Support

Most important: You can do all of this by yourself. You not even need to inform us about your Developer kit. You even can distribute your ready made Avastar blend file with your product. That is all possible without any restrictions.

But if you need serious help or just want to be sure things are going in the right way, then please check at the end of this document. Yes it costs, but we believe if you ever are in need to ask us, then your issue must be very challenging.

The basic integration

You preferably create either a Collada file (.dae) or (not recommended though) a blend file (.blend) that contains your Developer kit. This is what you give to your users.

The configuration file

Below you see an example configuration file generated by Avastar. Your customers can later import this text file to their own Developerkit manager. All they have to do additionally is to enter the location where they placed your developerkit on their local file system:

Important: The syntax of the very first line is most important and must follow this structure:

'[' brand '-' name ']'

[Dinkies - v1.9 rev4]
filename = dinkie_sphere_eyes.dae
brand = Dinkies
name = v1.9 rev4
scale = 1.0
up_axis = Z
source.rigtype = SL(1)
source.jointtype = PIVOT(2)
target.rigtype = EXTENDED(3)
target.jointtype = PIVOT(2)
target.skeletontype = AVATAR(4)
use_sl_head = False
use_male_shape = False
use_male_skeleton = False
transfer_joints = True
use_bind_pose = False(5)
use_sl_bone_ends = True
use_sl_bone_rolls = True

Remarks

The remarks below are meant for better understanding the entries in the file above. The Avastar documentation contains a very detailed document about how to create your own developer kit

⁽¹⁾ Can be “SL” or “AVASTAR”

⁽²⁾ Can be “POS” or “PIVOT”, we recommend you always work with the PIVOT Rig

⁽³⁾ Can be “BASIC”, “EXTENDED” or “REFERENCE”

⁽⁴⁾ Can be “AVASTAR” or “ANIMESH”

⁽⁵⁾ If the developer kit restpose is not the T-pose and if the restpose was created only by rotating the bones, then the rig is most probably good for using the bind pose option. If  the developer kit is mostly non human and comes with a heavily edited rig with bones moved around (translation) to other places, then we recommend to not use the bind pose option to avoid issues in SL.

Note: Of course you can also create this file manually with a simple text editor. We recommend though you use the exact same syntax as shown

Distribute your Developer kit

Most important: It is entirely your task to provide the distribution of your developer kit. We do never include your Developer kit files to our products. Also note that you should distribute the config file as described above along with your devkit files.

What your users will do

1. First they will fetch your Developer kit from your distribution server
2. Then they will open the Developer kit Manager in Avastar
3. Finally they will load your configuration file into the Developerkit Manager. They only need to configure the exact location of the configuration file on their local file system.

What we can do for you

• We can create the config file for you
• We can convert your Developer kit to an Avastar Rig and create the appropriate collada file
• We can test your Developer kit with Avastar to see if there are any issues with it.

If you want us to test your Developer kit and create the configuration file and or create a ready made collada file then you need to provide following items to us:

1. The original Developer kit files
2. A brief description about possible issues like for example when you have reused some bones for different purpose or when you have added your own bones, etc.

We then will review your Developer kit and either deliver the requested results, or reject the request if we can not reliably support your Developer kit.

Costs

We always first make a quick check on your Developer kit. If we believe that the Developer kit can not be integrated to Avastar in a reasonable amount of time or if we actually have no time left to do the task, then we will reject the request. Of course this does not cost you anything.

If we accept the request, then we charge a one time fee of 100 US$ to be paid in advance to our paypal account. Should we not be able to deliver a working result, then we of course will pay back the entire fee.

Legal issues

You must make sure that your Developer kit does not violate any license policies. We do not check on this. We work in behalf of you and we deliver only to you and to no other party. You are fully responsible should any third party license be violated either intentional or unintentional.

The Avalab team is bound to treat any data provided by our customers as confidential information without the need of any additional non disclosure agreements. If you believe that you need a more secure relationship, then this is fully OK with us. But please talk to a third party in that case. There should be others who can do this sort of task as good as we can do.