Avatar editing and animation for SecondLife and OpenSim
Avastar is a Blender Addon for Second Life content creators. Avastar is designed as tool for high quality animations and easy mesh character development. Avastar integrates seamless into the Blender framework. We support download of SL shapes as well as upload of mesh characters. We provide .bvh as well as .anim format. We added IK/FK controls to the standard SL Rig and we support attachment point animation
Non Customers:
Get your personal copy from the Jass-Shop in Second Life, or via Paypal (see left side of this page)
Fully rigged avatar with switchable IK/FK controls. Makes high quality animations a breeze.
Full support of the Second Life Skeleton. All 26 Bones can be animated separately. Attachment bone animation is supported as well.
FK Controlls for Head, Arms, Torso and legs
IK Controls for, Arms, Ellbows, Legs and Knees
And more …
Seamless IK/FK Blending
Rotation/Constraint controls
Breath Control
Create synchronized multiple avatar animations
Use Blenders rich animation features such as the graph editor, constraints and the NLA editor.
Character Creation
Import your own Second Life Shape (or Open Sim Shape) into Blender and make accurate animations that take into account the size and shape of your avatar.
Gender selector for male/female characters.
Do all your Shape editing within Blender: Edit your shape in Blender using the same control sliders as in SL.
Your Character will be automatically weighted and rigged.
The rig can be reused for your own mesh characters.
A Weight Copy function is integrated
Hand Morphs supported
Export Formats
bvh: Export animations for the whole avatar, or only particular bones to BVH format compatible with SL.
anim: Export to SL’s native animation format. This has more controls and features than exporting through BVH.
Texturing support
SL Standard UV maps for all meshes:
Eyes
Head & Eyebrows
Upper Body
Lower Body
Skirt
Use Blenders tools such as projection painting to create texture based skins and clothes.
Rigging can be customised or replaced entirely without affecting the animation export.
The mesh can be replaced, to create and animate custom mesh avatars
Workaround: export with armature, then import with weights & joints. We are working on a better solution (which is currently tested and will probably be available with the next Avastar update)
Gaia I am having the exact same problem as Marcy. I follow your tutorial exactly for rigging the mesh skirt. WHen I test the movement in Avastar it looks great. When I upload to the beta grid it looks like half or more of it is twisted 90 degrees from where it should be.
I have a suspicion of what is causing it and have tried a couple of workarounds but no luck fixing it so far.
Suspicion: Since I built the skirt around the “Standard Size” Avatar the skirt began -90 degrees rotated from the orientation of the avastar. I suspect this is the root of the problem.
Tries at solution:
Rotated the avastar to match the skirt’s orientation. Result was the same 90 degree twisting of the rig.
Rotated the skirt to match the avastar. Result was the same 90 Degree twisting of the rig.
At this point I am out of ideas. Though I did discover that my skirt is stupidly high poly and needs redone. The thing is everything I take in even simple stuff doing this twisted 90 degrees corkscrew thing.
I do use the Export SL collada button when working with the avastar.
When I apply rotation before exporting it. Either I get the 90 degree twist or it exports without any rigging whatsoever. I am not completely sure why I get one or the other.
I rotate then hit ctrl + A and pick the rotation and scale option to apply the rotation.
ok I tried again and it seems like APPLYING the rotation as I said above actually messes it up. If I simply rotate it without doing the ctrl + a and then rotation and scale then do the export. The 90 degree distortion on upload goes away.
one thing is critical though that rotation has to be the LAST thing you do before export. Otherwise you get all kinds of wierdness.
what you report sounds like Avastar is behaving totally wrong. But i can not understand what you are really doing. Is it possible that you can provide some screen shots or the blend file in the state where an export would fail ?
then i can take a look at it and see what goes wrong or how Avastar can be optimized to run smoother ?
Hello! im not-so-new in blender and i’ve succesful created a mesh model of hair.
but now i’ve concern trying to export collada material/texture into my object.
when i push onto “Sl Export” the console returns some error like: Unable to Copy File! Copy from “…” to “…”
etc.
it happen with blender 2.61 – 2.62 only when i apply material to my object. thanks in advance for the help
Hi, I have the latest Avastar and the latest Blender version 2.62. When I rig my mesh and export it to SL the way you explain in your tutorial it comes in all twisted and turned 90 degrees the wrong way. Some of the vertices are connected to the right points on the armature but the rest is turned which breaks the mesh apart besides turning the wrong way. Can you help me with what I am doing wrong?
