This video is about creating a tiny avatar. You can use the following procedure to make very small avatars or giants. Please note: You can do it exactly in the same way by using the avatar workbench. You find a related video on the machinimatrix blog.
So, the key to tiny avatars is: scaling down the armature in object mode. But we have to take care about one small detail here. Lets try to scale the armature. As you can see, the scaling of the Armature does not follow exactly the object scaling. This is due to bone constraints, in the head the neck and the chest. Here is a way how to fix this behaviour.
Enter pose mode.
Select the head bone.
Then go to the properties window and enter the bone constraints tab.
In the constraints section, disable the Limit-distance constraint by clicking on the eye icon.
Do this also for the neck and for the chest, and now you can scale the armature down to the desired size.
In the final step get back to pose mode, and again visit the three bones, head neck and the chest. For each bone press the reset distance button, and then re-enable the Limit Distance constraint. Now your Auva-star can be used for animation exactly as before.
We still need to apply the scale to all mesh parts and to the rig itself. Otherwise your downsizing will show no effect after upload to Second life. By now we have effectively changed the skeleton, and we have introduced joints offsets. Therefore we must export the armature along with the object. For this purpose we have added a Collada exporter to Auva-star, because blender’s official collada exporter currently does not create rigged meshes correctly.
Now lets turn to the Second Life mesh importer. In the importer window you can specify up to 4 levels of detail for your mesh, and By default these levels of detail will be auto generated. Lets keep with the defaults for now.
On the right side you can inspect your object in detail. You can enable the preview of skin weights and joints here. But keep in mind that the settings here have no influence on the upload itself. So, enabling weights and joints here is only good for inspection, but will not upload this data.
The upload of this data can be enabled in the upload options tab. Here we have to include skin weights and include joint positions. And only now the importer will upload what we expect, so lets calculate weights&fees. And finally we can upload the mesh.
Before i wear the tiny mesh, let me first wear my special invisibility outfit. This outfit will hide my default avatar mesh. oups, i have become a bit smaller by now. Lets get a bit closer. We see that actually my tiny is standing well above ground. Let us fix this now.
First i measure how much above ground my tiny hovers. I simply create a prim cube and adjust its height to fit my hover height.
I copy the resulting height of the cube into the cut buffer,
then i reupload the tiny mesh.
In the upload options i locate the z-offset entry, paste the hover height here, and make it negative.
I upload again, wear the new mesh, and now my tiny is standing on ground. thank you for watching.
When I try to make separate eyes from the rest of the mesh, they scale properly, but are still rigged in the position of where the eyes really would be instead of where they should be in relation to the body mesh – what am I doing wrong?
I make my tiny av. All goes well. I assign textures, skins in Blender and they show. I export to Collada, load model in SL and have a white tiny av, no skin textures?
When I try to make separate eyes from the rest of the mesh, they scale properly, but are still rigged in the position of where the eyes really would be instead of where they should be in relation to the body mesh – what am I doing wrong?
Hi:
I make my tiny av. All goes well. I assign textures, skins in Blender and they show. I export to Collada, load model in SL and have a white tiny av, no skin textures?
What am I missing?
Thanks
Dee
Figured it out – thanks