Clothes Skins Etc

Second Life Weighting Collision Bones

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While we wait for the Mesh Deformer people are looking for ways to make mesh clothes fit. There are some alternate methods for making clothes that change with the avatar shape. One of those is the use of Collision Bones. Some call it Collision Volumes. We have heard that method called liquid mesh in promotional stuff. It works to a point. But, how does one use Collision Volumes?

Collision Bones/Volumes
Collision Bones/Volumes

Using the Collision Bones in the default SL avatar one can achieve some measure of sizing tied to the avatar shape. The problem is getting that information from the modeling program to Second Life™.

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Second Life Baking Dance

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You probably know about SSA – Server Side Appearance by now. But, as we move into it and more people try it we are finding an oddity here and there. Today I heard of a new one.

As things are planned your viewer will handle your appearance during editing in Appearance Mode ( as right click on avatar Edit My Outfit ) always has, baking things locally and quickly. But, when you go into Appearance and pop on an Outfit, does the SSA system try to find a cached bake of the Outfit? Or does it just start baking the Outfit? Either would take some time. Does the viewer have to wait on the server?

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Second Life Shape Export

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I recently decided to buy Avastar-1 (RC2-782) and see if it could solve some problems I’ve run into with posing the avatar for weight painting. I’ve also had some problems getting custom mesh to fit my avatar. Tight skirts require everything be precise. Things weren’t as precise as I hoped. I was getting frustrated.

Comparing In-world with Avastar and OBJ Export
Comparing In-world with Avastar and OBJ Export

Avastar is an add-on for Blender sold by Machinimatrix.org for US$22. ($27 4/2017) I resisted purchasing it because I wanted to provide tutorials that provide a free path to accomplishing the same things. I’m in the process of updating my tutorial: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. It’s almost a year old and a few things have changed. 

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Second Life Mesh Clothes Tutorials

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Update: See Mesh Deformer Changes for an update on mesh clothing.

There are several people that make tutorials for Second Life™. Others explain aspects of Second Life. We can find their stuff in blogs, web sites, on YouTube and Vimeo, and amazingly enough in the SL Forum. Of all those the stuff in the forum seems to be the hardest to find. So, here are a couple of the forum jewels.

In modeling mesh that moves, avatars and clothes, the arrangement of the vertices and how they form loops of quadrilateral polygons is an important concept to understand. Arranging them well determines how well the model can flex. The arrangement of vertices and faces is referred to as the model’s topology.

Mesh Modeling Topology
Mesh Modeling Topology – By: Codewarrior.

Codewarrior Congrejo has a couple of good tutorials in the SL Forum. I think both are too good to just be buried in the forum. They will get little love from Bing & Google. Quickly they will scroll out of sight on the forum. So, I’m putting links here on my blog.

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New Penny Patton Shapes Released

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I like a lot of the work that Penny does with getting regions and avatars scaled to realistic proportions. So, when I saw that she had released new shapes I wanted to check them out. She has a blog article about them here: More Vitruvian Shapes!

The picture is one she made to show the difference between the Linden Made Shapes and the to-scale-shapes she makes and recommends.

Free Second Life Shapes
New Vitruvian Shapes by Penny Patton

You can find Penny’s Market Place here. The Vitruvian Shapes discussed are here. And the cost is: L$0, which you can’t beat. 

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