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Specifications for SL Compatible DAE Format


Bloodsong Termagant
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heyas; is there (or can there be created, please) information on the specific DAE formatting that SL expects to read on import of a rigged mesh? i keep generating dae files where sl does not recognize it as having a rig, and i have no idea why. and/or why my dae files have different sections and codes than racush's simplebot.dae that is the only one that seems to work for me. the closest i found was this: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Mesh_Asset_Format but it appears to be the format of the mesh file AFTER the sl importer parses it. i need to know this information, but what it expects in the DAE. oh, and this: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Troubleshooting but it just says 'collada 1.4' which is not helpful. i need an analysis of what blocks need to be in the dae and how they need to be formatted. thanks!
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Bloodsong Termagant wrote:

heyas; is there (or can there be created, please) information on the specific DAE formatting that SL expects to read on import of a rigged mesh? i keep generating dae files where sl does not recognize it as having a rig, and i have no idea why. and/or why my dae files have different sections and codes than racush's simplebot.dae that is the only one that seems to work for me. the closest i found was this:
but it appears to be the format of the mesh file AFTER the sl importer parses it. i need to know this information, but what it expects in the DAE. oh, and this:
but it just says 'collada 1.4' which is not helpful. i need an analysis of what blocks need to be in the dae and how they need to be formatted. thanks!

Ahh.. So many things could possibly be contributing to a rigging issue, did you enable the "skin weights"? and did you see the mesh go from a tpose into an idle stance?

Could you post some information from your second life log - specifically the area beginning with "Collada Importer Version:" and following. It probably contains some information on what specific aspect of the import or parsing process failed.

Best,

prep

 

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Yes there are "so many things" -- that is why we have been pleading for some sort of troubleshooting documentation, esp to error messages. What is the point of having an error message if no one seems to have any idea what they mean or what one might do with them.

LL's idea of mesh documentation seems to be mainly "ask in the forum" other than some minimalist and often outdated wiki pages that announce mesh coming this summer, among other things.

What kind of company introduces a quite complicated product and then says sorry, we don't have the manpower to provide instructions or a manual?  (And I am talking only about SL-specific information.)

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So i started this list here:

Where is the log ?

This is probably one of the most asked questions in this context. Why not place the error messages into a popup window ? So where IS the log ? Mine is at:

C:\Users\myLoginName\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\logs\SecondLife.log

Where is yours ? I am sure you will find it quickly and easily :matte-motes-evil:

 

Missing weight groups

When a weight group is missing, the GUI reports ... nothing. Here is what you find in the log:

Asset did not contain the joint (if you're u/l a fully rigged asset w/joint positions - it is required).mFootRight
Asset did not contain the joint (if you're u/l a fully rigged asset w/joint positions - it is required).mFootRight

That looks a bit like a wrong formatted message. But ok, i can guess mFootRight is missing... Maybe one short information about "Weightgroup mFootRight does not exist" would be  more helpfull here. But some questions raise:

 

  • what has a weight group to do with joints positions? There is no rig in that particular collada file, and no joints positions...
  • And why does a missing joint disable uploading of the mesh when i do not want to upload joints at all ?
  • And why does this issue not popup as error in the GUI ? just the weight selection is greyed out without explanations.

Fix: Add an empty weight group of name "mFootRight" to your mesh, then try again.


Unweighted vertices

When a vertex is not weighted, the GUI tells:

Error: Dae parsing issue - see log for details.

Here is the log:

verifyCount: Error: (expected/got)2233/2232verts

Why not simply: 1 out of 2233 vertices is not assigned to any weight group. Please check your weighting.

Fix: Find the missing vertices, assign them to at least one existing weight group, and try again.

 

Vertices weighted to more than 4 bones

Recently i had the impression that sometimes the SL Importer disables "with weights" when the model contains vertices with more than 4 weights. There is indeed a limitation in Second Life that allowd no more than 4 bone weights per vertex.

LL has mentioned (long time ago) that they do not test this constraint. So it might actually be no isse, but probably it is good to remember this constraint anyways.

 

Vertices weighted to 0.0

I have the impression that sometimes vertices which are weighted to 0.0 create spikes in SL. I believe that this is not a general issue. The one case where i have seen this problem was where all weights had a value of near to 0 and 2 of the weights had value of 0.0 It may be worthwhile to clean meshes with 0,0 weights. But be aware that every vertex needs at least one weight. Otherwise the SL Importer refuses to import the mesh.

 

Wrong selection of objects

I often forget to enable the "selection only" checkmark in the Collada exporter in Blender. This can lead to a whole bunch of issues with the SL Importer depending on what is in your scene. I have mostly seen parsing errors and "no mesh contained in data" errors in this case.

 

MAV_BLOCK missing

The problem is with the material assignments. When you have multiple materials, sometimes you can find a configuration where the entire set of faces for material A uses only vertices which are also needed to form the faces for Material B. Look at this cube:

box.png

The 4 narrow sides are all assigned to the red material, the big sides are assigned to yellow material. You see that the red material and the yellow material use the exact same set of vertices.

