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
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