Yesterday Gaia Clary released a new Release Candidate of AvaStar. This release is mostly cosmetic. Tool labels have changed to better reflect industry jargon. Some may have moved to smooth out some bumps in workflow.

Norder Ney @ HeavenScent 2014

Also, the Help Documentation has been updated to reflect the AvaStar 1.1 user interface. You can access the AvaStar Help pages here. Once on the first page there is a tree-like menu giving access to other help pages.

Gaia is revising the workflow documents to AvaStar 1.1 interface. There is no mention of an ETA for when those will be available.

AvaStar has context sensitive help. When in Blender, with AvaStar installed of course, right click a control and select Online Manual. Easy.

The release notes list these changes:

1. Fix: Armature Info displayed Avastar Custom shapes as Custom Children.
2. Fix: Avoid a stack trace when no object in Scene
3. New: Added Scale all options to Animation scaler
4. New: Added Animation scaler to sparkles
5. Imp: Adjusted Bone Setting Panel.
6. Rem: disabled streaming costs calculation (implementation was too uncertain)
7. Imp: various modifications for improving the Rigging and Skinning Panels.
8. Fix: detach sliders could result in broken mesh
9. Fix: detach sliders results in stack trace when shape ui is not loaded
10. Imp: Cleaned up Animation Retarget panel
11. Imp: More polishing of the Bone display panel
12. Fix: Fixed Online Manual pages (mapping and operator names)
13. Imp: Improved the layout of rotation inheriting of limb bones
14. Imp: separated Rig Properties into 2 panels ‘Rig Controls’ and ‘IK Controls’. Also improved UI a bit for easier usage
15. Imp: Set some panels to be displayed by default as collapsed
16. Fix: Fixed inconsistency with Shapekey Basis and Avastar’s update Shape function
17. New: Added automatic loading of Sparkles Addon when Avastar is loaded
18. Imp: Now Sparkles and Aastar are distributed separately
19. New: Added Walk Cycle preset to Sparkles
20. New: Moved UV Joiner, Walk cycle helper and Weight Inspector into the Sparkles Addon
21. Imp: updated template files
22. Imp: Moved Custom Shapes out of sight, removed obsolete shadow meshes
23. Imp: Shape sliders now also work with unparented meshes (meshes now only need an armature modifier)
24. Fix: Keep edit bones from jumping to wrong locations during a rig update.
25. New: Improved walk cycle template (new mesh hierarchy, added pose library)
26. Fix: Fixed an exception caused by a blender internal rename of a Bone Constraint
27. Fix: various issues with pose copy and constraint copy during upgrading an old Avastar rig
28. Rem: Disabled the operator panel for the rig copy tool
29. New: Added copy of current action to the rig transfer tool
30. New: Added separate draw interface for the timeline copy tool

There are some new features. I haven’t got to check them out yet. I have other projects taking time. I did download RC4 and I’ll be using it later today.