AvaStar

Gaia says: You have to update your AvaStar to AvaStar-1.3-18 when you want to work with Blender 2.73 (RC).

There are some problems with 2.73. The Blender people are holding back its release while they make fixes. But, there is an RC version out.

AvaStar 1.3-18 is the recommended version for Blender 2.73. Any earlier AvaStar version is likely to produce problems with 2.73.

The Buzz

We may find preset shapes in AvaStar someday. It was been discussed with Gaia this week. So, we may eventually see child, tiny, giant, and other shapes.

I don’t expect Gaia to add the ‘Standard Sizes’ as presets into AvaStar. But third parties may make add-in shapes for Blender and/or AvaStar. 

Standard Size

I am amazed that numerous people have no idea what standard sizes/shapes are. I suppose it is more confusion about the label and which is meant when people are talking about them than it is ignorance.

As we went into the ‘rigged’ clothes era there was confusion about the ‘Default’ shape. I have tutorials on that here in the blog. You can read those to see how much confusion there was and the lengths I went to to sort things out. Still getting a ‘shape’ out of SL and being able to use it is a confusing problem, see: Second Life Shape Export.

So it probably isn’t surprising that there is still confusion about the idea of a standard size… or is that standard shape… or are we talking viewer default shape? We went through all this during the Mesh Deformer era.

Suffice to say the default/standard size avatar that comes as a NEW SHAPE from the Create New Shape feature of the SL Viewer is the shape/size used by default by AvaStar. And there are minute… let me repeat “MINUTE”… differences. But, there are no practical or effective differences.

Standard Design Sizes

When we were making rigged clothes and hoping for the Mesh Deformer (if you don’t know about the Mesh Deformer, look for the Tag for it at the end of this article) a group of people got together and created the Standard Sizes, a user adopted set of standards, nothing official. The idea being you can use the ‘standard sizes’ for your avatar’s body and rigged mesh clothes should fit. They sort of did… or didn’t… depending on your perspective.

But should these 5 standard sizes be included in AvaStar? I wouldn’t pay extra for the feature. It might be nice… I might use them. But, we really only need the middle and extreme sizes shapes.; tiny, giant, fat, heroin/crack skinny. Fitted Mesh clothes designed for middle/default sizes should work for all but the most extreme shapes and sizes.

Rigged Clothes

There are still designers designing for the standard sizes. They don’t make fitted clothes. I suppose if you are not using AvaStar it is too hard to deal with the collision bones. Also, I do not know of any addons for Maya, 3DS, or any modeling system, other than Blender, that easily work with the collision bones.

From what I hear a number of designers still designing rigged clothes do use AvaStar. So, having the sizes as presets could help them. But, rigged clothes seems to me to be a thing of the past. So, I expect the hold out designers to change over at some point.

SL2

What are we going to have in SL2? We’ll probably have some idea in a few months. We have seen High Fidelity is leaving the cosmetic part of the avatar design to some later date. I don’t know that SL2 can do that. But, it makes sense. We don’t paint things until they are very nearly complete.

I do expect the sizing problem to get resolved for SL2.

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