Avastar's default orientation

[Allison Lynagh]

I'm old school blender, like 2.49 type old school (though I've used many before that as well). I learned on it, grew up on it, and now I'm forced to leave the one thing I truely got used to behind.

What I'm talking about is the "3" orientation. SL was in 3.. building was in 3. Everything was front facing and rigged on the 3 orientation. With avastar, not only have I not been able to rotate the rig (and thus be forced into the 'proper' orientation), but every attempt at trying to change it to something I'm more comfortable with has been foiled. Between applying rotation and scale to every part to scouring the internet for some sort of fix.. there has been none.

If anyone knows how to get avastar to what I'm used to (without it borking the rigged mesh up in the process), that would be greatly appreciated.

 

Alli

[Gaia Clary]

Blender's preferred orientation for rigged characters is with arms pointing along the x axis and the face looking at the negative Y axis. Many of the mirror functions for weight painting, bone editing, modelling, animating, etc... are mirroring along the X axis, like for example in the Mesh Edit options in the tool shelf, where you find the "X mirror" option but no Y-Mirror option...

On the other side the SL character's preferred orientation is with arms pointing along the Y axis and the face looking at the positive X axis. This makes it somewhat tedious to use blender with that orientation.

For Avastar we have chosen to use blender's preferred orientation so we do not have to fight with blender when it comes to symmetry operations. So you can work all the time in blender's preferred orientation. Avastar transforms your models into the SL rotation during export.

Forcing Avastar to work in the SL orientation is doable to some extend, but you will loose a lot of functions then, so it is not working nicely. If you really want to keep with SL's orientation in Blender then you will probably be more happy with using the Avatar Workbench or any other Basic Avatar Rig that uses the SL orientation out of the box.