This document has 2 parts. We begin with general advises how to setup your projects. then we show you how to get out of trouble and how you can identify if you have found a bug.

Section – General advice

Prepare your workbench

  1. Make sure that your Avastar is a released version
  2. Make sure your Avastar is released for your Blender version
  3. Make sure your rig version matches your Avastar version

Please make sure that the above checks are all positive. Never try to find short cuts, they may seem to work, maybe they even work for a while, but eventually every misalignment here will lead to catastrophic results in the future.

Get your meshes fit for the task

  1. Take care to use topology that can be animated without big trouble (this is hard work on the mesh)
  2. Use as few faces as possible for your meshes
  3. Avoid modelling parts which are typically not seen (inside of shoes for example)
  4. take care of your textures (UV-mapping)

A Clean Rig makes a difference

  1. Take care to have bones always placed at reasonable locations.
  2. Take care to have the Volume bones and attachments placed at reasonable places relative to their parent bones, even if you do not plan to use them.

Be careful with Animations

  1. Try to animate reasonably.
  2. Performing impossible moves is never a good thing
  3. Check that your meshes and your animations match together (increase face density only where needed)
  4. Avoid translation where you can

Sidenote: Rotating the structure bones actually adds translation to their children!

Section – Sanity checks

It is always good to keep your project in a good state and have no hidden issues. Things can go out of control so easily. You better check once in a while that your project still works as intended. Here are some checks for you:

Check the mesh

  1. more than one armature modifier
  2. duplicate vertices
  3. mesh is actually rigged to an armature

Check your Rig

  1. Check that your rig is in Pose Position (not in Rest position)
  2. Check your rig is an Avastar armature

Check the sliders

  1. Make a copy of your current Shape (Preset in Appearance Editor)
  2. Switch to the Orange default shape (check no distortions)
  3. Switch to the White stickman shape (check for no distortions)
  4. Switch to your stored Shape (preset) (check for no distortions)

Section – Getting out of trouble

You always can take care about everything and you can make everything right and vanilla with cherry on the top. but someday somehow the blinion (blender minion) will catch you and you no longer understand what your rig does. So how to get back to work? We assume you have taken care of the general advises above and your project is well organized. Then we can give you some recipes for recovery.

Prepare for disaster recovery

  1. Store your work into a new blendfile, so you can recover from here if something goes wrong
  2. remove all stuff that is still working (or hide it at least)
  3. check the basics (see below)