This page contains a list of limitations imposed by the SL character animation system and/or by Blender. The listed limitations do not apply to Blender/Avastar, It is important that you know what you are allowed to do and what you have to strictly avoid. So, please read this page carefully to avoid unexpected behavior of your creations.
Never re-parent Bones (SL limitation)
Artist: You must never modify the parent-child relation (parenting) of the blue SL Bones and the purple Bento Bones. Otherwise your imported rig becomes very distorted and the bone locations get mangled into disorder.
Technician: All bone locations are stored relative to their parent bone. The parent-child relation in SL is fixed. When you modify the parenting, then the relative child bone locations are taken from the wrong parent and lead to unexpected relocation of the child bone. This affects all children of the affected child as well.
Apply Scale & Rotation before binding
Artist: Always apply Scale and Rotation before you bind your meshes to an Avastar Rig, Note: This is often not necessary, however it helps to avoid unexpected fitting issues in SL. Remind: Having Scale and rotation applied is always the most safe way to go.
Techinician: Blender allows to scale and rotate your meshes as you like, in object mode, in edit mode, everywhere. However those scalings and rotations sum up over time, especially when you use parentt – child relationship between differently scaled objects you can end up in a desaster.
Apply Scale & Rotation before animating
Artist: While Blender supports animating your character even when the armature and the meshes are scaled and rotated in Object mode, you always have to export the meshes with scale and rotation applied. However, when you apply scale and rotation after you created your animations then you can end up in distorted animations.
Technician:The main problem is with Translation animations. When you apply scale & rotation then only your mesh scales/rotations are normalized. The translation part of your animations is not affected. This can lead to major distortions of your animations.
Note: The Sparkles Toolset contains an Animation scale tool. But this is a finicky thing. You best avoid the scaling of animations in first place.
Importing Developer Kits with Fitted Mesh needs Blender 2.79++
Artist: Please Update to Blender 2.79 or newer.
Technician: The Blender Collada importer makes a shortcut. It bakes all Bone scales and rotations into the Skeleton. Then it sets the scale and rotation of all bones to neutral (scale 1, rotation 0). While this is not wrong, we loose important information that is later needed for exporting the Collision Volumes with the correct bind pose information.