SLS-8 Working with non default Shapes

Please advance the video to minute 19:45 to see the visuals for the text below

Please note that in our 3d tool we use the avatar meshes without any shapes applied.
Thus the avatar within our laboratory looks like the mesh rezzed in world as well.
And That? is another major pitfall? and i show you now how disturbing this can be.

Suppose you wanted to create a mesh attachment for your personal shape.
And lets say your personal shape is a bit crazy,
Like for example this dwarf.<break time=”1.4s”/>

First and most obvious, we have to get this shape
into our 3D application as our reference model.<break time=”0.6s”/>

Fortunately some viewers provide a method to export
the current Avatar as a set of wave-front objects.
The Wave-front format is a well supported
standard format in 3D design. Wavefront files
typically use the file appendix .obj,
And all major 3D tools support this format.<break time=”0.7s”/>

In this example i use the singularity viewer
to export the head?^ the upper body? and the lower body of
this avatar.<break time=”1.3s”/>

However, the viewer preserves <emphasis>only</emphasis> the morph-sliders when it creates the exported objects,
but it fully ignores all of the skin-slider values.<break time=”1.0s”/>
Hence, when we later import the objects to our laboratory?^
then we get a model with all skin-sliders removed,
but all morph-sliders applied.<break time=”7.0s”/>
So, in our case we can see a significant deviation between the imported objects on the right,
and the avatar as it looks in Second Life on the left.

The good news is: when we now take this model back to second life,
then we see some nice magic happen.
That is, the skin-sliders get applied again,
while the morph-sliders are completely ignored.
So, the result is, the imported mesh matches more or less with the original shape.

There are only 2 downsides of this approach:
first, You have to work on a completely re-scaled model,
Thus you actually have to guess the proportions
of your attachment when it finally
is worn in world.<break time=”0.9s”/>

Second, this approach is not precise,
mostly because the weight values of your objects are not precisely preserved.
So the match is not perfect, as we can see here.<break time=”0.6s”/>

Thus, you should be prepared to need a few iterations
before your custom mesh looks like you want it to be.<break time=”1.4s”/>

Now: i am at the <emphasis>end</emphasis> of this troublesome tutorial.
But there is also some good news:
all of the issues and caveats which i mentioned in this video?
have been completely solved within the Avastar Addon for Blender.
However, you should always keep in mind what i told you here.
This information will help you a <emphasis>lot</emphasis> to solve complex issues when you later skin your own meshes.

Have a nice day, and hopefully see you again soon.
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