Posing the Avatar in Blender

I'm trying to use Blender to aid with making clothing, but I'm not real thrilled with the way the mannequin's arms stick out. It makes texture baking more complicated, and drawing accurately on the shoulders nigh-impossible. Absent just selecting the arms and rotating them downwards (which seems like it would cause problems, though please correct me if I'm wrong) is there any way to pose the avatar object? I know you can import .bvh files to Blender but I can't figure out how to make that work with the avatar, or if it's even possible. Thanks.

You'd have the replicate the correct bone setup, then use Blender's skinning tools (if it has them) to link the av mesh to the bones and assign weights to the vertexes (which bones they're influenced by and by how much). It would take a whole lot of guesswork and trial and error until you got the same deformations.

So there's no way to get the mannequin to put its arms down? Drat. Thanks anyway.

You can do it, Chip told you. It's not that hard actually, but beyond the scope of a forum post to explain.. I would suggest looking in the Blender documentation for 'Aramatures' and
'weight painting' there is alot of info available about this kind of stuff for Blender.

-whyroc

I've used Poser to pose the avatar that I load into blender. I think. It's been a while.