Reviving the Solarian Feline
Introduction
I write this post with a sense of Deja Vu, and I can’t help but wonder how I keep ending up here. Anyway! As you know, the Solarian Feline from Blue Galaxy is an incredibly well-made avatar that, despite being pre-bento, remains popular with an enthusiastic community.
One of the greatest things about it was its open architecture and welcoming policy towards new creators and hobbyists. The devkit was available to anyone who bought the avatar, no questions asked, and long after its creator’s disappearance, prominent creators such as Nama Gearz graciously host these files for us so we can continue to create.
There’s only one problem: the devkit is woefully, painfully out of date. The devkit was created in 2015 using Blender 2.7 and Avastar 1.3. An eternity of development has happened in that timeframe, and as of this writing, we are now on Blender 5.0 and Avastar 4.5. The old versions of Blender are not fun to use, to put it mildly. In addition, several bugs were introduced into the weight painting system around 2.76-2.79 that made skinning meshes particularly painful.
What follows is my own journey as I tried to update the Solarian devkit. Aside from the fixed bugs and far superior UI, there are plugins such as Robust Weight Transfer and UniV Lite, which can greatly help in creating this kind of content.
The Journey
My first thought was to try and ‘dredge’ the devkit up through versions of Blender and Avastar as though I had been keeping it actively maintained. At first, this appeared to be a promising route. However, it became clear that the jump between Avastar 1.x and 2.x was going to cause issues. Perhaps there was a setting in the upgrade tool I missed, and if so, please let me know, since I would like to develop Bento addons for the Solarian in the future.
My methodology for testing consisted of several tests, and if the converted rig failed any one of them, then the upgrade path was a failure.
- Rotate an animation bone and see if the mesh moved as expected. Most of the time, this test never failed.
- Play the animations included in the devkit and look for anything that didn’t move as expected. This tested the unconventional rigging, such as the ears.
- I imported my shape from SL as an XML. The test failed if it didn’t update the target rig or the shape didn’t apply correctly to the avatar model.
- Export a COLLADA file containing the main body of the female avatar. As a reference, I exported the same from Blender 2.75 with Avastar 1.7.1, the last version I know works correctly. If they looked the same in the importer preview for Second Life, then the test passed.
2.79 had a tendency to overwrite the bone positions in an unsafe way, and I tried several different combinations of settings to get this to work. While I was able to make something that looked correct for tests 1 and 2, test 3 refused to even start; it made a new rig and default body and inserted them into the scene. Subsequent attempts to move to Blender 5.0 from this rig failed 3 out of 4 tests.
Other tests I tried involved moving to Avastar 3.6.14 and 3.6.92 before 4.5 on Blender 5.0 had mixed or somewhat wonky results. Avastar 3.6.92 for Blender 4.1.1 was the cleanest of the two, as it was able to simply update the file with no workarounds. However, the result was missing a few bone groups in Rig Display compared to other versions, and failed early export tests. In retrospect, the export test failure was probably due to using the new glTF exporter instead of the legacy COLLADA exporter, but if the steps I ultimately settled on hadn’t worked, this would have been a close second.
The Solution
Thanks to some pointers from the people over in the Avastar Discord, I was able to start to pick apart individual options for the legacy upgrade tool in the ToolBox section of the Avastar Toolshelf. This ultimately worked with similar success to going through Blender 4.1.1 first, and taught me how to make sense of the mess left over by Blender migrating from Layers to Collections.
1. Prepare the Project
For some parts of the updater to work without throwing a script error, the skeleton can’t be in multiple collections. To fix this, find 'Avatar’ in the hierarchy, select it, and press ’M’. Then select Scene Collection to send it there. Next, it’s a good idea to do a little cleanup in here, so click the funnel in the top right and turn on the icon that looks like a monitor. From there, toggle all the objects and collections to enabled.
You can safely delete Collection 10 because it doesn’t contain anything useful; it’s only reference shapes that were used during the initial rigging process when Ash created the model. Aside from that, what I ended up doing was renaming Collections 1-2 to reflect the bodies that were in them, and moving the adult components into their respective collections. As Female and Femboy share the same adult lower body mesh, I created a link in the second collection by holding down Ctrl when dragging it.
2. Run the Legacy Updater
With the project now prepared, open the Avastar toolshelf and go to the Toolbox. Click the arrow to the left of Update Armature to expand the options, and check/uncheck the boxes so that the 1st and 3rd options are the only ones checked.
This is important, as leaving 'Fix Constraints’ checked will cause bone positions to get broken, resulting in the avatar’s eyes popping out, among other things. Leaving 'Rebuild Joint Edits’ checked causes the deform skeleton to break, and shape sliders no longer work.
Once you have the correct options, as shown in the picture above, selected, click 'Apply’. The avatar skeleton will update, but we aren’t quite done.
3. Fix Attachment Point Deforms
Because of the peculiar way it’s rigged, the Solarian uses a few of the attachment point bones for things like facial movement, and when we completed the update process above, they lost the 'deform’ flag they need to continue to function.
To fix this, we can toggle the Rig Display in Avastar to only show attachment bones, then select each of the following, and check the 'Deform’ box as shown in the screenshot:
- aLeft Ear
- aRight Ear
- aMouth
- aChin
- aPelvis
Conclusion
Once you’ve completed this step, your devkit should be ready to use in Blender 5.0. Be sure to save it in a safe place, otherwise you’ll have to do all this again!
On a final note, the glTF exporter doesn’t seem like it’s quite up to the task yet, so be sure to use the Avastar Legacy exporter when exporting content you make with the devkit out of Blender. (File -> Export -> Avastar Legacy (*.dae))