Maybe the vertex set is actually only exported once, but assigned to both materials. Actually i was able to reproduce the upload problem on the Firestorm viewer only. On the V3 from Linden Labs the problem did not appear.

Workaround: Add one extra triangle and assign it to one of the materials. Now the vertex sets are different, and the SL Importer (firestorm) is happy.

And finally: "MAV = Material Asset Value" (as i learned from a more recent post in this thread)

Duplicate vertices

Sometimes the SL Importer is not able to create lower LOD's. Typically you see either that all lower LOD  vertex counts are identical to the highest LOD regardless what limits you type in. Sometimes the viewer even crashes. And sometimes everything messes up when you add a physics shape with duplicate vertices.

Workaround: Always ensure that your model does not contain duplicate vertices.

 

To be continued (while stumbling over more issues)

 

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  • 2 months later...

This thread was started in January 2012. Meanwhile we have April. I must say, up to now, meshes leave me completely frustrated and I'm planning to have a break in creating things for SL.

I'm in SL to have fun creating things. And when I heard about meshes, I thought, wow, that's going to be a gread thing. But now I'm completely frustrated. Blender is such a beautiful program, but what sense does it make, if importing the meshes to SL drives you crazy and eats up more time than creating things.

No, I don't have a certain problem... it's the complete importer. Nearly every mesh, which is a little more complex than a cube or a spere causes the importer to complain in hyroglyphes. The preview always looks nice, but surely the importer finds something and refuses to do its job. It don't even tell what is wrong. Just crap like "MAV_BLOCK missing" or other info, that doesn't say anything about the reason.

 

I will wait for 3 month and waste my time with something, which is more fun. And then I will look, if the inporter is improoved and if Qarl's mesh deformer is implemented.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 7 months later...

I'm pretty sure that the MAV_BLOCK missing has other causes as well. In a project i'm working on, mesh is generated, and if there are multiple materials/colors, they never share the same vertices, they are always different pieces of mesh. So for me, that can't be problem, but sometimes I get the error anyway.

Also in the only jira entry about this error (as was mentioned earlier here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-7823) the error does not seem related to materials sharing vertices, but rather there might be something wrong in the physics calculator.


So I'm not saying that the problem you've described is not a cause, but there is certainly also another cause as far as I can tell.

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  • 4 months later...

I know this is an old post, and I'm sorry if it's wrong to reply in it, but I wanted to share my fix for this. When I get this issues, In blender I make sure to remove double first, to make sure there is no Extra verts, and then in the uploader, I use the auto generate physic(unless you have your own then you can use that too), if your item does not need a physic, you can still give it the lowest value, then do analyse. In some case, my prim count event went lower because I added a physic rather than none. :) Hope that help someone. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

MAV = Material Asset Value

 

In most cases there will be to many materials on a scetion of the upload or there is an unassigned material.

This is the most common issue. Follow the guidelines Gia has set and also check to make sure you do not have extra materials that are not assigned

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  • 1 month later...

I see all this stuff about vertex weight but I don't know what it means.

All I want to do is upload mesh, ive had my models uploaded before through a friend and i've recently been enabled to upload mesh but now I cant even upload it myself.

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  • 1 month later...

Thank you Gaia and all others!

As of August 2013 the problem still exists for me on some more complex meshes. And the workaround "Always ensure that your model does not contain duplicate vertices." doesnt work for me, as sometimes I just need double vertices (e.g. rigged barbwire looks odd if either smooth or plain. What workaround for me always works is:

 

Add a simple box as physics shape.

 

Of course this isnt really helpful if you need the physics on your build but for rigged meshes it works sorta good for me.

 

See you inworld :)

Sarah

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  • 3 years later...
  • 1 year later...
On 4/7/2012 at 5:47 AM, Amphei Jierdon said:

This thread was started in January 2012. Meanwhile we have April. I must say, up to now, meshes leave me completely frustrated and I'm planning to have a break in creating things for SL.

I'm in SL to have fun creating things. And when I heard about meshes, I thought, wow, that's going to be a gread thing. But now I'm completely frustrated. Blender is such a beautiful program, but what sense does it make, if importing the meshes to SL drives you crazy and eats up more time than creating things.

No, I don't have a certain problem... it's the complete importer. Nearly every mesh, which is a little more complex than a cube or a spere causes the importer to complain in hyroglyphes. The preview always looks nice, but surely the importer finds something and refuses to do its job. It don't even tell what is wrong. Just crap like "MAV_BLOCK missing" or other info, that doesn't say anything about the reason.

 

I will wait for 3 month and waste my time with something, which is more fun. And then I will look, if the inporter is improoved and if Qarl's mesh deformer is implemented.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Upload_Model_UI_reference  This helped me a lot 

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1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

Wellll, if you want to post a link to a hopelessly outdated web page, you might as well do it in a hopelessly outdated thread...

Well OK then :) BUT BUT Maybe some of them are still alive?  Think you will like this ...

 

 

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