making an avatar model for building with

This is a bit of an odd request, unless you're a shoe designer like I am.

I have been using various 3D tools (first wings, now blender) to build sculpties in SL. I've had excellent results with both, and am quite happy with the resulting shoes I've made.

To construct these, however, I've had to do a very large number of uploads to cope with the SL avatar foot when it's been adjusted into a "high heel" foot shape. While the OBJ files found on the downloads area are quite helpful, there is no model for the distorted foot. These uploads aren't that huge a deal, but it's really a workflow/time issue as the sizing/shaping work takes too long.

So, what I'm wondering is how might one get a good model of the distorted (high heel) foot? Something importable into blender would make me very happy, and save the lindens some wasted disk space on their beta servers.

Also, the question is more general than just for the ugly-as-all-get-out[/hightlight] avatar feet, as I can easily image builders wanting to speed up development of other sculpted attachments

The one best way to deal with avatar creation and minimise upload costs is to run your own sandbox with OpenSim (opensimulator.org). [But that's another story.]

However, there are some distorted av meshes here:
http://www.ccccybernetics.com/avatar_databank/
but may not be what you are after.
Good luck with all.

That is an amazing resource!

Thank you thank you thank you!

If you think that's amazing I wonder what you'll make of my avatar.blend file?

http://dominodesigns.info download link is at the right.

As far as I know it is the most complete avatar file available. All morph shapes are included as shape keys.

That looks great, Domino, thanks

My only question is (ahem), how do I work it? Do you have a pointer/quickie info on how to use blender to morph the avatar? I've only been using blender for modeling sculpties, no animation.

Thanks

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Animation/Basic/Deformation/Shape_Keys

Look for the bit on blending shape keys as that's all you need, there's no need to animate them.

Eventually I intend on having an appearance editor in Blender. As some of the appearance settings modify multiple things at once, it's hard to use the shape keys to get the mesh to look just like your avatar. But even in it's current state, it's a lot more useful than the all or nothing options on the morphs other techniques offer.

Wow. That's truly awesome Domino. You've saved me hours and hours of work

It took a bit to get blender to show the sliders in the Action Editor, but once they were there it was very easy to adjust the avatar.

Excellent work!

Glad you got it going. Anyone else following along can get the sliders shown by going to the action editor, in it's toolbar, change the Editor Mode from "Action Editor" to "ShapeKey Editor" and in the view menu, select "Show Sliders". There are different sliders for each of the avatar parts, so select the part you want to work on, and start sliding

After futzing with the sliders, I've determined that they don't quite work the same way as the avatar controls work in world.

For example, try this: Create a shoe in world, with the following values (for a female avatar with size ZERO feet):

shoe height: 0
heel height: 100 => shoe_heel_height: 1.0
heel shape: 14 => shoe_heel_point: .86 (?? a guess)
toe shape: 44 => shoe_toe_point: .44 (?? a guess, looks close...)
toe thickness: 8 => shoe_toe_thick: .08
platform height: 2 => shoe_platform_height: .02
platform width: 20 => shoe_platform_width: .20

What you see in world is a very pointy heel. In blender, the heel point is not quite right. Oddly, the incorrectness stems from the platform width, which makes me believe that there is a bias value in the viewer. A value of 20 as I used above leads to a pretty pointy heel point in SL, whereas in blender, a value of 20 leads to a fairly wide heel point.

I suspect there are other adjustments needed because I can't quite get my shoe to fit in blender as it fits in world (pretty close, but not quite right....). I'm not surprised that this part is tricky because in the viewer I can only get a perspective view, whereas in blender the perspective view doesn't agree with SL's...Also sizing is tricky, etc.

Anyway, it's still super helpful, just not perfect.

You are at about the point where I realised I needed to do the full gui to get it working right.

In the Second Life folder, you'll see a character folder containing a avatar_lad.xml which contains the settings for the appearance UI. If you search for heels, you'll see "High Heels" has driven parameters of 197 and 500, searching for those numbers show that "Shoe_Heel_Height" and "Shoe_Heels" are both adjusted by the Heel Height slider in SL. If you look at some of the other settings in there, the range isn't always a straight 0.0 to 1.0

Some of the settings also scale the skeleton, so trying to clone the avatar in Blender is tricky as things stand. I've still a lot to do to make this as user friendly as Primstar. Sadly, with my wrist problems, it's going to be some time before I get back to it

Look at this thread, it might be exactly what you're looking for. Make multiple sculpties in Zbrush and export to SL automatically assembled and scaled.

/8/d5/260272/1.html

Well, I hope your wrist gets better soon. I had wrist issues years ago, and can relate

So, I looked at the file you mentioned, and then I went and changed the min/max ranges for a few of the shoe/feet related parameters.

After that, I made a full-zeros shoe in world, attached a prim to it and precisely sized the prim. Took those dimensions into blender, and voila! a match

Or at least close enough for me to work more efficiently

Thanks again