Gaia,
I’m a Blender newbie and I’ve been using Avastar now for about 3 weeks trying to make SL animations. I think it has the most potential of any system I’ve experimented with so far. Keep up the good work.
I’d like to make a suggestion for a tutorial. There seem to be 3 modes of using IK and FK to make a pose. I’m having some difficulty with how they work together and how you may, or may not, move from one mode to another.
For example, if I use the IK bones, I seem to be relegated to using only that. If I set up a pose using the IK bones and then switch back to FK or use the Auto IK, the pose reverts back to the FK pose and does not keep what I set up in IK. I’m sure I’m missing something about how all these modes can work together. I tutorial about this would be much appreciated.
Hi Monica,
IK and FK can be blended together snapping IK targets on top of FK bones, then animating the influence values. Animation can get massively dense when it comes to blend the 2 systems together. Consider that, in a professional workflow, the media is 10 seconds of animation per week of work, including environmental and objects animation. If we reduce this to only character animation, media gets up to 15 seconds per week. The problem between IK and FK you have been experiencing so far, was related to the lack of targetless IK on the avatar limbs, which Magus graciously added in the latest release (currently 418) after some (much) “ranting” from me ^^ (thanks Magus for your patience!). Hence, now you can just dump AutoIK. Yet, animation infos are not much out there, as you certainly have noticed. I know of a course on Avastar animation at Builder’s Brewery though, try to take a look there.
Hi – I just got Avastar 1 yesterday and I’m loving it already. I do have a problem, though. For some reason, when I apply the skin textures, and bring the avatar back into world, the head and chest meshes are not blending well [even though they match fine in world on the normal avatar. Am I missing a setting or a tutorial?
i believe that is just a problem of the normals. I think that the default Avatar does some extra tricks on the seams to get the blending done right.
You can however do this trick:
1.) do your weighting and all you need to make your character move
2.) now freeze all 3 meshes (create copy) that makes copies of the character unparented
3.) Assign 3 different materials to the different parts
4.) join the parts
5.) remove duplicates
6.) export your joined mesh to Second Life
7.) Apply the textures to the 3 different texture faces.
it may be well possible that you end up with a nice blending. However i am not sure if it works. But i think so.
greetings, thank you first of all for the nice free to watch tutorials you have here for us. i would like to ask something about avastar. my only experience in creating models is 3ds max but i am not that skilled and i lack in plugins which i can see there are plenty for blender. so, if i choose avastar will i be able to rigg models like clothes for SL without getting too much involved into blender, lets say: open blender, import, a few clicks, export, done? hehe, thanks again!
Gaia,
Could you please check the comments I made under the First Steps tutorial. I just can’t get this to export a simple animation without errors getting reported. I’d print the log of errors but can’t copy and paste from the error screen and I don’t know where the log file would be, if any exists.
I am curious if when time it found could there be a tutorial made on how to make Alpha maps for meshes like shirts. So that when i upload my clothes i cant hide the character skin under it
I have problems with installing Avastar. I downloaded Blender 2.6 and followed all steps. But when I chosen avastar-1-dev-333.zip to install it to add-ons the programm stard to “think”, went unactive and never stoped. I waited for a long time and it’s just the same. I clicked at some place of the screen and it gave me an error an closed the Blender. Now I can’t open Blender again, it closes right in the begining. I tried to do it with Blender 2.59 and it is the same. I’m working with Windows 7. Please, help me.
Avastar can output to .anim format, which supports joint positions. But does Avastar support joint positions? In other words, does it support deformations? Can I create an animation that sets bone positions to new locations, and then a second animation to snap them back to their proper places?
I have been building Transformers in Second Life for quite some time now but I have never finished any of them due to constantly butting up against limitations in the way things are implemented. Mesh potentially would allow me to circumvent many of these limitations via joint offsets and a static height offset, but I would still require deformations to ‘transform’ the avatar into a vehicle shape. I could use alpha objects but I find that to be clunky and you cannot ‘animate’ the transformation gracefully using alpha’d objects. And I know of no way to change a mesh via script, thus no way of using joint offsets to perform the way deformations would.
