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With your body part completely built, it is time to weight it.
#CREATE IMVU CHARACTER SKIN#
This should allow you to more easily see how the skin on your new meshes is mapped and, more importantly, whether or not it matches what is on the master meshes.
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When this texture is applied to the avatar body in MAX, the horizontal and vertical lines are drawn as near straight as possible. To the left is the 256×512 plaid texture we use to make sure that our mapping is near perfect. So, please err on the side of delighting your customers and use the texture mapping IMVU has already lovingly built for you. When their skin texture products do not work perfectly, they get upset, leave bad reviews and spread the word that your products are unreliable. If you are building a body part that is meant to work seamlessly with the rest of products in the IMVU catalog, please remember to use the texture mapping already embedded in the meshes supplied in the master weighting files.Īs mentioned above, IMVU users expect their skin texture products to work perfectly across all clothing meshes. So, take the time to get your placement and weighting right on your boundary verts. When new geometry does not work well with existing clothes, customers complain and the overall sales of that Creator are hurt. NOTE: This ‘nasty seams’ business is actually very important. Otherwise, you get nasty seams in the messenger. What’s more, each boundary vert needs to be weighted the exact same way as its neighboring part. Each boundary vert needs to be placed in the exact same location as its neighboring body part. So, the vertices that live along the boundaries of a body part are called ‘boundary verts’.įor example, an avatar top product has boundary verts along the neck (where it connects to the head), waist (where it connects to the lower body) and wrists (where it connects to the hands). A boundary is defined as the open ends of a mesh where it is meant to meet up with connecting parts. The space between vertices is called ‘geometry’ and that geometry is what is drawn on screen when you’re chatting in IMVU. Scary McNastiness.Ī vertex is a point on a 3D mesh.
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Any deviation from the master position will result in a dark alley visit from Mr. Please remember to put the animation slider back to zero when exporting your mesh. Otherwise, the boundary vertices will look broken when applied in IMVU. So, please remember that, should you build a cool jacket for the male that you want to port to the female, you will essentially have to rebuild the mesh and redo the weighting. What’s more, their weighting poses (or, the position of the skeleton bones when the geometry is exported) are different. However, the shapes of the two bodies are quite different. xsf file in order to export geometry for both the male and female.
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The IMVU female and male avatar use the exact same skeleton.
#CREATE IMVU CHARACTER HOW TO#
All of these files will come in handy later when using the Create Mode Editor.Ĭonsidering that completely new avatar products will not work across all Furniture, Rooms, Head and Action menu items, we will not be covering how to build your own entirely new avatar from scratch in these tutorials.
#CREATE IMVU CHARACTER ZIP#
These ZIP files contain a MAX file for use in 3DS MAX, textures that are applied to that file and a previously exported skeleton. To build new clothing, hairstyle and head geometry for the IMVU avatars, you need to begin with an avatar that is positioned in the ‘weighting pose’.Ī file for both the female and male avatar is supplied to the left. To learn how to add geometry in a Create Mode Editor, please go to the Meshes Tab Tutorial. While its true that building clothing is hard because you need to know how to model and map fairly well while, at the same time, you need to know how to use Physique fairly well, take comfort in the fact that thousands of IMVU content creators have done it. Therefore, the movement of, say, the shoulder really matters to your customers’ end experience.
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