Second Life Mesh Design of Clothing Using Avastar, Blender and Zbrush Part III

 Hello after a little break I am back and still working on the last piece of mesh clothing and I will have to tell everyone I had to take the break to research the mesh body parts and how to work with them also ...  My findings are that Mesh boobs and butts are and issue with mesh clothing. From use of alphas and the Second Life alpha glitches to the fact they are edited resized and changed all the time so there is no default for them what so ever .... This means you cannot really put the mesh over the mesh. I have some ideas for solutions yet they are in the future and I have a contract to build other items first before I can do this. Also in the last two weeks second life has released a new viewer update and this may have included support for the new bones and such yet I am nt suire of this yet, but as a builder and a designer this is going to change our work as well change our use of avastar till Gaia Cherry has a chance to update the plugin. Yet I am not going to stop sharing workflows, I am telling you this because some parts of the workflow may change slightly ... So where I left off I was getting ready to bake maps in zbrush for the normals .... which are the bump maps and then as well I did add a specular and a material map which will then be used as a layer in some of the textures I use for the bra. I also have starter another item for a male avatar and will make many more. One thing I did not mention and that is that all of this may need 3 or 4 deformer shapes for each piece of clothing and as well you also may need alpha maps that make the body parts invisible ... so all you pervs out there ... looking up the dress of a female avi she will appear invisible and you may not be able to see her underwear or anything just other inner working of the mesh.  I say this as in my testing of mesh that is the first obvious part when designing and fiddling with clothing. My store in world you will be able to see many parts of my work in progress and it is located here
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Tegueste/217/165/22
if you like my blogs and would like to show it feel free to purchase and item or hit up my Tip Jar for either Badabong Bigbear or Elliana Inkpen as every little bit helps. So I know this is a short post and there are no image examples though I am working on these mesh appliers and need to finish adding them to my previous works .... So I will leave you with that and a link explaining mesh body attachments ,ore fully.
http://secondlife-blogger-elliana-inkpen.blogspot.com/

Intro to Using Blender to design second life mesh that is rigged and skinned to animate with your Second Life Avatar !

Long Title and well this first post of this series  I will keep short and sweet about the use of blender for mesh design in second life but I need to stress more the avatar development plugin called Avastar. First off I will tell you that there are  other programs that I have always preferred over blender .... But you may ask for what reason would you like these other programs more when blender is open source and free. Well the main reason is that 3d modeling, rendering and animation is taught and pushed by companies such as Zbrush Pixologic and Autodesk as well the Adobe creative suite. So if you want to work in that industry you have to work in the creative tools and pipelines that they have created for both movies and video games.  But even with that being said yes these others have great tools , but so does blender and now that I have spent a few days in blender again just doing refreshers ... well honestly even if not my first choice Blender is a great tool that is just as good as Autodesk or Maxon tools for the most part. Plus there is another plugin I have already mentioned that is critical to being a designer that uses Blender for second life clothing and animation  and that is Avastar ....  the link is in the previous post and its also listed on google. Avastar is a paid plugin that is simple to install and as well you could do some things without it when it comes to design and animation but what you cannot do without it is the bigger issue here. For example you can upload your male or female avatar shape right into the blend file ... Thus the clothes you create are basically now custom to your avatar ... as well you can now create multiple versions of the clothes for your shops etc .... with just the addition of a few extra steps instead of per say a few hours of time and steps.  Here is a screen shot of and avatar shape from Badabong Bigbear that I saved as and xml file from export out of the Phoenix viewer.

Here and above you can see the avatar is now a shape of a male and I can alter his shape using any of the sliders that I have circled in red and when I do so just like Second Life the shape of my avatar will change here in this .blend file ...   when I save and attachment and prepare to move it into Second life though ... It will be exported using the avastar plugin to a collada file and will include all the weights needed , and be rigged if I choose it to be. But the great thing here is that I do not have to depend on blender for this or use a work around or even rely on having to learn how to set up a rig on my own ... Yes I do know how to do this as well in Maya and in 3ds Max and Blender ...  but that is besides the point and as well yes there is a bit of work to it if you are new to 3d.  The whole point here is that our custom consoles and plugin is very easy to work with has all the add on bells and whistles and for the most part is all the extra you need for basic design and manipulations from animations to clothing and attachments. I have the Package adjustment circled because well it cracks me up ... I mean come on there genitals that are located there ... In art people that cannot get over this normally can end up ... aww never mind get your minds out of the gutter. 

 

Here above you see how easy it is to actually pose and avatar in Avastar and Blender and this will be correct to the right height and as well at zero point as in relation to you in your viewer. laoding the avatars exact size and then posing took less then 5 minutes they could be exported and uploaded to second life just as fast .....  So all in all this is a extreme power tool for mesh, and blender with ongoing development it makes the Avastar plugin well worth the 7000 lindens to purchase it. Yes second life mesh is a whole new breed of animal but with it the grid can evolve and be even more intense and fun to experience and explore. I will continue writing about it and showing more uses in the next post this week showing you the weight mapping features, as well how Avastar can be used with second life and blender for clothing animation and rigging, Also I will work on a work flow tutorial and maybe even include the workflow as if it is a video game pipeline including zbrush as well other game building apps that first off can and will aid us in mesh development and second off aid in alternate work flows to the process of designing mesh clothes for second life with more detail, great textures and ease of use for the digital art pipeline for second life.

Welcome Second Life Artists, Mesh Designers and Digital Sculptors

 

This is the finished pipe I recently built in 3 colors as well, with the glowing coal and a smoking particle script. All done 100% in Zbrush out of mesh. 

Thank you for visiting I will be adding many links to helpful builders blogs and tutorials as well other great art links and more. I have been using Photoshop as well many other great 3d programs for almost 17 years now, and I built this blog to help other great mesh designers, texture artists and even animators and machinma artists in 3d worlds as well as game engines. I have numerous avatars for use in both designing and building as well to use in my interest of virtual world robots and more. I will include items here from video of my live mesh creation and sculpting using programs such as Zbrush, 3ds Max, Blender, , Maya, Topogun, Photoshop, and many others. My Bigbear Design Store is also Located on Facebook located here Bigbear Design Mesh and 3d Design  I also have many other groups and pages from a zbrush art group to Freelance artists groups as well. These are all used by hundreds of artists to promote the work and as well others to find talented artists.  To show off a little of my original work first we will start with a simple smoking pipe that I created a week ago and now sell in my store in SL.

    Here is more items I am working on at this point still currently they could be used as a prop though I plan adding either AI (Artificial Intelligence) otherwise some sort of robot or pet type scripting, but I must be able to bring the prim or land impact allowance down some. If I turned them into and avatar that would be a slightly different type of circumstance but I am and have not.  The level of detail on the trihead dino animal is quite good and can be seen in world located at
Bigbear Design in Second Life in World Store   or
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Tegueste/218/165/703
I will be posting and blogging on a daily basis to everyone as well making connections to other bloggers and media. I as well try and provide weekly as well as monthly links to other helpful blogs and tools for use in second life. To start I will provide you with a link to one of the most helpful