Murgatroyd Zauberflote

I'd like to note that taking out animated bone positions doesn't just affect avatar creators (though that is a very big thing), but it also affects the ability to animate attachments, which allows for things like weaving a knife between your fingers (which would be POSSIBLE with bento!) and changing the position of a spear from resting to attack position. I don't know if LL also plans on disabling rotations for attachment bones, which also don't 'undeform' on their own, but that would also kill the ability to rotate weapons in hand. I don't know how many weapon creators on SL take advantage of that sort of animation, but I just started to, myself, and this would kill a cool thing that I discovered. Linden Labs, please reconsider disabling joint position animation. I believe it does more harm than good.

My team is trying to create a new avatar with Fitted Mesh included. The body works perfectly fine when its at normal SL height, but the avatar is supposed to be about 3/2 times taller than the SL avatar and that is somehow creating problems. As you can see, the avatar just sort of... explodes. The head isn't affected, and I think that's because the head isn't weighted to any of the collision bones, instead weighted to the old bones. But then I tried uploading the same exact mesh without including the joint positions and instead using an old-school .anim based deformer and this is the result: Not perfect, because this deformer was made for our old wolf avatar, but other than that, it works! But I don't want to have to use an old-school deformer, as they are problematic in many other ways. This seems like it should be an easy thing to solve, since the mesh av works find with the old-school deformer. I don't know why it would have such a hard time with included joint positions. Does anyone have any idea how I could get it to behave?

Ah hah! Saving the shape does work. Thank you! As for the lady's torso muscles, hopefully none of our customers will be too terribly offended that they can't hulk out.

So I'm a little late to the Fitted Mesh party, but I seem to be having trouble with a few of the sliders and I'm wondering if its just me, or if others experience the same thing. Below is the 1st Act athlete mesh body that I tested out the Fitted Mesh with. Using a female shape, the breast/pec sliders work about as I'd expect, but the torso muscle slider only works up to 50, so you can make the muscles smaller but not larger. I guess not many girls want beefy arms. Fair enough, though I'm not convinced that LL meant it to behave that way. But when using a male shape, these sliders do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. At all. Granted, male avatars usually wouldn't care about the pec/breast slider, though it would rather handy for a muscle avatar, as pec size tends to be a very personal preference for muscle-lovers. But the torso muscle slider? Surely they didn't mean for THAT to do nothing. Now, obviously I'm looking at using Fitted mesh for a very different sort of project than most people. I'm not just making clothing, so my problems with it are a little different than everybody else's, but sliders not working seems like it would effect more than just me. Has anyone else run into this problem?

Thank you very much! I was using Firestorm 3.2something. 3.3 fixes the problem beautifully.

Yeah I sometimes have problems with Firestorm not loading mesh. I haven't figured out the rhyme to it, yet, but if the mesh doesn't load in 1-2 minutes try typing "dd 0" (without quotes) into local chat, wait for the majority of things around you to disappear, then type dd 180 (or whatever draw distance you prefer) and see if that forces the meshes to load. If that doesn't work, try relogging. That usually fixes everything for me, but its a bit of a pain having to relog every time someone's mesh clothing disappears. Hopefully somone will fix that soon.

To make this easier I'll just describe exactly what I'm trying to do. I have a pair of sculpted eyeballs. The eyeball itself is one sculpt with no alpha channel on the texture. The cornea is a second sculpt over the top of the eyeball which has an alpha channel, making it mostly transparent, but adds shine over the pupil. (The effect is rather nice.) Then I have a mesh head which I'm trying to add features to: blinking and emotions, done with multiple meshes that are turned visible/invisible when needed. The problem I'm running into is that the cornea is made completely invisible by the invisible mesh in front of it, completely killing the effect. On further investigation it seems that any mesh with transparency will kill any other texture with an alpha channel that happens to be behind it. Is there any work-around for this?

EDIT: Nevermind. I should have done some more digging before I posted. Apparently I needed a 2.6 compatible armature as well. Downloaded the one from the site and everything works now. Sorry! So I must be doing something wrong still. I've made a mesh avatar (yay) in blender 2.49b. Rigged it, exported it with 2.49b with no problems. Uploaded it and it works pretty much as expected. I want to use the more recent versions of Blender, but I keep running into problems with rigging. I thought maybe this script would fix it. The av is no longer sideways, but now all of the parts are rotated wierd. The left arm is correct, but all the rest of the body parts are rotated 90 or 180 degrees from their joints, so the fingers of the right hand are pointing to where the elbow should be and the legs are sticking out at 90 degree angles from the hip, etc. I applied the rotation on the armature and the mesh, rotated to Blender orientation. I then tried rotating everything to face right, for SL orientation and tried exporting again without the z -90 rotation, but I got the same problem. I'm using the skeleton from the avatar.blend file and, as I said before, the rigging works when i use 2.49b. So I don't really know what the problem is.

Thank you! It took me a little while to figure it out. I was using the UV image editor to apply my textures and then had that option selected in the collada exporter, but doing everything through the materials panel makes more sense, and works perfectly.

Sorry. Using Blender 2.49b.

The highest resolution of sculptie is 1024 quads, which, unless I'm mistaken, translates to 2048 tris.

So I'm designing a mesh body that can use the standard SL skin texture layout. Why? Lets call it an experiment for now. Anyway, I have two meshes— male and female— and I need the face numbers on them to match each other. What's more, I NEED the neck area to be face 0 to match the head, which is a seperate mesh with only one face. Is there any way to predict which face will be assigned which number and also control it? I've heard something about changing the order of the material id or something, but I don't know what that means. I've just been assigning UV textures to the mesh via the UV image editor window, which maybe is the wrong way to do it?

Hey, I'm not replying because I'm interested in taking the job, but if you have trouble finding someone, I have a few tips for you that might help you find someone more easilly. Making a custom avatar in Second Life is a huge feat. A lot more work than just drawing a picture. I kinda explain the business of it <<in this blog post>>, but basically it can take several hundred, or ever several THOUSANDS of dollars worth of work time to create a custom avatar, depending on the complexity. So you'd need to convince any potential artists that your project is worth that to them. For example, give them an idea of how complex the project is, and a general idea of how much money you're willing to pay. If your character is similar to other animals, maybe let people know that, so if they've already made something similar, maybe they can just make minor modifications to something they've already done. Or, if its very different from anything else, maybe offer to let the creator sell the avatar, or a slightly modified version of the avatar.