Needs Ribbons

The hair is still mostly stiff, I tried weighting the loops to the neck some but it looked idiotic when I turned my head.

Hair

Hair, not a closeup, and this is about as low as my draw weight will drop before I add some detail back in. The draw weight is 22,270. Down from 90K something, and I was usually on the lower end of the draw weight spectrum.

Skirts, petticoats, corset with gromet detail, jacket, gloves, head, ears, hair, broach. All that for not a lot more viewer intensity than a library noob avatar.

ETA: Quadrupling the vertices for smoothness brought the hair up a whopping 546. O_o

Weight Painting

Thigh bone example.

Mesh Draw Weights

So I started on a roll your own avatar.


I just nailed the eyes and my overall smugness, and learned quite a bit too. There remain a few things I'm still not happy with but I'm about ready to wear it in public without shame.

Here's the big kicker: the draw weight of my old av head was 40,579.

The draw weight of this is 2,843. Add the eyelid back in and it's 4,611.

That's CRAZY light on the rendering engine! My hair in the pics are over 20,000, and next on the list for replacement.

Every Time I Hit The Gas

I discover I still have an inch of pedal.


That's actual prim broach, something I made in... 2005.

Now I want to make my own avatar. That's like discovering I have a pre-regulation destroyer class solid fuel recoil booster in the trunk. o.o

And a Jacket

Needs some trim, maybe a broach.




I can't believe I did this layer by layer.

It's Coming Together

And gloves.


lol. Upskirt.


I made boots too.

Boots were made for another project, otherwise we're up to three days work for this far.

It Grew a Gown

Schlep.

The Schlep

This essay kind of helped me over a hump.

Anyway, experiments in mesh, a corset. 'O course a real corset might as well be a solid sculpt with no give whatsoever, it's just that an AO that will in any way cooperate is becoming increasingly rare, and few give a damn anyway. So, I used a bendy AO to show the flexing properties.

There's even shine on the bones and high shine on the gromets. Yay! :D




And that's basically how things get done. You get in there and grind away. This was about 8 hours work.

Things Learned from Exporting my Avatar into Blender and Rigging It

This Tutorial wasn't too hard, just a couple places I had to slow down and try again. I had no complete startovers.

Blender 2.49b does not like 64 bit Python 2.6.2. Install the 32 bit.

You'll need SL 3.0 viewer.

To do your first upload you have to do a little multiple choice IP quiz on the SL website.

Rigging the boots to the armature did not work when trying to wear them. In fact, boots may have to be uploaded separately, left and right. More on this another time.