My Primstar-2 / Avastar refuses to install in my Blender

Download is corrupt

We expect that the addon is contained in a .zip file. Sometimes this zip file is not downloaded completely for unknown reasons.

For MAC Users: We often get reported that the Download automatically unzips the downloaded file. This must be avoided!

Sometimes your download gets corrupted by an Anti Virus program.

Fixes:

• Ensure that the downloaded file is a readable zip file. Try to read the content of the zip file. If your zip-reader can read the file, then all is well.
• If your Browser tries to unzip the download, then try:

  “right mouse click -> save as…”

• You always can temporarily disable your anti virus program, download the file and finally let the download be checked by your antivirus program. How this is done is dependent on the anti virus software.

Wrong File permissions

Wrong file permissions seem to be the most frequent problem when an installation does not work as expected.

You may or may not get warnings from Blender when this problem occurs. In most cases it looks like you have successfully installed the AddOn but actually you see no changes in Blender at all.

 Fixes:

• Ensure that your current user is able to write into the Application Data folders of Blender.
• For Windows: If you have installed Blender as Administrator, then also try to install AddOns as Administrator. This helps in most cases.
• For Linux: One user has reported that the installation did actually add the AddOn to the Application Data folder, but the file permissions where wrong after installation. This information has not been verified!

User name with special characters

Sometimes (especially on Windows?) Blender fails to install an addon when the username contains non ASCII characters like Umlauts for example. Also usernames with spaces are known to make trouble.

Typically the Addon “seems” to be installed, but either you do not find it in the AddOn list afterwards, or you find it but you can not enable it.

Fixes:

• Upgrade to a newer Blender release if you encounter this problem. Please report a bug to Blender if the newest released version of Blender does not work for you.
• The only reliable workaround we know is to change the user name to contain only ASCII characters.

Path to zip file with special characters

this is actually a variation of the previous problem. Some versions of Blender have severe issues with non ASCII characters in Path names.

Fixes:

• move your zip file to a folder with an “easy” path, like:
  • c:\downloads
  • /tmp/downloads

Note: After installing the addon you can safely remove the zip file again. But we recommend that you keep the file as backup somewhere on your disk or burn it to CDROM to be sure you keep your software “forever”.

Not an official Blender release

Although we try our best, we can not guarantee that our addons work on every Blender build.

• So if you  brave hearted and do your own builds,
• or you are fan of GraphicAll and get your Blender from there,
• or your operating system comes with a special Blender version, then you might run into troubles.

Fixes:

• Make sure that you get an official Blender release from blender.org
• Make sure that the addon version is released for your Blender version

Hint:the file name of the addon zip file contains the important information for you. For example:

avastar-1-dev-432_blender-2-59.zip

• “avastar” is the product name
• “1″ is the major product version
• “dev” is the development version. other values are “beta” and “release”
• “432″ is the update number (revision number”
• “blender-2-59″ tells which Blender version you must have at least.

Warning message during installation

When you install Avastar/Primstar-2 then you will currently see a warning message. You can ignore this message.

Fixes:

• No fix needed. We only inform you that we are not yet ready with our implementation. You have a prerelease. You will get informed when te release is ready. Then you can update to the release and the warning is gone.

Note: Once you have purchased Avastar-1 / Primstar-2 then you will get all subsequent maintenance releases for the major product version for free.