Thursday, October 16, 2014

Avastar adventures 2

New day. Closed Blender, Windows 7 update and reboot, today the file works properly, Avastar can export with no problems.. I will keep you updated!

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Avastar adventures

First of all, I must say Eleanora  Newell is great, as she is so fast at answering and helping with Avastar.
This is what she said on  http://blog.machinimatrix.org/workflows/classic-fitted-tips/ , where you find useful tips, tutorials and a blog about how to use Avastar.

Hi, Delia,
I need a picture showing me your shoes in object mode and on the right, I need to see the property shelf (toggles letter P) showing me the scale and rotations transforms for the shoes, please. Remember that I told you that if the shoes had incorrect scale (especially in the negative), it would cause reversed normals. In addition, if the scale is incorrect, you must then check the normals again after you correct it and make sure the normals don’t need to be corrected, because often they do. And again, this is NOT something Avastar does, this is all about the models and how you model, which includes if you keep correct scale and check for inversions throughout the modeling process.

Actually I had forgotten scaling is important, as this solved another issue I had had and Eleanora had told that to me already. In that case the problem was fixed, but this seems to be a more tricky one.
Here is what I did:
1 .
scaled, as you can see on the right.  CTRL+A

flipped normals and exported as in the  picture I  posted yesterday , dae - Avastar

Reimported them in Blender to see if everything was ok. Nope, flipped normals.

Checked if it is my problem or Avastar problem, exporting the same file using Blender- dae
Reimported the dae file.
Perfect.

So, as I am sure Avastar works and was tested, and I know I am soneone who can find bugs anywhere, I can think of the following reasons:
a- the program is so perfect that it fixes things which are not ok, so it interprets the lack of inner faces as something not ok and flips normals. Blender export does not do that, so it must be some extra line in exporting and checking.
b- there is some problem with vertex groups ( I added some for color  stripes etc) , or in interpreting the weights taken from Slink feet . ( I set the file as expained in the tutorial ). I exported as avastar .dae Slink feet for a check, and the file has no ending, I have to add .dae manually to be able to read it. ( see the picture in my previous posts)
c. There is some problem with texture, as I noticed before ( in Blender export for sl, not Avastar ) that it could give some problems when exporting it, so Texture might be an issue. No clue.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Struggling with Avastar 1.2

Trying again. I prepared again the Slink feet as explained in here http://blog.machinimatrix.org/workflows/classic-fitted-tips/ , appended my shoes again, removed skeleton and weights , applied them again, here is the result
Found what was wrong: never apply weights from Slink if your shoes still have a mirror modifier not applied, this will be the result. Weights from mirror to mirror cannot be changed, at least not in this case.
and of course checked normals again
So I finally found a solution.
Export Avastar dae.
Find the file with no ending .
add .dae manually
reimport it to Blender, you will see normals flipped
Flip normals
Export it to .dae using blender export

Monday, October 13, 2014

Struggling with Avastar

Hi everyone,

I have been struggling for a month or so now, trying to create some shoes. Apparently I can save and upload them properly using Blender save, but not Avastar, as it flips normals. Any clues?
See the pictures below.
 Here is my file, proper normals
 My file loaded as Blender file, after saving ( but no weights), in red, and in white, as Avastar weighted
 This is how it appears when saved with Avastar dae, and sometimes the file is not even saved,
this is how I save.
I guess there is something in my file which makes the program crazy, no idea what it is .