As a trial, and to provide space related outfits for the Space Station/ISS experience in Sine.space, I followed the instructions on the Sine.space wiki to create avatar clothing and attachments…
I used the freely available NASA 3D models for the Space Helmet and NASA Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU).
- Following and adapting the method described on the Sine.space Wiki page on making clothing & attachments:
- and noting the item upload review guidelines:
In a new Unity Scene with the EditorPack-….unitypackage installed, the Sine.space “2015 Male” asset is placed at 0,0,0. An empty object to act as a container for the attachment is placed also at 0,0,0. The attachment itself is then brought in and positioned appropriately relative to the avatar, and then put inside the container object. Two Unity components are added to the attachment container object: Clothing Item Settings and Virtual Good. Instructions to complete those are in the Sine.space wiki page. The container object is then dropped into the Unity assets window to create a prefab. This prefab is the item that then can be selected and uploaded to the Sine.space content servers.
NASA EMU and Space Helmet on avatar at Space Station Region in Sine.space
Gender Specific Variants
At the moment Sine.space requires attachments to be gender specific, so separate male and female variants of each attachment need to be created and uploaded. In the Clothing Item Settings change the mesh model from “2015 Male” to “2015 Female” and adjust the position of the item to fit the different body shape and size, then resave the prefab and upload that.
Creating a Complete Replacement Avatar – Static Mesh and Non-Animated
It is possible to completely replace the standard Sine.space avatar and add in a mesh (static or rigged) by providing a “Costume”…
https://wiki.sine.space/index.php?title=Full_Body_Replacement_Costumes
Create an empty game object and add components for the “Clothing Item Settings” and “Virtual Good” as before, but keep the actual mesh to make the replacement avatar separate. That needs to be a prefab and dropped onto the Extended Settings -> Custom Skeleton -> Root template slot. The empty component is then made a prefab and uploaded.
On the advice of Adam Frisby at Sine Wave, he provided a custom empty animation controller… and this needs to be added to the Clothing Item Settings, with the slots filled in as indicated in the diagram to the right…
Simpler NASA Astronaut EVA Avatar
The EMU mesh (and the Sintel mesh below) both proved to be quite complex meshes. A simpler NASA 3D model of an astronaut in an EVA suit was used instead. I used the freely available 3D Astronaut Nr 1 (Collada .dae format) by Max Grueter and Byr2008. Again set as a complete avatar replacement “Costume”.
RGU Diver
A Sine.space outfit was also created using the meshes from OpenSim made by Colin Hetherington for his RGU Diver suit for use in training simulations in virtual worlds for training oil and gas drilling rig workers (see this blog post). It is not intended for distribution beyond the demonstrations on the “Oil Rig” region on Sine.space.
Sintel Rigged Avatar
With the experience of trying a replacement static mesh model outfit/costume as indicated above for the NASA EMU, I tried the Blender.org CC-BY-NC Sintel avatar (see http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~ai/unity/resources/sintel/)… which is a rigged mesh avatar. On the advice again of Adam Frisby at Sine Space, its important that the rigged model prefab has the “Root Motion” unticked. Its ticked in the original avatar model. Also, as its greyed out and non-editable in the original asset, drag the one in the Assets into the Scene/Hierarchy, modify it to untick the root motion tick box, then drag it back into the Project/Assets view. Then use the new one from the project view to fill the slot skeleton template slot.
