SLS-3 The SL Appearance Editor

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In this lesson we will learn a lot about Morphing (for Blender users: Shape keys) but not so much about skeletal animation and bone weighting (this will come in the next lesson).

I have created an entire red skin for my Avatar and i have imported the mesh without any texture, thus the mesh appears in white. So it should be easy for you to distinguish between the Avatar and the mesh itself.

Inspecting the Sliders

So, lets again visit the Shape sliders in Secondlife Shape editor. Here you see that for example the Height slider applies to both the Mesh (white wires)  and the Avatar (red wires) in the same way.

All sliders which  do change the Skeleton affect the Mesh in exactly the same way as they affect the Avatar. Those sliders use Skeletal Animation. We will examine Skeletal Animation in detail in one of the next Lessons.
sls-3-02
But we also find sliders which do not affect the custom-mesh at all. Those sliders only influence the shape of the Second Life Avatar.
You can see this nicely when you look at the Torso – Belly Size. Here it becomes very obvious that only the Avatar’s shape (red wires) changes, while the rigged mesh (white wires) is not at all influenced by the slider.

All sliders which do not change the bone lengths are implemented by using Morph Shapes.
sls-3-01

The different behavior of the sliders is caused by two different animation methods for deforming the SL Avatar, namely:

  • Morphing (we will name the corresponding sliders Morph Sliders)
  • Skinning (we will name the corresponding sliders Skin Sliders)

These 2 animation methods will be described in the next 2 Lessons.

Appearance of Mesh Items

The appearance Sliders also influence your rigged custom meshes (when they are worn on the SL Avatar). However your custom meshes only react to Sliders which are related to Skinning. While Morphing is strictly reserved for the SL avatar.

Important: Especially the face morphs are not available for custom mesh items, hence there is no lipsync animation possible for custom Mesh. In fact, only 20 of the 120 available shape sliders do actually affect your custom meshes. This, is the top reason why its so troublesome to let mesh attachments fit exactly to your personal avatar shape.

In the next lessons we will introduce the 2 animation methods in more detail. At the end of these lessons you should know exactly what you can expect from your Custom meshes and how you can achieve that.

Back to: The SL Skeleton Course > SLS Basics

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