How to rig clothing for Second Life in Blender

Rigging is what turns a stiff model into clothing that bends with the avatar. In Second Life the garment must use the avatar's own skeleton and bone names, and no vertex may listen to more than four bones.

What you need

• Blender
• The Second Life skeleton, usually from your mesh body's developer kit
• A finished, unwrapped garment fitted to that body

Steps

1. Prepare the garment. Apply scale and rotation (Ctrl+A) on the garment, and make sure it stands exactly where the kit body stands.
2. Parent it to the armature. Select the garment, then the armature, press Ctrl+P and choose "With Empty Groups". The garment now has a vertex group for every bone, still empty.
3. Copy the weights from the body. With the body and the garment selected, use Weights > Transfer Weights in Weight Paint mode (source: by name, nearest face interpolated). The garment now moves roughly like the body under it.
4. Clean the weights. Run Weights > Limit Total with a limit of 4, then Normalize All, then Clean to remove tiny leftovers. Second Life refuses or distorts meshes with more than four weights per vertex.
5. Test in poses. Pose the armature: raise the arms, bend knees and elbows, sit. Fix what collapses or pokes through with the weight brushes.
6. Export. Export Collada (.dae) with the armature and with Second Life bone settings, and tick "Include skin weight" in the Second Life uploader.

Tips

• Delete vertex groups for bones the garment does not need: fewer joints, fewer surprises.
• For clothing that follows body sliders, the weights must be on the fitted-mesh (collision volume) bones as well - copying from a fitted body does that for you.
• A skirt usually needs hand-painted weights between the legs; no automatic transfer gets that right.

Next

• How to weight paint clothing in Blender
• How to transfer weights from a body to clothing in Blender
• How to make fitted mesh clothing for Second Life

Words you do not know? See the glossary. All guides: how-to guides.

This page is a written overview. In the SL Designers video courses you watch clothing being made from start to finish, and our Blender addons take over much of the technical work.