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.

Another rezday!

Eight years.

No wonder I've turned grey!

I made my first pieces of fitted mesh today.  Messing with the avatar shape sliders points out that several of the bone changes influence the appearance of the mesh in ways I didn't expect, especially around the hips and butt.

 

I used Blender 2.7, the fitted mesh survival kit, and a shirt from Damien Fate's free clothing mesh.

The most important tidbits?

• When weighing, four or fewer bones influencing each vertex. This means you can't just copy the weights from the avatar models. The area around the shoulders has a LOT of influences.
• If you aren't using some of the collision bones, you can delete their vertex groups and the mesh will still upload into SL. You cannot do that with the normal bones.
• Don't have the joints box in the SL viewer uploader checked.

Link to article on the new alpha settings

The new alpha settings

Blender and Rigged Mesh

I finally made a rigged mesh avatar using Blender 2.6.

 I'm adding some short notes here to make it easier in the future.

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• Make your model. Make sure to place vertices near the joints. Save file.
• Open up avatar.blend in Blender. Copy the bones layer into your model file.
• Align the model (and the bones if you're changing their lengths) so it and the bones looks reasonable. Parent (control-P) the bones and the model, and use the "envelopes" option.
• Select a bit of bone, and go into Pose mode (object, edit, etc)
• Select the mesh and go into Weight mode. Blue is no effect, Red is full effect. (object data - the little triangle tab - shows which bone you're on) Paint to your heart's content. Save.
• If you modded the bones: Select the bones. Object | Apply | Rotation and Scale
• Select the mesh and bones. 
• Export to collada as rigged SL object. If you changed the bones from default, or sized the bones up or down, make sure Deform Bones is checked. 
• Upload in SL as a rigged mesh. Check the boxes for skin weights and joint positions, and adjust the height offset as needed.

Busy and on the Bench

 

One of the downsides to working with mesh in SL is not being "in" SL while I work. Blender is definitely a two hands sort of application, and it needs a lot of screen real estate. No bings of people wanting a chat, no group windows exploding with drama. Scripting can be lone work too, especially if I take it offline.

Fantasy Fair is starting up again soon, and I'm kind of bemused to realize it was back in '09 when I was in it. It's been a long time since I've made things that weren't either just for me and friends, or for a contracted client.

I took an afternoon earlier this week and redid a chunk of my mainland space. I swapped out the cave skybox for a floating island with a couple grassy surfaces (and a cave inside!) As you can see, I bought a (4 LI!) bench for it.

Playing with scale

Peekaboo!