the Blender universe and i did not keep track on how other software would work or not work for SL. So is Blender a tool that makes it easier to get rigged mesh to SL than other tools do ? Is that the reason why the new FBX Importer is so exciting ? Is the good news that you now can import from more tools to Blender and from blender create the final export files for SL ?

The UV Map of a model only shows up if: The model has been set to EDIT Mode The model has been UV Unwrapped (in edit mode press "u") You need to learn about the different UV Unwrapping types and about how to create UV seams. btw: your follow up question will probably be: How do i add a texture to my model... http://blog.machinimatrix.org/materials-and-textures/

I have not looked at Make Human (and Marvelous Designer) for a long time, but these tools are on my todo list for the upcoming months. So right now i have not much to tell. I am sure others know better than me :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2:

I think this needs clarification: In fact SL can only handle triangles! What you mean is: Creating your models using Quads (4 sided polygons) is preferred for 2 reasons: Quads produce less artifacts when texturing (because of the way how the lighting is calculated) Quads make less trouble when you animate your object (because of cleaner topology) I believe that you can read complete books about both topics :matte-motes-sunglasses-1: However, when you upload a model to SL it is always converted to a mesh made only of triangles. But this does not contradict the statements above.

Miltades wrote: Hello! Also, the changes I make in edit mode, aren't showing up outside of edit mode, so in pose view, object view or just clicked on something else in the scene, the changes made in Edit mode become invisible. This is only a new issue. How do I change it? a very similar question is answered in blender.stackexchange: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/16217/edit-mode-changes-not-showing-up-in-object-mode in a nutshell: Set your pose back to rest Pose, then the armature looks the same in edit mode, pose mode and object mode.

Mylie Foxclaw wrote: Hi Aquila, I think I might have understood where exactly i went wrong. Thank you for the links Could you post a short info where it failed for you and how you fixed it ? thanks.

the torso weights on the shoulders are your issue. I actually wonder why you need to weight the shoulders to the torso at all.

can you show the weightmap of the Torso please ?

you have edited the armature. Thus the default stand pose will result in crossed front legs as you see in the viewer. You HAVE to also create your own poses and animations and you need to use an SL Animation overrider in order to fix this. This detail is actually missing in the horse video tutorial. We only show how to make a custom pose and never mentioned the legs crossing thing. Regarding the re import to Blender: Blender's animation system is based on Bones, while the standard animation system supoported by Collada is based on Joints. This gives issues with the leaf bones (wrists and toes). This could in principle be solved by supporting blender's collada extension. But since a re import of a dae file results in many more issues (due to the lack of blender's collada importer to impor all collada files equally well) we never thought of supporting that at all. So what you will do: 1.) Ignore the crossing legs and import 2.) Create a stand pose (1 frame animation) for your horse and import that. As soon as you run the custom stand, your horse will put its legs on ground as desired.

ensure the cursor is placed somewhere over the 3D viewport, then press "t" on the keyboard. there is also a video series about the bare necessities from the viewpoint of a seconld life user: Check out the first video of the playlist to learn more about the blender user interface. Or any starter tutorial for blender will do as well. Also there is Help -> Manual in blender

Sixx Yangtz wrote: I used a defalt rigged avatar to give it a specific pose but mow i want to freeze the body to use it as a collision point only. See here for the Freeze Tool documentation: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/help/freeze_shape/

If i understand right your aim is to make fitted Mesh clothes for a Mesh Avatar and for your personal SL Shape. Of course the best option would be to get a dummy mesh from the creator and then use that dummy as reference model in your 3D modelling program. The second best option (imho) is to make a low poly model of the original and use that. Normally this can be done rather quickly by making 2 images (from the front and from the side), then use box modelling to get a rough approximation of your model. It might depend how much of the original avatar's details your mesh clothes need to reflect. Maybe you only need to recreate your original model partially. Maybe you could even use the SL Avatar itself, modify its meshes a bit in your 3D tool so that they look similar to the mesh avatar of your choice and get away with that. Actually I believe that you could get something created within a couple of hours from where you can start fitting your clothes reasonably well to the Rest pose of your Avatar. But then there is still the problem of weighting. Because you do not know which weights the original uses. And honestly its a pity that creators of mesh avatars do not include mesh dummies for creating custom clothes However you can(!) export a mesh so that it fits perfectly to a GIVEN shape even when the weights differ from the original avatar. This can be done by calculating the bind pose matrices of the bones to match the anticipated shape. But this is way over what could be explained in a forum post. It took me some time to figure out how it needs to be done but it works pretty well now :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: But even that would not give a full guarantee that the fitted meshes also work nicely with your animations. Well.. Mesh is not easy yet, but we work on that :matte-motes-evil-invert:

Check if you have hidden faces or hidden edges in the "inside" of the hand. In edit Mode: Select -> Non manifold

I think the big difference between Blender and Maya is documentation. At least that is what Chosen few always pointed out when he was active in this forum. And i can agree that the Blender reference documentation is ... well, it has a link: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Reference judge yourself :matte-motes-evil: (ok, we are working on this) However from what the tools can do it appears to me that they all pretty much cover everything that is needed for working with 3D, regardless whether you are modelling for games or for animation film or whatever else. Each tool has its strenghts and weaknesses. so it actually depends on what your particular field of activities is and whether you need the one tool that works awesome in Maya but not at all in Blender. And even this judgement seems to be very user dependent. Some report that Maya is the superior tool for weighting characters, others tell its Blender... I bet al of this is just a matter of experience. You see, your question does not seem to have an easy answer (at least i don't know one) :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

the second video in that list might be helpful.

You can not use SL skin Objects with mesh characters, even if the character has been cloned as exact replica of the SL Avatar. However, if you have the skin textures on your computer, then of course you can upload these textures to Blender and use them there. And you can upload the textures to SL as well and texturize your character with them in SL as well.

Blender should at least import the rig and you should be able to work with it. So maybe it is best to ask the creator of the collada files to open a Blender support ticket at https://developer.blender.org/ and include an example for inspection.

Maybe you have selected a shape key different from the Basis: Maybe i should add that if this is the issue, then you better should use the Freeze tool instead of editing the Avastar meshes them self, see here: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/help/freeze_shape/

why do you need the invisible inside part ? if it is invisible then it can not be seen. then why can't you just remove it ?

as far as i know you can reset (synchronize) your aditi account by changing your password. that should also give you the same amount of L$ in Aditi that you have in Agni. Well... not ideal, but working :matte-motes-nerdy:

VulpesVulpes666 wrote: ...but you don't get all 100% same results in Avastar and SL Do you have a list of where we fail ? Examples would help a lot.