the Avatar Workbench project

[Gaia Clary]

H, all Blender fanatics.

During preparation of my current tutorial series i made a small sidestep project, "The Avatar Workbench". That is basically a modified version of the well known avatar.blend file from Domino. The download is here: The Avatar workbench

A very brief sketch about what it contains:

 

• It is based on avatar.blend and comes with all features of avatar.blend
• I added a MakeHuman mesh to it
• I grabbed one of the free skins from Vint Falken and embedded it into the file.
• I created a compatible UV-layout for the MakeHuman mesh, so you can reuse your old SL-skins on it. But please do not expect a wonder, right now the mapping is still... experimental and a bit rough so to say.
• I worked a bit on the weights of the feet, so that they now bend with less distortions than before.
• Both characters are already weighted and can be exported without changes to Second life.

 

When i can find the time and some good ideas how to improve the UV-layout of the MH avatar i will update the file. I also was thinking about how i could get the shape keys to also work on the MH mesh. Any help or sugestion on how to do that and how to map the SL-layout to the MH mesh is very welcome.

Have fun ;-)

[Ashasekayi Ra]

Thanks Gaia. This will be cool to play with.

[Nacy Nightfire]

Thanks Gaia, very thoughtful of you to provide this!

[Fizz Savira]

What are the permissions for using the MakeHuman mesh? In other words, can we import into SL as-is, do we have to modify it? Can we sell it? etc.

Great work as always, thanks for sharing

[Gaia Clary]

Please check this chapter of the MH license:

http://sites.google.com/site/makehumandocs/licensing#TOC-The-essentials-of-the-MakeHuman-lic

we have contacted MH about a year ago to clarify and we created "The essentials of the MakeHuman license" in cooperation with the MH developers. We have reviewed the text several times before we thought it where clear enough and finally it was published by MH. So all is well ;-)

the easiest way to proceed is to just copy the essentials of the MH license to a notecard and give that away along with your product (of course you need to tweek the text a bit according to your case)

[Rei Ekato]

I've been struggleing with getting the Makehuman mesh play nice with the SL amature. Any advice?

 

The issues I tend to run into are.

1. pieces of the mesh deforming outside of the body as if I have forgotten to weight paint them, but I cannot locate the issue in blender.

2. When I move or scale the armature to fit the mesh I tend to get the forearm overlaping the hand ( This one has been a real pain )

3. The last issues is making sence out of the weight painting, but I'm not sure it's an issue until I get the above figured out.

[Paul Lapointe]

Really nice of you Gaia  your a gem for being so giving and its really appreciated trust me . Only thing is im trying to open it in  my Jass Pro and it keeps crashing blender before it opens. any sugestions?

[Ashasekayi Ra]

It crashed for me in Blender 2.49 as well. But, it worked fine in Blender 2.59.

[Paul Lapointe]

Thanks Ashasekayi, I was using 2.49 so illl update and try again :-) .Really love your mesh vids by the way, very detailed and well thought out well done.Can't wait to see you do one on how you made the shirt :-)

[Gaia Clary]

Oups, sorry... I thought that i mentioned somewhere, that it currently does not work for 2.49. I must have lost this line somewhere during editing ;-(

I still am investigating what might have caused this problem. Actually i have setup the blend file with blender-2.59 and there must be some incompatible dev elopment maybe introduced with 2.59 ? ( The blender coders don't care any longer about Blender 2.4 since at least a year ...)

[Gaia Clary]

The problem on Blender-2.49b was an incompatible User interface change. You can open the file when you disable "Load UI" in the open file dialog box of Blender-2.49b.

But i have added a version of the workbench wich just opens fine on Blender-2.49b (see The avatar.workbench )

[Gaia Clary]

I updated the workbench once more. The MakeHuman character had its origin wrongly set. I fixed this now.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

---

Paul Lapointe wrote:

Thanks Ashasekayi, I was using 2.49 so illl update and try again :-) .Really love your mesh vids by the way, very detailed and well thought out well done.Can't wait to see you do one on how you made the shirt :-)

---

Thanks Paul I'm definitely going to make a clothing modeling series starting with the shirt from that tutorial.

[johnn Lenroy]

i try to export from the first layer the sl avatar but when i click on weight button again is off..

from the second layer the avatar is ok just i make selection on the head upperbody,lower and all ok in modifier window.but on first nop,or i do something wrong?

[Gaia Clary]

fixed. please download again,. it should now work.

 

[johnn Lenroy]

yes is working now but i get some spikes..i dont know if is Aditi problem spike 1

and this is the other spike 2 is from the original sl avatar in first layer .. second layer avatar is ok.

[Gaia Clary]

i believe this is qa bug, see CTS-718

[Viviane Hobble]

Hi all

I tried to use the workbench for rigging my meshes. But I have some problems. When I upload the rigged mesh and wear it, I have always these strange artefacts:

Looks a bit like transparent or alpha artefacts. When I rezz the dress it was all ok, but not when I wear the dress.

I tried all versions of blender and the corresponding workbenches - but there's always the same problem. 

I use the automatic weights and didn't forget to "export for SL".

Has anyone an idea what's the problem?

(sorry for my bad English - I'm German )

[Viviane Hobble]

No one an idea what could be the problem?

[Ashasekayi Ra]

It's hard to say without seeing the .blend file. If the outfit has two layers, it could be that the layers don't have identical weights on the vertices. Or, it could be that the weights are incorrect in that area. Automatic weights usually have to be cleaned up and tweaked.