Gaia Clary

April 13, 2016

Possibly your avatar definition does not match to the viewer's definition file. Also the weight maps for the default Avastar head have meanwhile been optimized a bit (see the video that we just released, that uses the most recent weight maps for the face)

In general it is not easy but doable to get all shape sliders to work. It took me about a day to get all sliders working almost smooth. Of course you still can create very odd shapes when you use many sliders at the same time with extreme values.

However the Head length slider should now work nicely.

April 13, 2016

Teager wrote:

@ Gaia

- it would be beneficial in your next avastar update to allow avastar to export a mesh even when parts of the skeleton have been deleted.

Yes, we will add an option to the exporter soon that allows to "only export weighted bones".

But we try to also allow to setup just partial skeletons so that you can remove unwanted bones and still keep the rig intact (but no proimises here :matte-motes-sunglasses-1: )

April 13, 2016

Here is a very very very quick made first impression of using Mesh Shapes with one Character and one simple animation that only uses Rotation:

Please note: It is important to use a rotation only animation here otherwise the Shapes will break.

We used the Bento Angel mesh (basically a clone of the System Avatar Mesh with additional Wings).

We used our development version of Avastar-2 to export the Mesh and create the Animation.

And we used the release candidate of the SL Bento Viewer.

April 12, 2016

The Slider definitions have been adjusted so that they can create results similar (but not equal!) to the System Character's head deformations. How the meshes will deform with the Sliders is also very dependent on the Weight maps. So you have full control over the deformation by adjusting the weights as needed.

Here is a screenshot of the Bento Head with the most recent weightmaps and the most recent slider definitions:

The most recent Avastar update (2.0-9) is based on information from last week. So it is already a bit outdated :matte-motes-sour:

April 9, 2016

There is indeed something wrong here. I suspect the Blender Collada importer has a flaw because actually all bones are there but depending on how you imported the skeleton they do not appear in pose mode.

Here is how i could import the skeleton:

Restart Blender (Important)
Import the Collada file with the options set:
1. Fix Leaf Bones: enabled
2. Find Bone Chains: enabled
3. Minimum Chain Length: 0
Now you should see the bones also in pose mode

You can read more about what these options mean in the release notes of Blender 2.73 (first chapter):

https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.73/Addons

i hope that helps

cheers,
Gaia

April 3, 2016

Tattorack wrote:

Thanksfor the replies, guys!

Now I at least know where to start ^^

EDIT: One thing though; Machinimatrix is trying to sell this "Avastar" blender addon for creating avatars in SL. That's just... nonsense (to use a milder word for it). Blender can obviously export in the format SL uses (that, or there'd already be a free plugin available).

Of course you can do almost everything just with pure Blender, but there are a few things you can't do easily (unless you program some functionality on your own which is of course doable as well).

Also i "officially" maintain the Blender Collada exporter especially to ensure that it always creates Collada files which can be imported to Second Life. And you can be pretty sure that i continue with this for another couple of years :matte-motes-nerdy:

So Blender is ready to be used out of the box for Second Life creations, even for fitted mesh to some extend. Although Fitted Mesh support is very basic and you need to know exactly how to do this and i can tell you its ugly, see:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/fitted_mesh_survival_kit/

Now to Avastar

We (Machinimatrix) created this Addon to help new users to step up quickly and advanced users to get their work done faster.There are actually a couple of features in this addon which you would not get by pure Blender unless you put a lot of work into it.

Here is a rather outdated (text only) comparison between what you can do with pure Blender and how you would do this with Avastar:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/compare-to-workbench/

And again, yes you can do whatever we have done by yourself. Its just so that we put about 10 person years of development into this Addon to create an almost perfect replica of the Second Life Environment in Blender.

Actually Avastar reads the Avatar definition files (avatar_lad.xml and avatar_skeleton.xml) to generate the Avastar rig, the Mesh dummies and an exact replica of the Appearance sliders in Blender...

Tattorack wrote:

and if its for generating character meshes, Project Human and ManuelLab are both quite free.

While you mention ManuelLab, i can not hold back and put this in front of your nose :matte-motes-evil:

But ...

Even with Avastar you can only create good stuff if you know about 3D Modelling and Animation. It is not a tool that allows to make stuff by 3 mouse clicks. Because of this i hesitate to sell this addon to newbies. Even if it helps to step up quickly. I always recommend to first learn Blender, then learn rigging for SL, then decide if you need Avastar or not.

To sum up: I got so much positive feedback from content creators, so that i believe what we did is not exactly Nonesense.

March 31, 2016

Hi, Vir

I downloaded the new viewer and made a quick test. I found there is one important entry missing in the lad file for the new face bones (marked in red below):

  <param     id="655"     group="1"     name="Head Size"     label="Head Size"     wearable="shape"     edit_group="shape_head"     label_min="Small Head"     label_max="Big Head"     show_simple="true"     value_min="-.25"     value_max=".10">      <param_skeleton>		  




























 	         <bone         name="mSkull"         scale="1 1 1"         offset="0 0 0.1" />

Should you build a new viewer in the next few days then could you please add the red definitions as shown above? Then the new bones scale correct with the head size. Thanks.

March 29, 2016

For which 3D content creation tool do you need information? Did you check in the wiki? See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh

March 28, 2016

Snickers Snook wrote:

Gaia Clary wrote:

Avatar. So why (why, why,...) doesn't the fashion creator community sit together and invent (or at least sponsor) the next generation Avatar...

Simply creating yet another mesh overlay with some intergrated HUD & slider system seems kind of like throwing the body and interrior of a Lamboghini onto a Yaris. Why?

Now i am a bit frustrated about this conversation. In essence you insist on the idea that getting an improved Avatar from linden lab will make things work better (for you). While i believe that improving the customisation of Mesh based characters is the way to go (for me).

I also clearly see how mesh creators can make our live complicated with Huds and stuff. But this is again an issue about improving customizability and not an argument to let LindenLab do the work. The question is basically:

Why do we need Huds? Can we replace them by something better? What would that be? (Scripters of the world... tell us please :matte-motes-nerdy: )

[edit] I do not say that all that needs to be done is using the existing system in a better way. Maybe some small changes in LSL (additional functions for example) could make avatar customization huds work easier, better... i just do not know much about this, so i can only guess here.

Snickers Snook wrote:

The fashion community is not a community in the least. There are thousands of designers just scraping along making things becuase they love to. The big "design" houses have shown no interest in standardization probably because they hope THEIR mesh avatar becomes "the" standard.

Well yes. But also diversity is the base of evolution. So either keep patient to see who wins or step in and help to evolve.

March 27, 2016

Snickers Snook wrote:

Gaia Clary wrote:

OK, here's my frustration as a clothing designer. I look at how the triangles are formed, spaced and sized. There simply isn't enough "detail" to make system clothing look right. But system clothing is what MOST wear. ...

Sorry for the rant but the more I think about this, the more annoyed I get with the whole direction of Second Life development or lack thereof.

For me the key question here is: Is Secondlife character all about humanoids or about arbitrary character creation?

If it is all about human characters, then IMHO the best improvement will be to create an awesome and flexible human mesh character with appearance slider system similar to MakeHuman or ManuelLab. This surely would be the Avatar-2 project.
But if it is all about creation of creatures of any kind, then we clearly can not favor the humanoids by providing a solution for those alone. Instead of this we have to think about how to support any sort of characters. This is what Project Bento is about.

So... Project Bento also opens up the option to create awesome humanoids outside of Secondlife and integrate them seamless into the system (see what we do in

). But it also allows to add non humans in the same way. So its open to all ideas and not focusing on one pattern alone.

I also believe that Project Bento is just one step towards a better system. There should be a couple more of improvements going to happen like improving the scripting features to make things easier (or doable), support for NCP's also comes to mind, Improving physics (keep quadruped feet on ground...) etc, etc...

One more thought about avatar-2: There is an entire fashion industry operating on the base of the current system Avatar. So why (why, why,...) doesn't the fashion creator community sit together and invent (or at least sponsor) the next generation Avatar, make it open and free to use for every attachment designer? Woudn't this fit best? Instead of letting LindenLab provide something on their own, just let the community provide something that fits best for them? And think about what additional features of the Secondlife system would make such a project become even better...

March 26, 2016

if your mesh is perfectly symmetric, then you should be able to copy the weights over to the other side. Here is a documentation for how you can copy weights:

http://avastar.online/help/copy-bone-weights/

[edit]:I just saw that the chapter for copy only a subset of weights is missing in the doc. Basically you follow what the document says for weight paint mode, but you enable vertex select mask, then select the vertices for which the weights shall be copied and proceed as described.

I will add a chapter for this soon. thanks for pointing me to that its missing.

March 26, 2016

dazhazit wrote:

I've seen a workflow from Manuel Bastioni Labs into Avastar which is open source character creation for blender but there are issues with UV compatibility, high polygon counts and hard to get along with customisation UI.

