Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix.org is making a new video tutorial on weight painting for Second Life™. A new post is up on her blog asking for input. See: Weighting with Blender.
AvaStar is not required. Plain Blender (2.70+) can be used for the tutorial.
One handy thing is the free ‘blend’ file with example clothes. There is also a free OBJ file with the same models. The models are licensed via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 with accommodation for the current Linden Lab TOS. The models are not yet weighted, that is for a class activity.
On Sunday Machinimatrix announced the release of AvaStar 1.1 Beta. Gaia Clary is saying there will be no more test releases as the last one is not drawing any big reports. This suggests AvaStar is near completion for the Fitted Mesh addition.
The announcement is here: Avastar-1.1 Beta is Out. The download is via your personal link for AvaStar.
I am guessing that with the exception of minor changes this beta will be the final release.
Gaia Clary has posted that someone is selling a ripped off of AvaStar in the SL Market Place for L$8,000. The rip-off is an old version of AvaStar. The rip-off is here (so you know which one NOT to buy).
The real AvaStar is available at: http://blog.machinimatrix.org . AvaStar sells for US$27 or about L$6,750.
Gaia filed a DMCA June 5th. As of this morning the rip-off remains on the Market Place.
Eleanora Newell announced today that Machinimatric.org has new information up for AvaStar users. There is a new START HERE page for those making mesh clothes.
See: Avastar – Start Here. This is a handy page to mark. It has links to the important information about AvaStar, which is now on version: 1.1-alpha 34. It has the following fixes and additions:
We are now on an Alpha version of AvaStar. Gaia has cleaned up the download page. The featured download is currently version: avastar-1-1-alpha_Blender_2-70.
But, there are now new test versions. The latest being: avastar-1.1-alpha-23_blender-2-70.
The change log as been updated too. It is now named: changelog-1-1-alpha-23.txt. How the logs are used may have changed. We will see with time. For now the changes in alpha-23 are:
2014-05-19 18:41:16 +0100 Avoid blender crash when removing shape sliders while in edit mode
2014-05-19 10:39:00 +0100 Added option to enable adaptive slider attachment and iteration count
2014-05-18 23:31:46 +0100 Fix: for slider attachments for non default shapes
2014-05-17 18:26:27 +0100 avoid exception in Armature Info Poll when no active Object selected
2014-05-16 07:16:30 +0100 Added checkmarks to the Freeze operator ‘Join Parts’ and ‘Remove Doubles’
2014-05-12 15:47:40 +0100 Added Armature Info panel to show number of animated Bones
2014-05-12 15:44:39 +0100 Added generic message display operator to be used in various locations
2014-05-12 15:40:21 +0100 Improved error message for when too many bones are animated
OK everyone is posting about these. If you haven’t already heard, you have to be hiding. They are far better than the Ruth and Roth avatars from earlier times.
They are interesting and noobies will look much better. However, noobies will still act like noobies . They won’t be all that hard to recognize.
However, Saturday when I was trying to play with the new avatars the SL system was acting up. The Choose an Avatar panel did not want to load. I kept getting an empty panel. I left the panel open and relogged, that got it working, or it may be just the relog did it. Or my region may have been having difficulties.
Once the panel was loaded then some avatars would not load. I would get what looked like an LOD4 version 0f the avatar only, very bizarre looking up close but ok from a distance. Switch to another one and later retry the one with loading problems, seemed to work.
When you wear one of these avatars a folder is created in the Clothing folder of your inventory. The ‘Lucy’ avatar is of course in the Lucy folder.
These avatars completely replace, well are worn over, your system avatar and a full body alpha mask hides the system avatar. They are complete mesh bodies and clothes. I am not sure why they made them No-Mod.
