Avastar: -12- Custom Shape Sliders

Transcript

Hello and welcome.
This is a quick tip for enabling custom-shape sliders.
Please note that this feature of Avastar is still a bit rough,
and not yet working as fluently as we want,
I show you how it works with Avastar 625.

Here you see a default Avastar character with some textures applied.
And this is a static mesh shirt.

In the first step we will rig the shirt.
Open the tool shelf and navigate to the Custom mesh panel,
and select the shirt and the Armature.

Now we can easily copy the weights
from the Avastar character to the T-Shirt
by using the Weight Copy tool.
Keep the default settings and click on: Copy weights.

Now locate the rigging panel,
and while keeping the Mesh and the Avastar Armature selected,
click on: parent to Armature.

Your mesh is now rigged and weighted.
You can check that by going to pose mode and pose the model,
and there you see that the Shirt will follow the Pose.

Now select the Avastar armature,
go to the Object Properties.
If it is not yet visible, then load the Shape user interface.
Now locate the Torso-sliders and change the Torso-length.
You see that while moving the slider, only the Avastar gets influenced.
But the mesh keeps its shape.

Now we will see how we can change that.
Lets put the Torso Length slider back to its original value,
Now select the mesh,
Go to the Object Data properties,
and locate the Shape keys section.

Here add a new Shape key.
This key is automatically named: Basis.
The Basis key keeps the vertex locations of the current mesh.
Now add a second shape key.
name that shape key: bone morph,
and set its influence to the maximum value, 1.0

Now switch back to the Object-properties section of the Avastar armature.
Here i want to point you to a nasty issue.
Right now everything looks as expected,
since we have not changed the slider settings.
But when you now click on the refresh-shape button,
then you see the mesh will be slightly deformed.
There is a technical cause for this deformation,
but I must admit that i still do not understand what exactly happens here.
I hope that we will be able to get this issue corrected soon.

So lets get back to the Torso-length slider.
Indeed the mesh now stretches and shrinks with the slider-changes.
But you see that it does only react on bone-length changes.
And this is exactly the same behaviour like we can see in Second Life.
So, if you change a shape-slider that does not change the bone length,
it will only influence the Avastar-shape but not the custom mesh.

We did this on purpose,
because now you can simulate in blender how the Second-Life shape-sliders
will affect your meshes.

Now lets turn back to the shape keys of our custom mesh.
This shape key has a value slider as well.
So, if you want to revert your mesh to its initial shape,
then all you need to do is to set the bone-morph shape-key back to 0.0.
Or, if you prefer to do so, you even can delete the Bone-morph shape key.
As soon as you do that, the mesh snaps back into its original shape.

Now take your time to explore the tool and have fun with it.
And thanks for watching.