Animation the attachment points is a fantastic work-around to a few key issues and I will likely be using this to create a few ‘pseudo-bones’, such as moving plates or wheels in and out of place. But I would still need deformations to move the core skeleton. For instance, the current design I am working on requires the shoulders to push forward in front of the chest and snap together, creating the facade of the front of a motorcycle. They then move back to the shoulders when in humanoid-mode. Thus, it is not just a matter of rotations; the joint positions must be set as well.
Does Avastar support .anim files with set joint positions? Thanks for the help!
Animating the bone or attachment point locations is currently disabled. As you point out, this is something that can easily be done through the anim format, but in testing we were getting odd results and it wasn’t as accurate as we wanted. Also we weren’t sure how the animation offsets would play with mesh offsets. Now we have a better handle on the latter we’ll look at animating the bone offsets again.
The Transformers is a nice example of using animation offsets. Most of the previous uses of deformation hacks can now be done cleanly with mesh, but this doesn’t allow a dynamic deformation for something like a Transformer.
Avastar is made for Blender 2.59 and newer vesions only. Since all Jass-Products are based on Blender-2.49b, Avastar will not work with Jass. However you can install Blender-2.59 or newer parallel to Jass and install Avastar there. There is no problem with doing that.
All editing functionality for Prims and Sculpties will be available with Primstar-2 when it is fully implemented. This will enable you to create/edit your prim/sculpt mesh attachments and reimport the modifications to Second Life.
Primstar-2 and Avastar are meant as complimentary products. They do not rely on each other, but they can be used together without any problems.
If you are using Mesh attachments, you can use Avastar as it is. However you will need to import your meshes as .obj (collada import is currently broken in blender) or if you use blender to create your meshes, just open the Blend file, then “SHIFT add Avastar” and go ahead with your edits.
I’m having a small issue with the avatar wig. When I load a new avastar model the bone for the eyes (presumably, the glasses-looking thing in Object View) is offest very far from the head itself. Here is a photo of the issue for clarity: Avastar Rig
http://s14.postimage.org/ogck3cz0x/arm.jpg
Workaround: export with armature, then import with weights & joints. We are working on a better solution (which is currently tested and will probably be available with the next Avastar update)
Gaia I am having the exact same problem as Marcy. I follow your tutorial exactly for rigging the mesh skirt. WHen I test the movement in Avastar it looks great. When I upload to the beta grid it looks like half or more of it is twisted 90 degrees from where it should be.
I have a suspicion of what is causing it and have tried a couple of workarounds but no luck fixing it so far.
Suspicion: Since I built the skirt around the “Standard Size” Avatar the skirt began -90 degrees rotated from the orientation of the avastar. I suspect this is the root of the problem.
Tries at solution:
Rotated the avastar to match the skirt’s orientation. Result was the same 90 degree twisting of the rig.
Rotated the skirt to match the avastar. Result was the same 90 Degree twisting of the rig.
At this point I am out of ideas. Though I did discover that my skirt is stupidly high poly and needs redone. The thing is everything I take in even simple stuff doing this twisted 90 degrees corkscrew thing.
Are you sure that you use the “Export SL Collada” button in the tool shelf when you export a mesh that was rigged to an Avastar character ?
Also please apply rotation to your mesh before exporting it (although i believe that the rotation is meanwhile applied automatically).
Yep I have done both.
I do use the Export SL collada button when working with the avastar.
When I apply rotation before exporting it. Either I get the 90 degree twist or it exports without any rigging whatsoever. I am not completely sure why I get one or the other.
