Visible seam when connecting two smooth shaded pieces.

[Gaia Clary]

i can confirm that Avastar calculates the welding wrong in certain situations (however, it works for welding head/upper/lower body of the SL Avatar). Your solution perfectly matches to what i found in the last 2 days. And indeed it has to do with how the welding picks the right or wrong normals.

BTW: Regarding the future of welding :matte-motes-evil-invert: :

Actually we have started working on implementing export/import of custom normals. This will be added to the Blender Collada exporter and to the Avastar exporter as well (plans are to provide this wiuth blender 2.75)

But this is only half of the solution. Because you also need to get the custom normals from somewhere. So i plan to move the "welded normals" feature from Avastar's collada exporter into an Operator, such that you will be able to:

 

• Use the welding function to generate the normals (similar to how Avastar works today)
• Use the Collada exporters to export the Normals to SL

You can expect to see this in the near future.

[Christhiana]

That is some really good news for all mesh creators in SL!

I'm really excited and looking forward to the new operator and export features.

It's great that this will now also be available to people who haven't bought the avastar addon (although they should, it's worth every cent!).

Thank you so much Gaia! 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

"As I said, I didn't read the entire thread .... No idea if there is a solution or workaround for that too."

Naughty Kwak. That's not like you. I already gave two work-arounds for the bb problem. :matte-motes-wink:

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I know..so much to read, so little time....

EDIT...and not a lot of 3ds max users on the forum

[Christhiana]

What would also seem to me like a nice feature to have... would be to be able to exclude the normals of a vertex from being automatically updated by blender. A 'lock vertex normals' option. this way you could delete geometry and keep certain vertex normals as they were before the adjoining geometry was deleted. This would make certain tasks very simple and quick. for example you if you wanted to split an object in two, you could make a copy and delete the opposite halves from each while you have the vertex normals along the seam locked.

[Gaia Clary]

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Christhiana wrote:

What would also seem to me like a nice feature to have... would be to be able to exclude the normals of a vertex from being automatically updated by blender. A 'lock vertex normals' option. this way you could delete geometry and keep certain vertex normals as they were before the adjoining geometry was deleted.

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In principle this can be done now. However some tools are yet missing. I am working on a few of these tools now and will add them to our Sparkles addon.

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Christhiana wrote:

For example you if you wanted to split an object in two, you could make a copy and delete the opposite halves from each while you have the vertex normals along the seam locked.

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I have the welding operator almost ready now. this one will take care about sharp edges, edge split, smooth and flat faces, etc. It should be as easy as "select the 2 objects, press the weld button, done"

[Drongle McMahon]

It should be as easy as "select the 2 objects, press the weld button, done"

:matte-motes-grin: Is that just in Avastar or Blender? If it's Blender, can we have an intra-object version too? "select two edge loops > average edge normals" would give more explicit control. Object could be separated after that, it that is the intention. Maybe it could use existing code from bridge edgeloops to work out vertex correspondences and reject invalid cases. 

PS. While you are here, can we have the object name put into the <instance geometry> as a name attribute to cope with innovations in Project-Importer (see your private messages:-)

[Gaia Clary]

here is our first implementation of custom normals support:

You will need a daily build of Blender to get all of that it fully working (the Collada exporter will have custom normals export in the daily build of tomorrow)

[Gaia Clary]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

If it's Blender, can we have an intra-object version too?

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i think i can add that as well, yes.

[Drongle McMahon]

I think lots of people will be as pleased with that as I will be.

[Christhiana]

That was fast!

I'm going to try it out over the weekend!

Thanks for the update.

[Gaia Clary]

Please take care that currently this only works reliably with daily builds of blender:

https://builder.blender.org/download/

For the Sparkles addon i am now looking to find a good workaround to solve issues with Blender 2.73 and custom normals :matte-motes-impatient:

[Drongle McMahon]

Argghh! I couldn't get it to work - then I realised that the 64-bit version I installed is a day behind the 32-bit version :matte-motes-confused: