Sorry for the delays everyone. Time Warner Cable accidentally disconnected our internet after our apartment’s contract for cable TV (Which we never used) expired. They didn’t stop to check and see that some of us had internet accounts. So they couldn’t bother to send anyone out for a week!
Anyway, I’m back online and once again working on the Dire Wolf sinking issue!
I think we’ve got a decent working mesh ‘stickman’ that will make the dire wolf the proper shape. I’m in the process of testing it now. The Unfortunate news is that with this new mesh ‘deforming’ system, that a lot of the old animations aren’t working properly. So far they’ve been minor fixes. But since I was already messing with animations I decided to make two fixes of previous complaints about the dire wolf: The walk animation has the paws lifting too high in the air, almost like a prancing gait. We’ve also heard complaints about the dire wolf ‘kicking out’ too much on the run. Both of these issues have been fixed so far.
Some other changes we’re thinking about doing since we’re already working on the avatar:
Here’s the run:
And the walk:
I have spoken to one of the creators of the Seawolf avatars, and we determined that we might be able to fix our ‘large’ avatars if we use mesh deformers. Unfortunately I am not as well versed in mesh as I would like to be, so this is going a bit slower than I would like. But I did want to show you some of the progress I made with it:
The white ‘stickman’ thing is the mesh deformed shape. As you can see, it still needs a little work, the legs aren’t lining up right, the front paws are a little off. I might use this time to fix some of the issues I’ve never liked on the Dire, but I want to try to roll this out as soon as I can. And no, the deformer shape will be invisible when I’m done, I just wanted you guys to see it for now.
So if I’m using a mesh deformer, why not just go all the way with mesh? Well, I want to! That’s why I’m learning how to make mesh avs now, but I’m only just learning. And this particular issue is actually to fix a problem that Linden Labs caused with that July/August update (The dire wolf sinking). So I want to get this avatar back to working properly before I can move on. And that means using a mesh deformer while continuing to use prim attachments.
When I’m more comfortable making mesh avs, you bet there will be a dire wolf version of it. But I’m not ready to release anything like that yet. Not just yet.