Building Furniture Models

In IMVU a piece of furniture is any product that can be placed into a 3D scene. These types of products usually live in the Furniture section of the IMVU catalog. Furniture can be anything you, the developer, can think of. Whether it is a simple cube or a treadmill with an running avatar animation, you can make and sell it all in IMVU. The biggest limitation on building Furniture for IMVU is your own imagination
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It is important to note that a Furniture product is different than the 3D scene in which it will eventually live. Although they can share many of the same technical aspects, Furniture is officially a product that can be placed and moved around in a 3D scene.

Building Furniture requires a working knowledge of building in 3D including: texture mapping, weighting, lighting, and animating.

This document will be split up into four sections: 1. Building the Skeleton, Mesh and Material for the Furniture 2. Exporting those assets into the proper, Cal3D file formats 3. Assembling those assets in the IMVU Previewer to create a Furniture product 4. Submitting a product to the IMVU catalog

When finished with this doc, you will know how to retrieve the example Furniture items from the Developer page, set up the Furniture skeleton and node hierarchy, build the Furniture geometry, assign Multi Sub-Materials and name them correctly, animate the Furniture (or portions thereof), place cameras, bake in vertex lighting, export the skeleton, mesh, animation and material files, take a GREAT catalog shot, load your new exported files in the Previewer, create a product, save your CFL file, submit the product to the IMVU catalog and - FINALLY - download the product and use it in IMVU. Very cool.

Although Furniture has a lot in common with building a 3D Scene, this document is not the same as the Scenes document and should be read carefully.

NOTE: It is very important that you work from and save all of your files to IMVUtools/Previewer/Examples. This is because certain products (like Avatar Body Patterns and all derivations of any product) rely on the existence of other products to run in the previewer. So, please avoid the headache of dealing with this bug by simply working out of the Examples folder we provide. That said, it is also VERY, VERY important that you save all of your finished products and source files anywhere but IMVUtools/Previewer/Examples as uninstalling the previewer or installing a new version of the previewer will cause this folder to be deleted.