Dear customers, Avastar lovers (and haters), not yet purchasers, longtime fans, sparrows..
It may be too early to ask you about your experience with the new Avastar-2 release, but Avastar in general has been around for 5 years and I believe it’s time to collect some user voices.
We ask you today:
- What do you like (or dislike) most about Avastar?
- Has it helped you, or let you down?
- Do you use the tool a lot or not so much?
- …
We’re looking to get some base opinions about what we do here.
Whatever comes to mind about our product, just let us know here on this page.
Thank you for any contribution, especially when you point us to areas where we still need to improve!
Sincerely,
Gaia
from the Avastar team
What do you like (or dislike) most about Avastar? – i love that it is made especially for Second Life. I love that it uses the SL avatar and that i can rig and animate. i have really appreciated the help that I can get in SL
Has it helped you, or let you down? – it is the biggest help I have ever found for learning Blender and applying it to Second life
Do you use the tool a lot or not so much? – i don’t use it very much lately. Blender has proven to be really hard for me to master and I just leave it sit for long periods
It has pretty much every suite needed to make any avatar imaginable for SL. The shape sliders are a funky thing .
If you want to do do any decent clothing the weight copy is a must function, not to mention anim exporter which is another must for animations. The .bvh behaves funky in most cases I ever tried.
I personally think Avastar actually makes stuff too easy for beginners, they then create oversampled atrocities in marvellous creator.
It has everything for weighting clothes and shoes and making animations for SL in one place. Nothing that can’t be done in Blender, but it simplifies my workflow so much to have everything just a click or two away. Like Blender, it suffers a bit from too many features and too much customisation so can be complicated to get the hang of. I’d rather have that and a steepish learning curve than not enough features though!
The only criticisms I have is that it’s not always up to date with the latest version of Blender and some mesh dev kits only work with older versions of Avastar, so swapping between versions is sometimes required. That’s not the fault of Avastar though! The hand/arm IK is a bit weird too, but you don’t have to use it.
5 Avastars for Avastar!
Blender for sure is an awesome software. But. It’s an open source software that kind of “can do way too much” . It’s not a (right out of the box working) tool like Photoshop. Imagine you have a tool to build your own Photoshop. It is very confusing for me and a lot of other designers. Avastar makes Blender an optimized tool to work for our Second Life needs. Its perfect to me for importing full perm fashion, fine tuning the fitting, weight painting / rigging it and have a clean export for the Second life needs. It cost less than a taxi to the airport but it’s priceless for me and so is the support. Lots of help all around via ticket or also in the Avastar group. And believe me. No support, no success. Avastar is worth more than 50 USD a month to me. I am happy they are not Adobe and charge for all that. I am sure, without Avastar i would have shot myself already. 😀
Sometimes I look at the SL forums. People ask if Blender and/or avastar are worthwhile for SL creation purposes. To me its surprising that folk start to actually discuss this. Both are (by very far) the best/ easiest and cheapest way to do everything. Add in the free Gimp program for your image manipulations (its like free photoshop, like blender is free Maya or whatever).
Now you only have to add in your own time to learn the things you need specific to your project. Once you are comfortable with mesh creation & animation, do the same with scripts .. just patiently look and learn .. you will gradually discover a feeling of wonderment … its all very addictive actually!
But do start with the Blender/ avastar combo^^ to get straight onto an effective and popular path ^^