Big changes ahead (Fasten Your Seat Belts)

Avastar Collada

 optimized for OpenSim exports

Feature complete:

We have fixed all major issues with the Collada export. As you might know the Avastar -500 already contained a preliminary version of our own Collada exporter. We have meanwhile improved the exporter significantly. And it now provides everything needed for exporting your Meshes to OpenSIm and compatible worlds (see feature list on the right side)

Easy to use:

On first sight the new export panel looks like we have dropped functionality. But actually we have removed complexity from the user interface and now Avastar does the job for you. The only necessary decision for you is from where Avastar will collect your textures (if you have any) You do that in the texture options.

And you wonder what this “SL Bone bug fix” thing is ? Well it is another issue we found. Aside from the normal bones which start with an “m” there are a bunch of other bones that can be used – the “attachment point” bones and around twenty “collision volume” bones. These can be weighted and animated (see below), however if you try and reposition them, or even position them in their default place, horrible things happen in SL. This option just removes those bones from the armature section of the exported collada file.

BTW: Avastar can be used to export static meshes. Just select your meshes and export them all together with your weighted character or alone. There is nothing to consider here. It just works.

You do not like the Avastar Collada exporter ? No problem, the Blender Collada exporter is also available for you (as part of the Blender 2.64 distribution) with many improvements and it works reliably for OpenSim meshes.

• Exports static meshes and rigged meshes
  (limited to Avastar Rigs!)
• Support for color-only (material color)
• Alpha value (fully transparent/fully opaque)
• Brightness (on/off)
• Up to 8 textures per object (texture faces)
• Export of UV textures
• Export of material textures
• Uses active UV-layout for export
• Object names are sorted to support multiple LOD files
• Exports only deforming weight groups.
• On the Fly normalisation during Export to Collada.

Compatible with older Blender releases:

The Avastar Collada exporter works with any blender version starting from Blender 2.60 up to the most recent version. The export options have been cut down to a minimum. All critical export parameters are now calculated by Avastar:

Actually you just need to select the meshes which you want to export. Avastar detects on its own when it must export the armature.

Volume Bones

Weighted Volume Bones:

Red Poly (a resident from a popular online world) has pointed out that the volume bones in fact can be weighted to mesh. These are just ordinary bones and every SL avatar has them already. Avastar now has them too (see the red bones in the image on the right side) and you can use them in your own creations. Where they are really interesting is that they react to some of the shape sliders in SL (like the way mHead reacts to Head Size) which means you can create clothes and attachments that adapt to the character’s shape.

Simple workflow

To get to the point: Avastar now supports volume bones in a really nice way. As mentioned above the bones always follow the avatar shape sliders, and all the complexity in using these bones is taken care of automatically. We’ve added a function that allows you to see the effect the shape will have on your mesh inside blender so you can now model over a whole shape range (see below).

• all 19 available Volume Bones are now supported.
• the volume bones react to the shape sliders in Blender just like they do in the target system.
• The volume bones can be animated just like any bone

Enable volume bone weighting

The volume bones can be weighted just like the default SL bones:

1. Parent and Weight your own Mesh to the Avastar character (as always)
2. If your mesh has not yet any Shape keys, then create a Base shape key (Simply add a shape key, it will be named “Base”).
3. Add another Shape key and name it “bone_morph”. Avastar will use this shape key as the storage for the changes on the mesh due to the shape slider movements.
4. Set the shape key influence to 1.0
5. Select the Avastar rig, go to Pose mode and open the Bone properties section.
6. Select all volume bones at once. (assuming you have enabled their visibility before)
7. Press SHIFT +W -> Deform to enable the deform checkmark for all volume bones. You might need to do that twice. This toggle behaves like the ‘a’ toggle for select/deselect all vertices.
8. Go and add some weights to the volume bones (in weight paint mode)
9. And now your custom mesh will react to the Avastar Shape sliders. And when you wear it in your oline world and change your shape it will react in exactly the same way as it does in Blender.

We still need to specify how exactly the volume bones need to be weighted. That is currently a field for experimentation.

But please note that the weight painting of the volume bones is still up to the user (you!). We do not provide ready weighted volume bones (yet).

Skeleton editing

• Function panel for Lock/Unlock skeleton Rotation
• Dito for Lock/Unlock Location
• Bake selected Bones as new rest pose

weighting

• Weight adjustment tool now only appears in weight painting mode with a single vertex selected (so the values are live and can be adjusted immediately)
• copy weights no longer normalises the weights
• find unweighted now ignores non SL bones and bones set not to deform (avoids many issues seen on previous releases)
• normalise all now ignores non SL bones and bones set not to deform
• Normalisation of Weights only done on export to Collada. It’s quite useful to be able to weight paint several bones to 1.

Mesh

Just reshape the Avastar character and your mesh will follow all bone length changes. Note: This is exactly what also will happen in your online world! This gives you some great benefits:

• You can see in Blender how your mesh will react on the shape sliders.
• You can optimize your weighting directly and with visual control. (work in progress, currently its not yet as user friendly as we want.)

Using this feature is almost trivial, you just have to do a couple of preparations:

1. Parent and Weight your own Mesh to the Avastar character (as always)
2. If your mesh has not yet any Shape keys, then create a Basis shape key (Simply add a shape key, it will be named “Basis”).
3. Add another Shape key and name it “bone_morph”. Avastar will use this shape key as the storage for the changes on the mesh due to the shape slider movements.
4. Set the shape key influence to 1.0

• Your custom meshes can now react on the Shape sliders in Blender
• default material added to meshes when new Avatars created
• mesh statistics reported (on console for now)
  • Basic mesh data (polygons, modifiers, armatures, etc.)
  • analysis of weight groups (zero weight / more than 4 weight groups etc)
• bake T pose now ignores non SL bones and bones set not to deform
• shape preview also ignores non deforming weight groups and normalises on the fly

other new features / improvements

Shapes:

• basic code in place using custom shape key “bone_morph”
• deals with non deforming weight groups correctly
• deals with unweighted / unnormalised vertices correctly
• reacting correctly to normal bones like mHead as well as volume deform bones
• reacting correctly to volume bones taking into account base rotation and scale
• hidden mesh is now not updated for efficiency.
• morph-only changes are now really fast. to be verified!
• general speed improvements in the sliders
• fixed some bugs with the torso muscles slide

Animation:

• bone location animation enabled
• increased the accuracy of exported animations. This will produce bigger files but it should capture much more of the subtle motion.

Armature:

• Parent to armature button added besides T Pose bake button. (You only need T Pose bake if your armature is NOT in T-Pose when you paent a mesh to your armature!)
• Bake bone pose – set default rest pose for selected bones only. this is needed to provide support for non human characters (to be documented)
• foot pivot code changed to not depend on the mesh (now mesh keeps on ground in blender) Note: this has nothing to do with the z-offset in the mesh importer.