I believe that the Manuel Bastioni tool is an interesting candidate for making mesh characters. In fact the newest version of Avastar contains a converter from Bastioni to SL which also adds automatic weightmaps for the face ( not soo perfect yet, but useful )

Manuel told me that he will take care of the polygon count. So i believe we will eventually see low poly mesh versions in the future.

Regarding the UV mappping from Bastioni characters to the SL UV mapping we might come up with something useful too. But first things first, now its Bento time :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

March 26, 2016

Snickers Snook wrote:

Gaia Clary wrote:

So... in which way are mesh bodies "royal PITA" ? Maybe it makes more sense to improve that...

Well let's see. for my Maitreya mesh body, I have to wear:...

Indeed... I also have tried some of the mesh products and i must agree that the way how things are setup often appeals like being a challenge for customers. I myself gave up on using complicated avatar setups like you describe (not that they are bad, i just was not patient enough to actually use them).

I also believe that some of the complications you describe are introduced because creators (and also users at times) try to do things which are just not well supported. It is frustrating :matte-motes-mad:

That's why i was asking what could be done to make the entire system better suited for the purpose. And how would a remake of the default Avatar help us with that?

About a renewal of the System Avatar

I honestly do not like the idea of defining an Avatar-2 at all. I would be much more happy if we can modernise the SL Character animation system to better support any sort of user creations.

And from what i have seen so far the bento project is a huge step toward making things easier. At least if you use the new system in a good way and learn what can be done and what should be avoided...

About the HUDs

I do not know much about how the HUDs work and if this can be made easier for all (character creators, scripters and users). Maybe some scripters could propose improvements on the scripting side to allow easier user interfaces at least. I believe that would help a lot...

About a Community driven alternative

Here is the most interesting part... Many have told me it would be nice to have an open source mesh character for the comunity. But after a couple of years with Mesh i still see nothing open sourced and widely used. Why that? (Maybe i am just not aware of it...)

I believe the answer is simple: There is nobody who would reward those who provide this open sourced and freely usable product in a comfortable way. I admit i have somewhat given up on it, however i invite everybody (again) to help us push the Ava Meshes forward from idea towards implementation, see http://blog.machinimatrix.org/the-ava-meshes/

But we got enough advise by now. Time of talking seems to be over. Now its time of doing :matte-motes-nerdy:

March 26, 2016

Gael Streeter wrote:

I have a Bento mesh head with a close little mouth by default (with the default shape delivered with it).

I find this mouth too small, and I use the shape sliders (Lip Width etc.) to make it wider.

Now I play on it a Smile animation (using the Bento mouth bones) made and delivered by the creator of the Bento mesh head.How will act this animation ?

Will the smile be exactly like the designer made it for the default shape : a smiling little mouth ?

Or will the smile effects be added to the shape changes : a smiling wide mouth (so perhaps over smiling) ?

Animations play on top of the appearance shape slider system.
So if you have set up a wide mouth via appearance sliders
and then you use a "smile" animation this smile will run
on top of your appearance. But...

We have to distinguish between 2 different animation type:

Rotational animations (use rotations only)

The first type of animation plays nicely on top of your mouth.
so it preserves your appearance and i believe that the animated smile
comes out more or less as expected. However if your mouth is really
wide and the animator has made an animation for a really small mouth
then you might see deviations of some kind (although i am not sure how
this actually affects the look, it might even work because wide mouth
also does wide smile :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:)

Transitional animations (use transitions and possibly rotations in combination)

The second type of animation moves the bones into a position that is
defined by the animation creator. But this will only be a relative move
based on where your bones are placed by the appearance slider.

so if the creator has decided to force a "small mouth animation"
then he/she will use only small transition changes (because the mouth is small).
Consequently your wide mouth will still smile, but the animation
will not scale proportional, so your wide mouth smile might become less apparent.

Of course if the animator created an animation for a wide mouth and you set up
your appearance to have a small mouth, then you may get an oversmile again.

March 26, 2016

1. Will the bones moves requested by the facial animations applied above the appearance sliders changes ?

No. The Facial animation appearance sliders for the default Avatar

use Morph shapes for the expression changes on the default avatar.

And the default Avatar completely ignores the new Bento bones.

On the other side Meshes are not affected by Morph shapes.

Mesh based characters (and animations) only react on Bone changes.

So the morph based expressions are used by the default avatar

and the bone based expressions are used by meshes.

So they do not mix up.

2. Will the bones moves requested by the facial animations replace completely the appearance sliders changes ?

No. See above.

Example : In SL I modify my mouth shape with the sliders. What is happening now if I play a Smile or a Open Mouth animation (designed on a "default" shape of the mouth, not my current one) ?

On Default Avatars nothing changes. the animations play as before.
On existing Mesh Avatars nothing changes because existing mesh avatars
are not aware of the new Bones (have no weight maps for the new bones)
New (future) creations may add weight maps for the new face bones.
Depending on how the creator chooses to weight the new bones

the facial expression sliders affect the face similar as the morph shapes

do for the default avatar.

Most of you know for sure know much better than me how all of this works.

However i thought its a good idea to add...

A Bit of basics

The Second Life default Avatar uses 2 different animation systems for its shape,

that is it uses Morph shapes and skeletal animation in combination.

Currently (in Agni) most appearance sliders (~100) are connected to morphs

and only ~20 sliders are connected to the skeleton.

The connection between the skeleton (the bones) and the skin

(the character meshes and mesh attachments) is defined in the weight maps.

Weight maps are defined in the meshes. And within each mesh

there is at most one weight map for each bone.

Here is a video about this:

And here is the text version of it: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/lesson/sls-1/

For standard Avatars

Nothing will change at all. The sliders affect the Avatar just like always.

All changes on the new (Bento-) Bones due to appearance sliders

are not(!) propagated to the default Avatar Face or hands because

the default Avatar is not weighted to the new bones.

For Mesh Avatars

It is mostly up to the creator in which way a mesh reacts on the Bones.

It all depends on how the weight maps are setup and how the bone joints

are placed in the mesh (you can move the bone joints around as you like).

We currently are adding the new Bento bones to the avatar definition files,

so that we get many more Appearance sliders to work (about 30 of the

face appearance sliders are already set up, a few more will be added shortly)

Here is the related demo video again:

March 21, 2016

Changing the default Avatar has been discussed for years now. And Linden Lab always rejected any change requests on it to preserve compatibility with existing user content. Actually that even makes sense to me

The other alternative was to provide 2 versions of default Avatar, so that legacy content can keep as it is but new content can use "the better avatar". But this would probably make the Avatar animation system even more complicated as it is today.

The third alternative is to improve the skeleton for "better customization". That is what Project Bento is about. So the goal is to improve the capabilities of custom meshes as much as possible. And that is why Bento introduces new animation bones. And eventually why we are able to attach more sliders to the Animation system for custom meshes.

But to say it precisely:

The goal is not to reproduce what the default Avatar can do! However the goal could be to make custom meshes better than the default Avatar in (almost) any aspect. As you say custom meshes already look great, now they get the ability to animate great as well...

Snickers Snook wrote:

I mean mesh bodies look so good but they are a royal PITA.

So... in which way are mesh bodies "royal PITA" ? Maybe it makes more sense to improve that...

Snickers Snook wrote:

Wouldn't simply improving the base avatar (ie doubling the triangle or something)

Adding more Triangles is in general the way to make a bad mesh even worse. Improving the topology of the mesh at some locations might be a better alternative.

Actually the current Avatar Mesh is not as bad as many might think. This mesh has been created to support about 130 appearance sliders and both genders... IMHO the biggest issue here is that many animations and poses stress the mesh in unfortunate ways and bend it into shapes which simply no longer work.

A good example is the "sinking in of straps into the shoulder parts" problem :

You see how the mesh model and its animation is so closely related to each other that Animators and cloth makers should also consider to work much more closely together .

Now i do not tell the default Avatar meshes are ultimately awesome. That's why i think that improving the support for custom meshes is so important

March 18, 2016

Hi;

Last week we have started to add Slider support into the Avatar_lad.xml file I already reported about this a couple of days ago. Now we are sort of finished and ready for a closer review.

Skeleton changes

We needed to add a few changes to the skeleton:

New Bones

mFaceTeethUpper
mFaceTeethLower
mFaceNoseBridge

The nose bridge is needed to support upper/lower nose bridge sliders. The teeth bones are absolutely necessary to place the teeth correctly for all appearance sliders which move the mouth.

To get full slider support for the eyes we would need to add 2 more bones to the inner eye corners, and for the nose nostril sliders we'd need one more bone at the nose base (between mouth and nose). But i am not sure if this is soo important.

Moved cheek bones

We found that the cheek sliders on the default Avatar do their maximum changes on different locations from where the original Bento cheek bones have been placed (see my last comment in this thread). We moved the cheek bones a bit to achieve better cheek slider behavior.

