[sldev] Avatar mesh/morph exporter/importer

[Vector Hastings]

Khyota, I share your excitement about this.

I compiled the mesh_1_1_patchfile from
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-6199 with MSVS2008 Express against
1.21.6 and I've had the following experience:

(FYI, my interest (as Mike knows) is mostly as a machinimator who wants to
manipulate the facial expression morphs so they can be more useful as
dramatic expressions.)

Before I went to the trouble of modifying an emote mesh exported from this
client, I decided to try and import it after export just to be sure I had
everything working.

So I went: Advanced>Character>Meshes &
Morphs>headMesh>headMesh>Express_Embarassed_Emote>Save OBJ
then I immediately loaded that same mesh using the same menu option:
Advanced>Character>Meshes &
Morphs>headMesh>headMesh>Express_Embarassed_Emote>Load OBJ

I have two observations which are really questions I hope to resolve:

1. The new mesh seems to have "shrunk" my head. See the attached picture.

2. I was expecting it to replace the "emote" part of the avatar definition,
so that when I get to the stage of modifying the meshes, I won't see the
modified mesh unless I make my avi emote in a way that would have used a
standard emote mesh. But in fact, it replaces the base head mesh. And it
does so in a way that mostly negates the slider values for my head shape. I
tried making my base head with 50's on all the sliders, thinking maybe it
was a sizing issue (my avi has a big head :-) ). But that had no effect
whatsoever, so I'm barking up the wrong tree.

I tried to look at the source code changes from a previous patch for this,
but there were some spacing changes and I couldn't create an automated
diff-check (my skill here is very minimal). But it does look like there were
some significant menu changes to perform LLM saves, and that might have
destabilized an earlier version that might have been working better.

>My guess with the texture baking is that the texture vertices changed.
>Compare the two .obj files to see.  I intend to add support for the face
>information in the .obj file which ties the geometric vertices and
>normals to the texture vertices, but for now, they have to be a one to
>one correspondence in the correct order.  You could try manually editing
>the .obj files to use the new geometric vertices with the old texture
>coordinates to see if that's the reason.

A quick diff of the 2 files reveals that the ARE completely different, Quite
new to modeling so im not sure how to keep them in the correct order.
*wonders
if anyone else is testing this with blender* Also importing the base mesh,
seems to set it as the current mesh, instead of the base. Not sure if that
was
intended. I edited one of the vertex coordinates and it imported but i dont
see a differance in the shape, but the texture baked correctly, ill play
with
that more later.

>I deliberately chose to give the file picker the full path name, since I
>thought it made sense to keep the .obj files with the .llm files.  Is
>the problem that you want to put them somewhere else and you have to
>keep changing it for every save?

Figured it would be the same as saving textures and snapshots :) not a big
deal though.

Khyota
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