I rotate then hit ctrl + A and pick the rotation and scale option to apply the rotation.
ok I tried again and it seems like APPLYING the rotation as I said above actually messes it up. If I simply rotate it without doing the ctrl + a and then rotation and scale then do the export. The 90 degree distortion on upload goes away.
one thing is critical though that rotation has to be the LAST thing you do before export. Otherwise you get all kinds of wierdness.
what you report sounds like Avastar is behaving totally wrong. But i can not understand what you are really doing. Is it possible that you can provide some screen shots or the blend file in the state where an export would fail ?
then i can take a look at it and see what goes wrong or how Avastar can be optimized to run smoother ?
thanks,
Gaia
email sent with step by step and screenshots
Hello! im not-so-new in blender and i’ve succesful created a mesh model of hair.
but now i’ve concern trying to export collada material/texture into my object.
when i push onto “Sl Export” the console returns some error like: Unable to Copy File! Copy from “…” to “…”
etc.
it happen with blender 2.61 – 2.62 only when i apply material to my object. thanks in advance for the help
Hi, I have the latest Avastar and the latest Blender version 2.62. When I rig my mesh and export it to SL the way you explain in your tutorial it comes in all twisted and turned 90 degrees the wrong way. Some of the vertices are connected to the right points on the armature but the rest is turned which breaks the mesh apart besides turning the wrong way. Can you help me with what I am doing wrong?
Hi.
Please send me your blend file for inspection to gaia.clary@machinimatrix.org or use http://pasteall.org/blend and send me the link to your uploaded blend file.
cheers,
Gaia
my mesh does the same its fine in blender but once i upload it half the mesh is twisted may i send you mine as well
Gaia,
I’m a Blender newbie and I’ve been using Avastar now for about 3 weeks trying to make SL animations. I think it has the most potential of any system I’ve experimented with so far. Keep up the good work.
I’d like to make a suggestion for a tutorial. There seem to be 3 modes of using IK and FK to make a pose. I’m having some difficulty with how they work together and how you may, or may not, move from one mode to another.
For example, if I use the IK bones, I seem to be relegated to using only that. If I set up a pose using the IK bones and then switch back to FK or use the Auto IK, the pose reverts back to the FK pose and does not keep what I set up in IK. I’m sure I’m missing something about how all these modes can work together. I tutorial about this would be much appreciated.
Hi Monica,
IK and FK can be blended together snapping IK targets on top of FK bones, then animating the influence values. Animation can get massively dense when it comes to blend the 2 systems together. Consider that, in a professional workflow, the media is 10 seconds of animation per week of work, including environmental and objects animation. If we reduce this to only character animation, media gets up to 15 seconds per week. The problem between IK and FK you have been experiencing so far, was related to the lack of targetless IK on the avatar limbs, which Magus graciously added in the latest release (currently 418) after some (much) “ranting” from me ^^ (thanks Magus for your patience!). Hence, now you can just dump AutoIK. Yet, animation infos are not much out there, as you certainly have noticed. I know of a course on Avastar animation at Builder’s Brewery though, try to take a look there.
Cheers
OptimoMaximo
Thanks for the ranting LOL. V 418 seems to work a lot more intuitively.
Hi – I just got Avastar 1 yesterday and I’m loving it already. I do have a problem, though. For some reason, when I apply the skin textures, and bring the avatar back into world, the head and chest meshes are not blending well [even though they match fine in world on the normal avatar. Am I missing a setting or a tutorial?
Thanks [using it with blender 2.61]
i believe that is just a problem of the normals. I think that the default Avatar does some extra tricks on the seams to get the blending done right.
You can however do this trick:
1.) do your weighting and all you need to make your character move
2.) now freeze all 3 meshes (create copy) that makes copies of the character unparented
3.) Assign 3 different materials to the different parts
4.) join the parts
5.) remove duplicates
6.) export your joined mesh to Second Life
7.) Apply the textures to the 3 different texture faces.
it may be well possible that you end up with a nice blending. However i am not sure if it works. But i think so.
Thanks! I’ll give that a whirl as soon as I have a chunk of time for it.
greetings, thank you first of all for the nice free to watch tutorials you have here for us. i would like to ask something about avastar. my only experience in creating models is 3ds max but i am not that skilled and i lack in plugins which i can see there are plenty for blender. so, if i choose avastar will i be able to rigg models like clothes for SL without getting too much involved into blender, lets say: open blender, import, a few clicks, export, done? hehe, thanks again!
Gaia,
Could you please check the comments I made under the First Steps tutorial. I just can’t get this to export a simple animation without errors getting reported. I’d print the log of errors but can’t copy and paste from the error screen and I don’t know where the log file would be, if any exists.
