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As most of you are no doubt aware, I've got carpal tunnel syndrome in my mouse wrist which is preventing me from working. I'm still doing what I can on the Primstar scripts, but having been on sick leave since the beginning of the year, I have very little income. Your donations really do make a big difference and for the next week Gaia Glary and the Machinimatrix crew will match any donations made (up to a total of $1000). So if you find the scripts valuable, now is an ideal time to make a donation at the Machinimatrix site

Thanks to help from Mike Monkowski from IBM and Richard from Linden Lab on the sldev mailing list, I've now got the avatar skeleton weights working. A new avatar.blend file has been uploaded. You can use pose mode to experiment with the skeleton. Next job is texturing, or perhaps shape support, or a control rig to make animations easier.. Or sleep..

My new router should arrive tomorrow, so I'll be back inworld soon! In the meantime I've got morph shapes working in Blender. Weighting the skeleton is the next job.

Today I went back to part of the avatar_lad.xml file that I'd skipped over when doing the skeleton. The import avatar script now adds a whole bunch of empties that are parented to the appropriate bones. These are the attachment points so I can now simply parent an object, say a sculptie, to the "Chest", "Left Pec", "Right Foot" etc. Besides the obvious benefits in editing parts of an outfit in place, this should also allow advanced constraints to be used when doing animations. Still a long way to go, but the foundations are getting stronger each day.

My broadband router is dying and I'm lucky to get 5 minutes between reboots. Which means no distractions and I'm getting lots of coding done!

I've completed the UV mapping import for the base mesh and have got the morph shapes in too. Some of the shapes look a little strange, for now I'm assuming it will work out once I've got them setup with IPO drivers to do the blending correctly. Click the picture for a higher resolution version.

The default avatar meshes are now imported along with the skeleton. Next step is to add support for the UV Maps and morph shapes.

Here's a couple of teaser images from one of my current projects. It's likely to be awhile before this is ready for release, but I've made enough progress to be interesting.