New Faun Legs and Creating Fitted Rigged Mesh

Try these new fitted rigged mesh faun legs!

 



Making these has been an education!  Here's several things I learned about fitted rigged mesh.

One size does not fit all. Always try the demo.

•  Items aimed to fit more common shapes don't necessarily work well near the extremes of the default body sliders.
• The [Knock Kneed - Bow Legged] body slider is ignored by the fitted skeleton. Make sure you've got that set at 50 if you're wearing something that interacts with the legs.
• The often mocked [Package] body slider is also ignored.
• Male and Female default shapes have a lot of unexpected differences. I didn't expect to see this around the knee and lower leg.

 Creating the mesh:

• It will stretch textures in areas where the body sliders are significantly different from your model's (think about the female shape's tummy slider!) and it will stretch textures in areas that are influenced by more than one bone.
• Be generous with the vertices around blended weight areas as well as joints.
• Blender has a lovely "decimate" modifier. Once your model is made and weighed, try it for generating lower LOD versions. It generates much more attractive versions than the SL uploader.

Weighing the mesh:

• You only get 4 parts to influence any one vertex. Blender can handle more, but the SL uploader will just throw extras away.
• You don't need to weigh both to a collision bone and a standard bone. The collision bones have their local bones taken into account.
• Don't use Blender's transfer weights option when doing fitted mesh. I've used it a lot for rigged mesh with no complications (yes, I've made some shoes for Slink feet.) For fitted it was trying to use both skeleton sets.
• Weighing near joints affects how the connecting points deform with movement. It took me several tries to get the lowest joint to deform attractively when the foot moved.  

Problems:


There's a known issue where fitted mesh can display terribly. Melted mesh, jagged points, and the whole mess keeps pointing toward < 0,0,0 >.

The current solution if you experience this is in your Graphics Preferences. If you have Advanced Lighting Model turned off, try un-checking Hardware Skinning.