Here is the newest draft Video showing all 28 appearance sliders in action ):

Note: On some sequences the mouth opens. This is just a face expression (open Mouth) which i added to the animation to show how nicely the teeth move now :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2:

We still need to check how the sliders operate with the Male Avatar.

Feedback is highly appreciated as always :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

March 13, 2016

Over the past couple of days we have been working on the avatar lad file to add slider support fopr the new Bento bones to the Second Life Viewer. Here is the list of Sliders which we where able to add so far:

Nose Size
Nose Width
Nostril Width
Nose Thickness
Crooked Nose

Lip width
Lip Fullness
Lip Thickness
Lip Ratio
LipCleftDepth
LipCleft
Mouth Corner
Shift Mouth
Mouth Position

Ear Size
Ear Tips (pointy)

Chin Depth
Jaw Jut

Eye Opening
Outer Eye Corner
Puffy eyelids
Forehead Angle
Brow Size

But you should always remember that the appearance sliders work different for the Default SL Avatar (where they use Morph shapes) and for custom meshes (where they use skeletal animation).

So you will always find differences between what the Sliders do to the SL Default Avatar Meshes compared to what they do to your custom meshes even if you use an exact mesh clone of the default avatar!) I believe we can not say this often enough :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

However, while working on the slider support we found a couple of issues:

Issue1: Cheek Bones at wrong position?

The cheek bones have been placed at positions which do not correspond to where the cheek appearance sliders influence the Avatar Mesh. The most important affected sliders are:

Upper Cheeks
Lower Cheeks
Cheek Bones

Here is an image:

The green dots mark the location of the Bento Bone endpoints. The joints are not visible (buried deep inside the head)
The black circles mark where the cheek sliders have maximal influence on the SL Avatar.

Question: Is there any good reason for the chosen Bento bone locations? If not what about moving the cheek bone joints so that they better match the Avatar cheeks? Then we can add the appearance sliders for the cheeks with no problems.

Issue2: Teeth and Mouth Position

We found that weighting the teeth as follows gives good results in general:

Upper teeth weighted to the mHead
Lower Teeth weighted to the mFaceJaw

I believe this makes a lot of anatomical sense. And it worked very well until we introduced the SL Appearance sliders. The best example for where it goes wrong is seen with the sliders for the mouth and lips (e.g. the Mouth Position slider):

Explanation: Only the lip bones are moved up/down. Since the teeth are (currently) weighted to mHead and mFaceJaw they stay in place. So how can we solve this issue?

Attach the teeth to the lip bones?

We could attach the upper teeth to mFaceLipUpperCenter and the lower teeth to mFaceLipLowerCenter. But when we do this then all animations of these lip bones also move the teeth. I believe this is strongly not what we want.

Attach all teeth to the Jaw?

When we do this then we have to move the Jaw up/down together with the Mouth Position. But then we also move the chin which is weighted to the Jaw as well (for the Chin Depth Slider). And also we must allow the mouth to open so the upper teeth must be weighted to a different bone than the lower teeth.

So what can we do now?

My first guess is to add 2 new bones dedicated to the teeth: mTeethUpper (parented to mFaceRoot) and mTeethLower (parented to mFaceJaw).These 2 bones can then be moved together with the other lip bones for all sliders which move the mouth up/down/sidewards.

But possibly someone here can come up with a better idea how to proceed with this particular issue?

Issue3: Sliders do not support Bone Rotation

So far we found 2 sliders where we can not proceed because the SL Appearance sliders seem to not support rotation offsets:

We could weight the ears to mFaceEar2 instead of mFaceEar1 then move mFaceEar2 with the appearance sliders (this is doable but nbot optimal). But for the nose i have no idea (except adding a Nosetip bone to mFaceNoseCenter)

The best solution imho is to allow a rotation offset in the SL Appearance slider definitions. The second best solution is to not provide Sliders for nose tip and ear angle.

March 10, 2016

March 10, 2016

This indicates that for some reason your meshes are marked as "avastar-mesh". This can happen when you make copies of the Avastar meshes and reuse them for your own creations.

The correct way to reuse the Avastar Meshes (and to fix your issue):

Freeze your mesh with the Freeze tool (in Tool shelf - Avastar vertical tab - Tools) with the options:

Original: Delete
as static Mesh: disabled

The quick fix (with potential for serious unhappyness):

Check in the Custom Properties of the Mesh Object if you find a property named "avastar-mesh". Delete this property when it is listed. then the fitting panel should instantly enable itself.

Why is it so "complicated" after all?

