 |
 Please do not re-post/replublish this tutorial partially nor in whole. |
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| Weighting Accessory items |
| This tutorial will guide you trough the steps of
weighting accessory items. Accessories are avatar attachments that are weighted to 1 bone only and do not replace any body-parts, the advantage of accessories is that you can wear multiple accessories who use the same meshslot. if you would have done the same with clothing, they would replace each other. You cannot include avatar poses in accessories. You can download the mesh used in this tutorial here(?) |
Starting a new project |
| First create a new project, either male or female.
This will open up a new document, witch contains the avatar and its skeleton.  Alternatively you can open any of the templates available in the "IMVU File Editors" file collection straight from the Google warehouse(?), you can find out more about that in the Novice tutorials(?).
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hierarchies |
 One
of the 1st things you might notice when you have opened up a new project
is when you have your Outliner(?)
toolbox open (You can find that under,
[Window] > [Outliner])That there are 2 separate hierarchies one called "BodyMesh" and one called "Skeleton". The BodyMesh and all its groups inside are used to position and build our meshes on. there is no need to alter these groups as they will get ignored at export. The Skeleton and all its components are used to weight our mesh to, (Note that you can only weight to "AttachmentRoot" when your making a accesorie). |
Building your mesh |
| First we have to worry only about the BodyMesh(?),
this is where we have to build our accessory mesh on.
Now that we are done with building our mesh we have little use for the body-mesh. You can go ahead and hide(?) it. |
Weighting your mesh |
 Now
that the BodyMesh is hidden, all theres left is our Mesh and the Skeleton,For what we are now are going to do you can use either the "Outliner"(?) or the "Entity Info"(?) tool, i will be using the "Entity Info"(?) cause it will show more clear what exactly we are doing here. First we will group together our mesh, so in this case the Letters "IMVU" Each bone of the skeleton has its own name. these are the names you going to need to weight your mesh to. Since we are making an accesorie our mesh can only be weighted to
"AttachmentRoot" but we still gonna have to specify what bone our mesh
should be moving along with. In this case we want to weight our accessory to the Head.
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Exporting |
| Now we are ready to export, simply save your mesh
then go to : [Plugins] > [IMVU File Editor] > [Export]   |
Creator mode |
| Now we're almost done, we've made our mesh, weighted
and exported it, now we gonna add our product in creator mode. (Click screenshots for larger version) |
 In
Client go to creator mode and derive from an accessory, here we will
use "IMVU's female glasses(?)". |
 First
we go to the "Config" tab there are 3 things we need to worry
about."[ Compatible body Patern PID ]" to have your item compatible with female only just type "80" for male only type "191" and for both type "80, 191" We will use "80, 191" in this case. "[XSF]" Although the item we're deriving from might also move along with the same bone as your mesh will, its unlikely the creator aligned the AttatchmentRoot exactly at the same position we did, so you still have to put in your own XSF file that was made during export. "[Attachment Node]" Here is where you specify what bone your mesh moves allong with. in this case it will remain "Head" (note that this is upper-case sensitive)
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 Next
we go to the "Meshes" tab, where we put in our XMF and out textures,
and them we're all done. |
Thats all there is to it, our accesory is done
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| Tutorial by Hellstrong © IMVU-Products.biz 2010 |
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I
prefer to use the textured versions, cause it gives me a better view
of things, also i can replace the texture with whatever i want to use
on my base mesh. But for this tutorial i will use the default template.
For
this tutorial im just making a simple head-sign floating above the head.
