COMPLETE Avatar dataset/morph targets

Thanks so much for this!

Say, does anyone know. Do you think this thread warrents a sticky status? And if so, how does something like that happen?

Thanks,

Zee

You've certainly got my vote for a sticky, not that voting has anything to do with it.

E-mail Torley, and ask him to sticky it for you.

This should absolutely be a sticky

I'll write him. Thanks for the tip.

Zee

This is rather complicated, as the appearance sliders don't necessarily correspond to a single morph target. Many simply apply one target increasingly for decreasing values below 50% and another target increasingly for increasing values above 50%, but some are more complex.

Pigtails, for example, is neutral at 0% (no morph), increasingly applies Hair_Pigtails_Short until 10%, blends from Hair_Pigtails_Short to Hair_Pigtails_Med between 10% and 50%, from Hair_Pigtails_Med to Hair_Pigtails_Medlong between 50% and 75%, and from Hair_Pigtails_Medlong to Hair_Pigtails_Long between 75% and 100%.

This data is defined in the avatar_lad.xml file in the SecondLife/Character folder.

Edit to add: Further complicating this is that not all physical alterations to an avatar use morph targets. Some scale and/or translate the skeletal structure (and associated verts) directly.

Thanks Deanna. That's good to know. After playing around with it for a while yesterday I've given up on trying to recreate the slider setup in Max. My setup uses a custom UV mapping where all three templates are stacked vertically. I'd need to take each sectional morph target from the dataset, weld it to the other two parts, and redo the mapping on all of them. Ultimately it's not really worth the effort. I'm only doing a few channels.

I noticed that some of the obj files in the hair set don't load correctly. They generate polygon index errors. Just a heads up. It may be limited to Max's obj importer, but it's possible that some of them are corrupt.

Do you know which ones off hand and I can double check them?

Zee

Sweet! Exactly what I was looking for! I'm using Hexagon and the .obj files work just fine. Thanks for making this available!

I'll wait and see if anyone else reports having any issues with them. If not then I'll assume it's something unique to my setup.

Theoretically I'll be on vacation in a few days and have time to play. I'll make sure to check in and let y'all know how the hair meshes and Max get along for me.

*Stickied* — thx Zee for the heads-up and others who encouraged this knowledge to be spread. I don't really frequent the forums anymore, so I'd recommend in the future, if you have suggestions... please let Katt Linden know, she oversees the forums and is our Communications Manager!

Thanks for posting this resource, and thanks to Torley for jumping in and making it Sticky!

I'll be looking forward to reading all of your notes here as you experiment with this!!

-- Katt Linden

oo great work snagging the hair mesh, mind if I add this to SLCP? Not that I'd get around to it anytime soon, just wondering if you'd be okay with it if I ever do find myself with a spare month (yeah right.)

Let me think about that. I want to atleast make sure that there aren't any issues that we have to fix first. I'm also toying with the idea of doing a tinted set on the uppers and lowers for things like sleeve length, etc... Although that's in the "when I have a month" of free time also =D

Ok, we had some very high-profile linkage to the site when Torley mentioned the site on the SL Blog =D (No hard feelings Torley, we still love you!)

Anyways, we've got the site back on-line now and for now we recommend that you limit yourself to downloading the .zipped file collections linked from the top of each page rather than downloading each individual file. It will save you time and save us on having to replace more hardware (grin).

Zee

OMG. I got to thinking about something and I accidently reminded myself of this.

I grabbed the full set of hair OBJ files. Imported the base hair into Max and all good. Then I imported a handful of targets. Some of the targets are kind of scary with broken normals, but Morpher doesn't seem to mind. Apparently Morpher doesn't care about normals, so I'm not worried about it either.

Of the few that I loaded, one didn't seem to want to be a part of Morpher. It's called 'bangs back up'. So I poked around with it and noticed right away that the vertex count is way off. This is why Max's Morpher didn't want to load it as a target.

The vert count could be the cause of Chip's woes.

I'll be checking more of the hair targets as time wears on. And I'll do my best to keep an eye on this sticky. I have a hard time remembering to check the stickies for updates, but I'll do my best.

edit:

Chip, there is a little trick that I picked up a long time ago when dealing with broken imported OBJ files. Sometimes it helps to convert to Poly and maybe back to Mesh again. It's like Max gets confused and you have to convert the data structure in order for it to makes sense again. It like re-indexes the data or something. Worth a shot.

edit again:

I got to playing with one of the broken hair meshes and noticed that it's in chunks (Elements). I'm not sure how you are doing things, but might be worth looking into as a culprit of bad things. The target that I'm looking at in particular is broken but Morpher still loads it just fine.

I couldn't get them to load into Max at all. When I attempted to import the problem parts it would just give a "polygon index error" and refuse to import. Max wasn't able to parse them (using Max 2009). I haven't had a chance to fart with it since then. One good thing I did notice in my brief experiments was that the vertex numbers are retained (which I didn't think would be the case), so they work as morph targets without having to manually associate the verts.

Now that is odd.

If you find the time, post the names of some of the hair targets that you can't load. I'll see about exporting them from Max8 and we'll give that a go. That is assuming I can get them to open with the same vert count and indexing as the base mesh.

Unless Zee and/or Zora beat us to the punch with something uber.

Thanks for this! It sounds great. Although...
Importing the OBJ into Blender, it refuses to actually render the object, even though it's able to unwrap the mesh and all that good stuff. It seems to act like it's able to occlude objects intersecting or behind it (I added a cube to see what was going on), but otherwise it's blank space as far as it's concerned.

I'm probably making some very newbie mistake, but I haven't had this problem with LL's obj files, so I'm not sure how to repair it.

Any suggestions?

ETA: I had the idea of importing it into Wings 3D and exporting out as an obj again and then running it through Blender, and this time it seemed to work like a charm! Lovely. Wonder why it isn't working in Blender properly... Perhaps it's related to the problem that Chip reported with Max?

Sorry I haven't been able to follow up on this yet. But I have been watching the thread. I should have time this weekend to get caught up and dig into this OBJ issue though.

wow this is awesome, thanks Torley for pinning it, I wouldn't have seen it else!

Should copyrights be attributed to Linden Research, Inc. instead of Linden Lab?

After playing with the .ac files I decided a scripted solution was more use to Blender users, so I've been working on importing the avatar directly from the SL data files. Currently I have all morph targets as shape keys in blender and a basic rigged skeleton all in one blend file for download at http://dominodesigns.info

I'm still working on the script, so check the site regularly for new features

Can anyone point me at the XML datasets that were used to create these?