[Opensim-users] Firestorm on OpenSim and mesh physics

[Marcus Llewellyn]

Rigging with Blender is a bit on the advanced side. It really requires a 
fairly solid foundation based on Blender's more fundamental uses and 
controls. Weight painting a mesh is much easier if you already know how 
to use Blender's texturing or sculpting tools, for example. That said, I 
don't regret one minute investing the time to learn it... once you get 
the hang of things it's a really awesome tool.

When getting started with Blender, I can't recommend Blender Cookie's 
tutorials enough. They're anywhere from a few minutes to maybe ninety 
minutes long, many of them absolutely free and high quality, and can 
teach you everything from the basics to advanced topics and techniques 
applicable to OpenSim. You'll want to go through their beginner 
tutorials at a minimum before even trying to get into rigging. Try 
starting at this URL: http://cgcookie.com/blender/get-started-with-blender/

When it comes to rigged meshes, you can go two ways. Both paths start at 
Gaia Clary's Machinimatrix website. The simplest thing to do is to 
purchase and use their Avastar product (US$22) which does a lot of 
things for you, and supports things like LL's internal animation format. 
I've never used this product, so I really don't know anything about it 
in depth.

The other way has a steeper learning curve, because you have to do 
everything yourself, and starts with a Blender project file called 
avatar-workbench. This file contains the default LL skeletal rig, a 
weighted avatar mesh, and a MakeHuman mesh weighted to the LL rig. This 
is definitely the more challenging path, as you need to learn how to 
setup and configure many things yourself. I find this more satisfying 
myself, as I'm forced to learn exactly what's going on and generally why 
things occasionally go awry, but most people just wanna get stuff done. 
Avastar also has the only Blender exporter for LL's internal animation 
format that I've ever heard of. It's shame there's no open sourced one 
around yet.

You find both the Avastar product and the free avatar-workbench project 
file at the following URL: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/

Marcus

On 12/5/2012 2:58 PM, InuYasha Meiji wrote:
> Oh I wish I knew how to do that.  I have a great model of a Asian 
> Water buffalo, I would love to convert to a mesh with a working 
> skeleton.  I would then use it as a NPC on my grid and have a roaming 
> Waterbuffalo, or cart pulling buffalo for my grid.  There is just so 
> much I don't know about converting from a 3dsmax high vector 3ds and 
> or obj file to a uploadable mesh, and no clue about making a skeleton 
> for it.  I have poser but never even used Blender.  Where should I start?
>
> InuYasha