Polys and avatar questions

How many polys can your avatar be? (Max). Can I import stuff I have created in Blender as my avatar on second life? I need a comprehensive guide basically on how to customize your avatar!!!

We can not fundamentally change our avatar meshes. We can use the sliders provided in Appearance to altar the avatar itself. All other modifications must be accomplished by adding prims to your avatar as attachments. Other tricks like using animations to twist the avatar into a ball or to flip the limbs back on themselves to make a very short avatar (like the Tinies) are also possible, but none of these change the fundamental avatar wiremesh.

-Ghoti

And I'm afraid that you can't import stuff made in Blender or any other program. Everything in SL is made of Prims.

I'm intrigued by this too. I've seen 'tinies' and I've seen a Smurf too. These might just be the standard Avatar mesh altered but how? It isn't possible to create these bodies with the standard adjustment sliders. So my question is how do you make them and get them into SL?

Crow

They use animations/poses that are warped out to allow the AV shape to get so tiny but yet give them arms and legs. They look like robots walking around but that's tinies for you as far as I have seen.

On a side note...

I personally would love to see the ability for people to create custom 3D meshes for import into SL. I think there would be a huge business in that. It would be very limited at start as the designers outweight the modelers in numbers. But being able to truely customize the base of your avatar would be quite an interesting market and experience. Creatures, mutations, etc. Those who create custom meshes would be responsible for creating the biped/skeletal/rig system for it as well.

If this ever happened though it would be in the LONG run.

All the avatars that go beyond sliders are made with Prim attachments.

In some cases, the base avatar is folded over on itself, using scripts, so it will fit inside a tiny prim assortment. In other cases, the designer has used "invisiprims" to make the base avatar, or portions of the base avatar, invisible. That's the same trick that's used with shoes, to make parts of the foot vanish so only the spike heels are visible.

Personally, after spending a bit more than a year here, I'm just as glad that we can't import our own meshes from other programs. I'm pretty sure, if we could, that people would be trying to import Poser figures, and those things have such dense meshes that servers would be crashing right and left, and we'd be here trying to explain the whole thing about vertex count and rendering forever.

The only way I'd be happy with it is if SL charged a hefty per-poly price for upload, and all imported things were automatically no-copy (even for the person uploading.) If people were paying $1000L per poly for upload, it would be obvious that many polys were bad, even if they didn't understand the real reason that many polys are bad.

But there would still be a bunch who would just pay the price, and it would be worse than the hoochie hair. So I'm just as glad that we simply can't do it.