I am curious if when time it found could there be a tutorial made on how to make Alpha maps for meshes like shirts. So that when i upload my clothes i cant hide the character skin under it
Is there any information on how to adjust the joints to a set of bones I already setup? Or can I have avastar interact with them?
I have a tiny avatar I made I wish to try and animate with this but my joints are much smaller then the rig.
I have problems with installing Avastar. I downloaded Blender 2.6 and followed all steps. But when I chosen avastar-1-dev-333.zip to install it to add-ons the programm stard to “think”, went unactive and never stoped. I waited for a long time and it’s just the same. I clicked at some place of the screen and it gave me an error an closed the Blender. Now I can’t open Blender again, it closes right in the begining. I tried to do it with Blender 2.59 and it is the same. I’m working with Windows 7. Please, help me.
Avastar can output to .anim format, which supports joint positions. But does Avastar support joint positions? In other words, does it support deformations? Can I create an animation that sets bone positions to new locations, and then a second animation to snap them back to their proper places?
I have been building Transformers in Second Life for quite some time now but I have never finished any of them due to constantly butting up against limitations in the way things are implemented. Mesh potentially would allow me to circumvent many of these limitations via joint offsets and a static height offset, but I would still require deformations to ‘transform’ the avatar into a vehicle shape. I could use alpha objects but I find that to be clunky and you cannot ‘animate’ the transformation gracefully using alpha’d objects. And I know of no way to change a mesh via script, thus no way of using joint offsets to perform the way deformations would.
Animation the attachment points is a fantastic work-around to a few key issues and I will likely be using this to create a few ‘pseudo-bones’, such as moving plates or wheels in and out of place. But I would still need deformations to move the core skeleton. For instance, the current design I am working on requires the shoulders to push forward in front of the chest and snap together, creating the facade of the front of a motorcycle. They then move back to the shoulders when in humanoid-mode. Thus, it is not just a matter of rotations; the joint positions must be set as well.
Does Avastar support .anim files with set joint positions? Thanks for the help!
Hi Vilkacis,
Animating the bone or attachment point locations is currently disabled. As you point out, this is something that can easily be done through the anim format, but in testing we were getting odd results and it wasn’t as accurate as we wanted. Also we weren’t sure how the animation offsets would play with mesh offsets. Now we have a better handle on the latter we’ll look at animating the bone offsets again.
The Transformers is a nice example of using animation offsets. Most of the previous uses of deformation hacks can now be done cleanly with mesh, but this doesn’t allow a dynamic deformation for something like a Transformer.
Hello. Thank you very much for this great tool!!! I would love to use it but I have Jass-magic. Will it work with Jass-magic???
Hi, Kusha;
Avastar is made for Blender 2.59 and newer vesions only. Since all Jass-Products are based on Blender-2.49b, Avastar will not work with Jass. However you can install Blender-2.59 or newer parallel to Jass and install Avastar there. There is no problem with doing that.
Are there any plans to offer a way to edit prim/sculpt attachments on avatars through Avastar?
All editing functionality for Prims and Sculpties will be available with Primstar-2 when it is fully implemented. This will enable you to create/edit your prim/sculpt mesh attachments and reimport the modifications to Second Life.
Primstar-2 and Avastar are meant as complimentary products. They do not rely on each other, but they can be used together without any problems.
If you are using Mesh attachments, you can use Avastar as it is. However you will need to import your meshes as .obj (collada import is currently broken in blender) or if you use blender to create your meshes, just open the Blend file, then “SHIFT add Avastar” and go ahead with your edits.
Do you plan on making a tutorial video soon so people can see it in action?
yes, its in preparation.
Hello!
I’m having a small issue with the avatar wig. When I load a new avastar model the bone for the eyes (presumably, the glasses-looking thing in Object View) is offest very far from the head itself. Here is a photo of the issue for clarity: Avastar Rig
I’m using Blender 2.61 32bit on a Win7 machine.
Thank you!
Merry
This is a known issue. We are already taking care of it. However thank you for the hint!
Cheers,
Gaia
I am on Christmas vacation, but this will be my gift t to myself as soon as I get home. I wish I could do Blender on my iPad. thank you!
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