Well, Avastar tries to emulate the SL Viewer. Especially the default Avatar uses Morph Shapes (Shape keys in Blender) while Custom Meshes only use Skeletal Animation to shape the mesh. So Avastar does Skeletal Animation on Custom Meshes and Morph Shapes on the Default Avatar meshes as well.

If we would allow Avastar-Meshes to use both methods, we ended up in a serious damage. And that would indeed make things complicated and nasty.

I hope this helps.

March 9, 2016

Of course this is just a guess. But you can get this when your object contains more than 21844 triangles. then the SL Importer splits up your mesh into chunks. And this can cause differnet number of materials in LODs ...

The best workaround so far:

Keep the number of triangles per texture fdace <= 21844 triangles.
Make your own LOD Meshes.

March 7, 2016

Kitsune Shan wrote:

While the workaround works, I would rather see this bug fixed. I find pretty unnecessary to use custom joints offset or animations just to put the eyes in place.

This actually was not a workaround, but a proposal for how the bug can be easily fixed

March 5, 2016

Loleeta Lennie wrote:

I submitted a ticket on your website for a Refund Request. I give up. Obviously Avastar just isn't for me. I've already deleted and Uninstalled it from Blender.

I will refund you on monday. Please apologize for the delay.

March 3, 2016

Hi, Vir;

I have been looking in more depth at the eye bones. And i finally found that all that is needed is to put the Alt eyes at the exact same locations as the Eye bones and use the same (6 digit) precision.

Below is an image with corrected avatar_skeleton using 6 digit precision on the alt eyes.

The parenting to different bones (mHead and mFaceRoot) seems to work with no problems. I also found no issue with the appearance sliders (the alt eye bones follow the appearance sliders as expected).

On the contrary: When you try the sliders with the current Bento Skeleton then you see how the distance between the eyes and alt eyes varies when you move the eye depth slider.

March 3, 2016

Loleeta Lennie wrote:

No matter whether I use my custom human meshes or a primitive stick person, I get the same results. When it DOES decide to rig, I get errors saying "No Vertices are weighted", or something to that effect. The only problem, is the meshes ARE properly weight painted.

Another issue, is Avastar just won't copy bone weights from the "from Avastar" setting. Nothing happens. Period.

I took an awful chance making a large purchase like this. (To me, this was expensive. L$ doesn't come easy for me these days). I pondered on it for over 2 weeks before I even posted about it here. Maybe others have no issues with Avastar. Great for them. It was just a wasteful purchase for me. Lesson learned on my part.

I'll just stick with what I do best...HUDs.

I am very sure that the cases you report can be handled by Avastar. Period. So you can either ask me for a full refund and i will pay you back right away. Or you proceed and help me to help you. For now here is an attempt to help you blindly:

The following answers are fully based on assumptions. Your issues could happen for totally different reasons. I only can tell you what's going on when i can take a look into the blend files (see below).

No Vertices are weighted

This can happen when your meshes are weighted to Fitted Mesh Bones but the collision Volumes have not been enabled as Deform bones.
Or when you try to use the function "alter to restpose" on a mesh where not all vertices have been weighted.
Should you have used Avastar-2 for your experiments then you might have fallen into something related to the new bento bones.

Copy of Bone weights

This function works only between meshes which are rigged to the same skeleton.
It also only works reliably when you have applied rotation and scale to your meshes.
Also the function can fail for meshes which contain more than one layer of faces, for example when an object was solidified or has intersecting submeshes.
There is a bone weight copy function in Blender. But i must admit that function is a bit odd to use especially when you are not used to the "blender way".

Mirror Copy of bone weights

This function only works (in standard Blender) when your mesh is strictly symmetric

My proposal for you

Since at this moment i only can guess, what about this:

You send me your Blend files which do not work by using one of the methods below:

post the blend files here in the forum
post the blend files to http://pasteall.org/blend (and secure them with password) and send me the download link
open a new ticket at http://blog.machinimatrix.org/tickets
send the blend file(s) to me at gaia.clary@machinimatrix.org
deposit the blend files wherever is convenient for you, then send me an IM with the download link (Gaia Clary)

Then i proceed as follows:

I inspect what is going on.
I tell you why it does not work.
I fix the documentation as needed
I fix the tools if needed.

If we fail to fix our software (should it have bugs after all) then i fully refund you and and you can keep the software as if you bought it regular. But please note that i am mostly occupied with other things until next Monday, so possibly i can not respond in a snap. However i will try to do my best to get your issues solved as soon as i can.

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