New scripts up with add mesh support for VWR-9384
Unfortunately the latest word from Qarl was that VWR-9384 would not make it into the next release. This could mean people start making sculpties with the wrong sizes and then "legacy" content would prevent VWR-9384 from ever being implemented. Please let your voice be heard on this important issue and vote now, as tomorrow may be too late!
You can download the latest import at the right. The avatar is a conversion of the Second Life avatar directly from the avatar_lad.xml and associated files. It was released by Linden Research, Inc under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. You should consider the avatar.blend file to still be under that license.
Tip: if you want to blend multiple shapes, hit the record button on the timeline to automatically create IPO curves when you change things.
The avatar stuff got held up with the appearance of oblong sculpties and investigating their implementation. The development version of the Blender sculptie scripts has been updated with basic support for these, it's still rough but at least we can experiment with them.
In other news, I've grabbed another item from my todo list and here's the progress on that:
The Gimp documentation for writing file load and save handlers in Python is very sparse. I've managed to get it working for loading and saving SL terrain.raw files but there is an odd error I want to fix before release.
Thanks to help from Mike Monkowski from IBM and Richard from Linden Lab on the sldev mailing list, I've now got the avatar skeleton weights working. A new avatar.blend file has been uploaded. You can use pose mode to experiment with the skeleton. Next job is texturing, or perhaps shape support, or a control rig to make animations easier.. Or sleep..
My new router should arrive tomorrow, so I'll be back inworld soon! In the meantime I've got morph shapes working in Blender. Weighting the skeleton is the next job.
Today I went back to part of the avatar_lad.xml file that I'd skipped over when doing the skeleton. The import avatar script now adds a whole bunch of empties that are parented to the appropriate bones. These are the attachment points so I can now simply parent an object, say a sculptie, to the "Chest", "Left Pec", "Right Foot" etc. Besides the obvious benefits in editing parts of an outfit in place, this should also allow advanced constraints to be used when doing animations. Still a long way to go, but the foundations are getting stronger each day.
I've been Ruthed!
The default avatar meshes are now imported along with the skeleton. Next step is to add support for the UV Maps and morph shapes.
My broadband router is dying and I'm lucky to get 5 minutes between reboots. Which means no distractions and I'm getting lots of coding done!
I've completed the UV mapping import for the base mesh and have got the morph shapes in too. Some of the shapes look a little strange, for now I'm assuming it will work out once I've got them setup with IPO drivers to do the blending correctly. Click the picture for a higher resolution version.
Here's a couple of teaser images from one of my current projects. It's likely to be awhile before this is ready for release, but I've made enough progress to be interesting.
The plan is to import a fully rigged mesh and to support gene pool information to match Second Life® shapes. As I said, it'll be awhile..
