Knowledge | Avalab

Section Pages

Skinning Basics

This chapter is a very brief but hopefully complete introduction to the fundamentals of skinning and how this applies to Blender. If you are an experienced Blender user, then you may skip the first part of this document and…

Avastar Bones

Avastar’s Rig is fully compatible to the Second Life Rig and it behaves mostly identical to the Avatar in Second Life. We have organized the Rig into 5 Subgroups:

Fitted Mesh

This page is about the principles of fitted Mesh. We strongly recommend that you first read this page before you attempt to go ahead and do practical work. However here are the links to the other pages on this topic:

The SL Skeleton

Creating the Avatar Workbench and Avastar has given us great insight on the SL avatar. The goal of this article is to give you detailed information about the construction of the Second Life avatar and what you can do with it.

Slider Mapping

Here you find the mapping from the Appearance Sliders to all affected Bones. Click on the section titles below to open the section lists. Section contains a list of sliders with 4 rows:

Joint Positions Basics

We already know that we can modify the Second Life default Skeleton by using the Appearance Sliders. But this is not all we can do. In fact it is possible to rearrange the Skeleton in any way we want. There are only 3 basic rules:

Welding Normals

When you look at the Avastar Character you might have noticed that the entire avatar looks like it was made of one mesh. There are no seams between head, upper body and lower body.

Avastar & Workbench

This article will hopefully answer your questions about what Avastar has that Blender does not already provide. Therefore we will compare Avastar only to pure Blender using the Avatar Workbench as reference blend file.

Binding for experts

Lets assume you have created a new extended Avastar as the basis for your new Character.

Blender 2.8 collada

Avastar 2.93 also works with Blender 3.0 and newer

Collada Parsing Errors

Second Life users frequently report a Dae parsing error. We found a couple of situations where this error appears (see below). However, in general your first step is to look into the Second Life Viewer Logfile…

Under the Carpet

If you want to know what kind of problems we are facing while working on Avastar, then you are at the right place. But this is nothing that you need to know for your daily work. Feel free to dive into the dungeons or avoid…