Due to a comment in the SL Forum i created this post to clarify a few things around Avastar-1.1 and fitted mesh.

About Avastar-1.1

Many people think that Avastar 1.1 is already finished and polished for usage with fitted mesh. So there is a tendency to use the most recently added test versions, mainly because they want to use the new features we provide for fitted mesh.  However, Avastar-1.1 is not yet released, it is not yet well documented, and it may still contain issues (see below). We provide a preliminary very brief and intermediate documentation here:

https://www.avalab.org/2013/12/22/avastar-1-1-coming-soon/

About Testversions

The reason why we provide Avastar test versions is to give users the possibility to play with the new features. So users benefit from getting access to the most recent development, while we benefit from getting feedback (before release). And this also explains why we often release new test versions.

  • Actually we have seen this problem before and so i created a post about which Avastar to use for what:https://www.avalab.org/2014/03/05/which-avastar-to-use/
  • Regarding the change logs you are right. However since a few days i update them again when i upload a new version.
  • Regarding the documentation: It should be correct for Avastar-1.0

About the Videos

Many videos are old and outdated. Especially the video about Tinies and Giants is totally outdated. Actually it is now possible to make this much easier especially because LindenLab has added the “Hover slider” to the Shape editor after this video was produced. Actually this video is on my list for a complete rework (among many others as well).

About issues with official fitted Mesh blend file

Here i see a very common mistake that people think this issue is related to Avastar, but it is not! The problem has been identified by many people who do not use Avastar. Once this issue caught my attention, we started investigating on this. I asked many people about this and everybody told me the same: It does not work regardless of the viewer they used.

Eventually we found the cause of this problem and this has lead to a change in Blender 2.70 that adds a workaround for a missing feature that exists in Maya and Max, but not in Blender. So i have been told that this issue existed on any viewer and the blender workaround worked as designed. As far as i know Linden Lab has not yet updated their zip file to provide the modified blend file that works with Blender 2.70 You can get a working version from here:

https://www.avalab.org/fitted_mesh_survival_kit/

About customer care

We are open for any feedback positive as negative. I personally can not answer every complaint because i mainly try to fix issues. I am not aware of having dropped any complains from anywhere. I never do that. I answer as much as i can. However, In YouTube i can not preserve comments on videos after i updated them. So sometimes complaints get removed actually because i removed an outdated video.

About current development:

A few weeks ago we found an issue with the presentation part of Avastar, that creates a wrong display when you try to use the Avastar slider system on your own custom meshes. And please note, this is only on the visualization part of Avastar and it only is wrong for fitted mesh. The visualization of classic weighted meshes is almost precise except 2 locations around the mouth and the left foot. There is currently no other serious issue (of which i know) with the software.

Our aim is to let the Avastar character in Blender behave as close as possible to how the SL Avatar behaves in SL. That is i am testing for the exact same behavior on the level of vertex locations, to provide a consistent solution that works for any given shape, for fitted mesh as well as for classic weighting, for female and for male, and also for your non human meshes.

We will release Avastar-1.1 only after we have reached a visual compatibility for all situations. Right now the fitted mesh visualization in Blender works “almost” good for female, not so good for male, and certainly not good enough for me. And i am picky about this. Therefore i try to understand what causes the visualization issue and how i can fix it.