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Avatar exportation from SL to import in a 3D software

Azumi Mosuke
Registered User
Join date: 19 Jul 2006
Posts: 28
03-31-2008 03:59
hello here my quest.

i do clothing for my avatar in SL and i wanted to do some with sculpties and instead of speanding 400 prims have a 1 or 10 prims cloth piece. my issue is i wanted to know if it was possible to export my avatar from SL and import it in the software instead of the basic avatar we find in SL ressources. thank You
Chosen Few
Alpha Channel Slave
Join date: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 7,496
03-31-2008 07:44
There's no way to export directly. However, anything that can be displayed on-screen can be captured if you know your way around a computer. Sorry, but I won't say more about the how-to's on that, and hopefully no one else will either. While your intentions may well be honorable, the sad truth is that many people looking to capture such data are content thieves. And while dedicated thieves already know all this, unfortunately all it takes for someone who's on the fence about stealing to tip to the wrong side of it is for theft to be made too easy for them. I won't contribute to that by posting instructions.

Here's what I'd suggest as the next best thing. Work the way 3D artists who build character models from scratch work. Use image planes. Take front-view, side-view, and if needed, top-view, screenshots of your avatar. You may want to do this in front of a green-screen or some other solidly colored background, to make the avatar image easy to extract from the environment.

What you want to do is something like what's in the image below, only with screenshots instead of drawings:



In your paint program of choice, extract the avatar images from the screenshots, and put them all into a single image. Line them up, and scale them so that they're all the same size. In other words, if the head is 50 pixels tall in the front view, make sure it's also 50 pixels tall in the side view. Basically, you're putting together "blueprints" of your avatar here.

Once you've got everything scaled and aligned, apply the image to a an appropriately sized polygonal plane in your 3D modeling program. Duplicate the plane, and then use whatever the equivalents of repeat/offset are in your particular program to show just one view on each. Rotate the planes so that each view faces the appropriate direction, and move them so they're in proper alignment.

You can now build your attachment objects right in place, using the image planes as templates. As I said, this is how it's usually done when building models from scratch, so the technique is well worth learning. Trust me; you won't need your actual avatar mesh if you've got good images of it.

You might even find that this technique is BETTER than working against the actual mesh anyway, since it enables you to draw your attachments beforehand. Drawing everything out in advance saves you a ton of time in the modeling phase.
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