Dear customers, Avastar lovers (and haters), not yet purchasers, longtime fans, sparrows..
It may be too early to ask you about your experience with the new Avastar-2 release, but Avastar in general has been around for 5 years and I believe it’s time to collect some user voices.
We ask you today:
- What do you like (or dislike) most about Avastar?
- Has it helped you, or let you down?
- Do you use the tool a lot or not so much?
- …
We’re looking to get some base opinions about what we do here.
Whatever comes to mind about our product, just let us know here on this page.
Thank you for any contribution, especially when you point us to areas where we still need to improve!
Sincerely,
Gaia
from the Avastar team
no sales only complaint and hope is for omega layers checked with omega lady only one layer. truth is no one buys non omega these days even bento with skin huds clothes and hairs and shapes. oh and avatars can’t wear shoes that needs fixing too. Still I find avastar quite a good thing to use for making avatars and easy.
First off, Gaia and the rest of the support are amazing and very helpful.
Now for Avastar.
I like that you guys keep it updated along with SL and Blender as needed. The only thing I haven’t liked is all the bugs between versions, and having to use [x version here] to do specific things, then possibly load another version later. This is less of an issue on the newest version, but a common issue through my first year or so of the purchase.
I’m not a fan of having to repurchase over time. I don’t remember if the fee was 3k or 6k, but if it’s 6k, I feel that’s a bit steep, especially when I purchased it nothing said I will need to spend cash to continue getting the updates, and there was no countdown about support. Although I understand you guys needing to stay funded, I felt this was a bad business ethic, so I can’t say for certain if I will repurchase once my time is up.
All in all it has been a very helpful tool for animating and rigging. I’d definitely recommend it to people for the initial purchase.
Hi;
Thanks for your comment on this page.
Please let me just clarify your remark about the upgrade fees:
First and most important: Avastar-1 updates will never be charged with extra costs. As this was our promise at the time when we offered the first version of this Addon back in 2011.
We have announced the change from “pay once get free updates forever” to “pay for one year of support” in december 2014. We have announced this again in november 2015 and in december 2015. And this is also mentioned in the purchase page of the website and on the SL vendor in our shop. I will recheck this to see if we can make this more apparent.
However we enabled this limitation only after october-2017 and everybody who has purchased before that date still gets one year of updates until october-2018 .
Here are the links to our announcements:
I use Avastar all the time; for me it’s a must have.
I would LOVE to see some better documentation on the Machinimatrix site – up-to-date video tutorials on Fitmesh, weighting to attachment points, etc. The key phrase here being “up-to-date”. The video tutorials are my first step whenever I have an issue to solve, but so many of them are out of date and refer to buttons/commands that have moved, changed, etc. I also find the Avastar staff to be somewhat non-responsive on questions asked in comment fields.
tl;dr: The add-on itself is fantastic, I wouldn’t be creating without it. Support needs some work.
Hi;
Thanks for your comment on this page.
About the outdated videos:
About 2 years ago we had removed all outdated videos from public view to avoid any confusions. But this gave us a huge flood of complaints either. many people seemed to like outdated videos more than no videos at all. So we moved the videos back into public view but marked them as “only valid for Avastar-1”.
Later in time we created 2 websites
Admittedly both websites had the same content for a long time while we still have been working on getting Avastar-2 to work properly. However this has changed since october-2017 where we subsequently updated the avastar-2 documentation. Yes it still contains older videos but we are replacing them one by one as soon as we can.
About answering in comments sections:
We found that providing help through our web pages does not work nicely because the comment fields tend to become quickly cluttered with text. Also general help in the comments section does not work in most cases because we almost always need to see your blend files to give appropriate answers.
However we do provide general help through the SL Chat channel “Blender Avastar” which allows us to respond interactively. And we provide a support website at https://support.avalab.org/tickets/ where you can also drop your demo blend files.
I fully support Sureyya’s comment and highly appreciate the work of the Avastar team around Gaia. They have done and still do such a marvellous job in developing, fixing, improving and documenting this unique Blender addon.
In the past three years, I created numberous rigged mesh attachments (mainly clothes) for the basic SL rig. With some experiences and thanks to Gaia’s supportive tutorials, it meanwhile works well and I use it very often. Beyond this level – Fitted Mesh, Bento or even custom rigging – I never dared to proceed.
Regarding the creation of animations with Avastar, I must admit that I still have my difficulties, though I even visited inworld classes and watched Gaia’s tutorials several times. Beyond static poses and very simple animations, it remains complicated to me (e.g. I haven’t got in the past three years how inverse kinematics really works). However, it might be my lack of experience and dedication that I don’t get along with Avastar in this respect. I still prefer QAvimator when I need a quick pose or simple animation.
When I would have a wish free, I would like to have a far less elaborated tool for my modest needs (so to say an “Avastar Elements”), but I know that this would cause extra efforts and costs for Gaia’s team. Luckily, Avastar can be at least customise in a way that the displayed options can be limited to the prefered level.
i really do appreciate the help of avastar in rigging and loading meshes to second life.What i like most in avastar is…it is upgraded continously to help more and more and to get easier solutions.And also before loading mesh it says what can be wrong about the mesh (eg. unweighted vertex,weights more than 4 bones etc)very very helping to fix a problem.
its not an exaggeration to say that i thank to creators(Gaia is the first ) of this add-on whenever i work in blender:)it lifts heavy burdens from our shoulders much more than i expected.
BUT…..I wish there is a really easy and a functional button (like all the others till now) which can directly transfer the rig and the weight paints from one mesh to the other (definitely similar ones)Maybe there is but i have not discover it yet.I am sure i would use that property oftenly.