Avatar Building

I am trying to figure out what I would need to do to modify avatars.

It is difficult for me to use the in-game building tools, so I'm hoping to rely on import/export with Blender 3d. I have the plug-in that brings the Second Life building tools to the Blender interface.

I have two questions:

Is there a tool I can use to import/export .obj files from Second Life to Blender and vice versa? (I think I've seen a script that will convert .obj to Second Life, but nothing to do the reverse.)

How do joints work for avatars? And are there any tools that will help me take figures with joints and translate them to a Second Life avatar?

Someone's likely going to beat me to posting it (well, it turns out they didn't), but you seem headed down entirely the wrong path here. If I recall right, anything .obj has nothing to do with Second Life. There's a thread not far back - right at /8/c7/165516/1.html - that discusses roughly the same topic.

Most everything in Second Life is built strictly out of 7 different primitives (thus we constantly speak of using "prims", which can be stretched, twisted, and sliced, and then assembled together to create the final structure. The only exception is avatars, which are a human body model with various slider settings assigned to it to reshape the figure, and then optionally you can attach primitives to its surface too.

The good news is, you can indeed work offline thanks to the efforts of other another resident who created the Offline Builder Blender plugin. You'll have to use this plugin throughout the building process, which is really inevitable as SL's format can be rather unique and limiting.

Assuming of course, you can figure out how to use Blender.

Amity specifically mentioned interest in using Blender, so I kept it simple as such. There are, for example, other editors one can use plugins for, but I just didn't bother to look that up this time.

I'm also wondering if there's some 'trick' to making joints work right. I have played around with making a forearm to go with a cyber upperarm I have, but encounter the following problem: In order to make the joint look right when the arm is bent, it has to look like it's unattached while the arm is straight down.