We have found some serious issues with precision regarding rigged meshes. For example rigged attachments may get attached slightly away from their expected location on the character.
This issue seems to appear only if you create attachments for your SL Avatar. As long as you work with full characters and as long as the charater attachments use the same armature as the main character, these precision issues are either neglectable or do not show up at all.
Our current experiments point to some scaling issues with the Blender Collada exporter. We still need to find the cause of the problems. We will release a fix as soon as we got it. Sorry, there is no time estimate available for when the problem will be solved. Please be prepared for a few weeks.
Note: The roll out of the blender 2.63 support is not affected. So you will get Avastar for Blender 2.63 within the next few days.
apologize
Gaia
I think I’m experiencing this issue now that I’m attempting to export a mesh i’ve been working on for weeks. Sadly what you call a ‘precision issue’ is far more serious, the avatar produced by Avastar is incorrectly scaled. Thus the mesh doesn’t align with the skeleton joints in-world the same way they appear in Avastar.
I’m now faced with the prospect of redesigning my mesh to a more accurate armature and needless to say I’m not too happy about that.
Don’t get frustrated, the precision issues have been solved as far as we can tell. The next release will make precise exports. I think we will be able to publish it next week.
Regarding your particular issue:
And if your issue is not solved with the update, then please send us your .blend file so we can see what is going wrong in Avastar.
Thanks for the information. I do use a customized body shape which I import from an XML using Avastar’s import feature. This creates an armature with non-standard bone lengths apparently. Out of all of your suggestions, the second, importing with joint offsets, did work, however, this solution is unaccpetable as people could be wearing the jacket with other mesh items, and making such joint offsets affects all worn mesh.
But this did give me an idea which seems to have been successful. I added a new Default Avastar rig. I then simply scaled (while in object mode) this default armature to match the modified armature that Avastar had created from the XML import. Parenting my mesh to this new armature, I could then import into SL with joint offsets included, but the included joints being the defaults. This achieved a correct fit without *visually* changing the joints in SL.
I hope the coming patch can make this unnecessary, but for now maybe this info can help someone.
Maybe not overriding the 1.5x collada export built into 2.5 and higher may fix this issue?
Just saying, since blender Dumped 1.4 because it was not working reliably.
Since Blender 2.62 the Collada exporter works and creates correct collada-1.4.1 data. For Avastar we need to take care of some special cases, which have nothing to do with the Collada export itself.
These issues are mostly due to some very nasty preassumptions made by the SL Importer. These issues do not occur with the “easy approach” as used in avatar.blend however the Avastar rig is a bit more complex 🙂
Good to hear ,thanks for the response, Adobe wouldn’t treat their customers this way they would ignore them completely 🙂
Any news on a fix to this problem? I bought your add on maybe 4 days ago and have been banging my head on the wall thinking I was doing something wrong.This describes my exact issue.Sadly weighting attachments to specific shapes was the only reason I bought this prog
We have a fix, but there are still some questions open, so we can not yet publish it. I guess that we will be able to publish an update by end of this month.