Transfer your SL Avatar appearance to Opensim

Posted by on February 28, 2009 under avatar, howto | Be the First to Comment

You can connect to Second Life using realXtend viewer. It is not at its best that way, but still there are some nice features worth writing about. One of them is the possibility for inter-grid teleporting, as I wrote in teleporting with realXtend. Another smaller yet interesting feature is that it is possible to import and export the avatar appearance.

Many people have spent a lot of time in tweaking their avatar appearance in Second Life. SL Avatar has 144 settings:

• Shape, 77 settings
• Skin, 26 settings
• Hair, 39 settings
• Eyes, 2 settings

Bringing your avatar to OSGrid is clearly a non-zero effort. Using realXtend appearance import/export, the work is made significantly easier.

The export gives you a XML file that can be saved to a local computer (it is actually just a text file, not xml inside). You need to have “worn” bodyparts and clothing on when using the import and export facilities. Textures keys are exported but currently not able to be imported, because different grids will have different keys, and there is no way to match them up.

To Export:

1. Start editing your appearance
2. Click the Export Button,
3. Select a file name for the saved data

 To import:

1. Start Editing your appearance
2. Click the Import Button
3. Select a file with the saved data
4. Make changes to textures
5. Click SaveAll Button

This is tested from Second Life to OSGrid, and to a standalone Opensim. Textures need to be upload separately and set manually. Many thanks to Ewe Loon for the code patch!

Note: The avatar appearance import/export works in Opensim and SL, not with the realXtend’s own free form mesh avatar. realXtend’s own avatar is stored on a separate server which makes it easy to be used at different realXtend servers (ie your avatar travels with you when you teleport around), which makes this kind of import/export unnecessary.

The avatar appearance import/export can also be used to back up your sl avatar easily or you can even send your sl avatar settings in email.

How to make faces for your realXtend avatar

Posted by Jani on December 7, 2008 under avatar, howto | Be the First to Comment

Neo, left, needs to grow his hair when compared to Keanu, right

One of the really fun features of realXtend is the possibility to generate new realistic faces for the avatar. You can use two photos to make a face - one from front and one from side. See the video below to understand what happens:

To use your own face, you need to:

1. find or take two photos from yourself - front and side
2. download and install facegen modeller free version
3. Launch facegen and use “photofit” with your photos
4. once you are happy with the new face, save it into a .fg file
5. download and install FaceGen2Rex, launch it and follow instructions (from the readme file) where to put the resulting files (and what else to do)
6. start your rexviewer, go to a world with your avatar and select view->avatar generator
7. Select different head by using arrows at the bottom + change skin for the head

After you have success fully imported your face to realXtend, you can continue and bring your favorite celebrities to the virtual world - guess who are modeled below (note: the SI stamp is removed from the forehead when imported)! Go to downloads section to get the facegen files.

Famous persons made into 3D from photos

I also tried to make Martti Ahtisaari and Elvis but they did not look as good. You can get some interesting results by using drawn characters and using side photo from a different person. If this is not enough, you can always use the huge amount of tweaking possibilities of Facegen.
Have fun!