How Do I Use the mannequin program i downloaded from the secondlife download page..

Second Life Avatar Content Creation Aids
January, 2005

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These are intended for use by Second Life content creators. They can be used within other 3D applications as mannequins to aid in the creation of character animation and body textures for upload into Second Life. Included here are two Poser specific characters plus .obj and .bvh files that can be used to create similar mannequins in other 3D apps.
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The Folder "SL Avatar" contains two custom Poser 4/5 figures, "SL_Female" and "SL_Male." These characters match the base Second Life female and male meshes (prior to any morphs applied). They also contain matching texture UVs and bone/joint orientations. Using these custom figures rather than the standard figures supplied with Poser should result in more accurate animations uploaded into Second Life. The proportions of these figures can be further modified within Poser to create accurate animations for specific SL characters.

The mesh on each of the Poser models is divided into 3 material groups matching the SL avatar head, upperbody, and lowerbody textures. These groups allow clothing, skin, and tattoo textures to be previewed on the character within Poser as opposed to requiring logging in to Second Life.

To add the Poser figures to your Poser Library:

1. Navigate to the install location of your Poser app. and open the 'character' folder of your Poser library. (For example, ...\Poser 5\Runtime\libraries\character)

2. Copy the 'SL Avatar' folder and its contents into the character folder.

3. Start Poser and clear the work space.

4. Open the Poser library and click the 'Figures' button to reveal the character folder categories. Open the "SL Avatar" folder to find 2 new characters, "SL_Female" and "SL_Male". Double click the icon to add it to your scene.
NOTE TO POSER 4 USERS: The icon in the library will appear as a generic figure shrugging his shoulders. There may be a couple warning messages about the version number of the character but click through these and the character will be added to your scene. You can then click on the '+' button in the library to create an identical character that will have a new icon and will open without any warning messages.

5. If you want to make this character your default startup Poser character open the 'Edit/General Prefs.' menu, set the Document Preference to 'Launch to Preferred State', and press the 'Set Preferred State' button. Now each time you launch Poser it will load the SL mannequin automatically as its default figure.

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The Folder "SL Clothing" contains one Poser pp2 prop file representing the skirt. You can copy this folder to your Poser Props directory. This file is useful as a texture mannequin.
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The other files included may prove useful toward the creation of SL compatible animation characters in 3D applications such as Maya, 3DSMax, Animation Master, and Blender. Animations created on these characters can then be uploaded into Second Life as long as the 3D app. can be configured to output standard BVH text files.

Additionally, the obj model files can be imported into programs such as Deep Paint and Zbrush to paint clothing, skin, and tattoo textures directly on the 3D mesh, or to simply preview textures on a Second Life compatible mannequin without requiring logging in to Second Life.

"SL_avatar_OBJ.obj" is a version of the base SL avatar mesh with correct texture UVs. The mesh has been divided into groups based on the bone group influences of the SL avatar skeleton. As with the Poser figure above, material groups are divided into the 3 main texture groups found on the SL avatar, ‘head', 'lowerbody', and 'upperbody'. Additionally, the Poser folder mentioned above contains both male and female .OBJs of the SL mesh without bone groups.

"SL_skirtmesh_OBJ.obj" is 3D mesh representing the SL skirt object.

"SL_Avatar_Tpose.bvh" is a single frame base skeletal animation pose with all joint rotations zeroed out. It can be used as reference to reconstruct the SL skeleton in other 3D applications. Remember that the hierarchy, joint names, and joint rotation order must match those specified in this file in order for any resulting animation to import correctly into Second Life.
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Happy content creation!

-Xenon Linden
Art Monkey



=I Want To Use The mannequin to look at my clothes befor i upload them into secondlife but i do not under stand any of the information given when i downloaded the file=

First of all, there's no such thing as "the mannequin program". The mannequin files are not programs themselves; they are simply data files to be viewed from within a program. Think of them kind of like documents or images or MP3's or any other type of file you might be more familiar with. You probably understand already that an MP3 isn't a program; it's just a file to be read and played by an MP3 player program such as Windows Media Player or iTunes. And you probably already know that an image isn't a program; it's just a file to be displayed by an image editing program like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.

Well, the very same goes for those mannequin files. They are files to be read by 3D appliciations. The Poser format files can be used in Poser or DAZ|Studio. The OBJ files can be viewed in almost any 3D application (Maya, 3DS Max, Lightwave, Blender, etc.).

So, if you want to use the mannequins, you'll need one of those programs and you'll need to learn how to use it.

Check out the sticky thread at the top of this forum called "SL Clothes Previewer." It's a free program you can download to preview your avatar textures offline.

thank you this is what i wanted to no i do not no what all that was about so i said the name of the document rong thanks tho