Tinies and Giants

About this Document...

Content:

Create a Tinie or Giant

Import the Mesh to your online world.

 The Video:

  • Create a Character.
  • Scale the Armature
  • Use the Collada Exporter
  • Use the SL Importer for Upload

What does Avastar provide?

Avastar basically supports the creation of animatable Models (Avatars&attachments) and the creation of animations. Therefore the tool adds various functions and user interface elements to Blender.

The full functionality of Avastar can be a bit overwhelming on first sight. You should be prepared to spend some time and patience to get it all working nicely for your projects.

What does this Document provide?

Creating Tinies and Giants with Avastar is really easy. Actually it all boils down to scaling the Avatar in Object mode and knowing about how to handle the scaling during export…

This is only the Transcript of the above Video. A More detailed Reference Guide is planned.

We expect that you have basic knowledge about Blender.

Tines and Giants with Fitted mesh

Please read our documentation about Fitted mesh. There you also find a hint about how to work with Joint Positions.For the expert: Here is a shortcut: How it works with joint positions…

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Avastar’s support for tiny and giant avatars.

Well,
the key to giants and tinies is: scaling the armature in object mode.
So, select the Armature,
and then scale it up or down to your likes.

After you have scaled your character to the desired size
you can immediately export your character to Collada.
You only need to open the Avastar Collada Export panel
and there
select the mesh parts which you want to export.

However, you must be aware of a caveat here.
Take a look at the advanced Collada tab.
There you find the option: Apply Armature Scale.

When you want to get a correct export,
then it is sufficient to enable this option.
Or you can take the more complicated way
and apply scale to the armature and all its rigged mesh objects.
However, it is much more convenient and less error prone to use the export-option.

So, if you do not take care of this in either way,
then your scaled character will not get resized within Second Life.

But this is not the end of the story.
We also need to do one more thing in the Second Life mesh importer.

After we have loaded the mesh
we can check its look in the preview window.
We also can enable the preview of the skin weights and joints here.
But keep in mind that enabling joints and weights in the previewer
is only good for inspection, but this alone will not upload the data.

Therefore?^ we also have to open the upload options tab.
Here we have to include skin weights and joint positions.
And only now the importer will upload what we expect.

so lets now calculate weights and fees.
And finally we can upload the mesh.

But before i wear the tiny mesh
let me first wear my special invisibility outfit.
This outfit will hide my default avatar mesh.

oops?^ i have become a bit smaller by now.
So, Lets take a closer look especially on the feet.
We see that actually my tiny is standing well above ground.
So, let us fix this now.

Open the Avatar Shape editor.
Then in the Body section scroll down to the hover slider.
Here you can adjust the hover height of your avatar.

And now the tiny is standing a bit better on the ground floor.
thank you for watching,