Maya 2012 to upload glitches

[Sabanco]

Hey folks!

I started a few months ago with mesh and tried some nice builds but till today I got some really bad upload glitches and artifacts shown. These glitches and artifacts do not show on every mesh I made. Since Monday I tried to figure out what happened to my object and also tried to find sth about that problem in this forums. The thing is when I build a complex model (ie not only a tube or sphere) that has only one side the upload works for me. It does not depend on if I do a rigged version of that or simply upload a model.

The UVWs are layed out right and relaxed, only one material on that model, vertex count low to high(does not make any difference), no nonmanifold faces etc., topology right, scaling is small to high(same it does not make any difference), normals softened and correctly towards the viewer.

But if I try to extrude and or do a smooth on that fine working model the upload preview shows me weird glitches and artifacts - also inworld and also seen by other Residents.

I do my upload where I work and where our inworld shop is, not on a mesh testing sim or so. Ok further when I watch the model in the preview after an extrude and or a smooth it shows me UWV distortion. (At this point again: UWVs correctly layed out) And when I give it a try and check the skin weights some vertices were pulled into the pivot point of my model and a few faces get lost. This is not the only weird thing. When I got only one DAE file and never change anything but load it a few times into the upload preview the UVW distortion wanders on my model and so do the verts and holes - for everytime when Ill try uploading that file.

I did try save my model into a separete file (ma, fbx and obj) checked it in another program, did a freeze trans, del history, optimize scene file, mesh cleanup, average vertices, another UWV unmapping, imported it into my rig file and rigged it, but its still the same when Ill try to upload that. Oh and I did save it as 2011 FBX and converted it into DAE.

This could not be. really. I mean my model is correct, my UVWs are correct, my skeleton is correct but when I do that extrude and or smooth it becomes weirdo. That means when I wand to do a really good mesh I simply could not do it. Today im thinking of importing it into blender or so. It seems the uploader hates me or mayas fbx export is getting nasty.

If anyone has a suggestion or a faint idea what Im doing wrong PLS make it!

Edit: Did a quick import into blender and tried a few exports. It did not work at all. I still got that artifacts.

Edit#2: Tried extruding and smoothing other objects. Same case, it will not upload correctly.

[Chosen Few]

DId you perform these extrusions/smoothings before or after you did the rigging? 

From what you wrote, it sounds like it was after.  If that's the case, then that's your problem, right there.  Those kinds of operations drastically alter the topology of the model.  The vertex numbering changes, the winding order changes,  the UV associations change, etc., etc., etc.  The new geometry has no way of knowing how it's supposed to be influenced by the bones.  The topology of the model MUST be finalized, including deletion of history and transformations, BEFORE you bind, always. 

If you find yourself in a situation in which you've already done the rigging, but you need to make those kinds of changes, detach the model from the skeleton first.  Make your changes, freeze transformations, delete history, and then re-attach.  Be aware that you'll likely have to do a brand new rig, since if your UV data has changed, the existing weight maps won't work anymore.

[Sabanco]

*sigh* yes, truly yes. I did it before. And the artifacts come and go where they want - bound or not bound, maya nor blender nor meshlab. thats the thing. Did anyone else have this problems?

*saaaad panda*

[JackRipper666]

I would like to suggest using your mesh in Maya 2011 if you have that version, download the open collada plugin since the last version of Maya it supports is 2011. The FBX converter from Autodesk does not work very well for SL. Version 2011 Converter works when going from Maya FBX to Maya .dae. But I believe this just tries to mimic the open collada you find in google. It's much slower waiting for the files to load in SL and tends to be a larger file size for some reason. I have reverted back to 2011 for this reason and it has solved many of my problems. Also using Maya I'd switch it from centimeters to meters being that SL works in Meters and makes your work a little less getting correct proportions in world from the start of an upload. It's hard to work in Meters in Maya at first but if you play with your camera's and go to view>look at selection this tends to get your perspective cam to correct some of it's awkwardness when working in maya. Also the F hotkey helps as well. But I'd suggest trying Maya 2011, download open collada from google and trying that see if it clears up anything. If you don't want to do this it should work under FBX converter 2011. The other versions 2012-13 I can't get to work. 2011 though is no guarantee either my best results are the actual plugin.

 

For your UV mapping if you have Zbrush and want to do some testing you could use UV Master plugin which does a really good job to unwrap your mesh quickly for you. This way you can test out what might be the problem. Then you can go back and lay out the map how you want or just adjust the results UV Master gives you. Anyway hope something helps.

[Sabanco]

Aww Jack. The first one telling me Maya 2012 is crap. I was searching in the CGSociety this night and foung interesting bugs refering to extrude and smooth. Other bugs than I have but it sounds to me theres sth mathematically going wrong with smooth and extrude in maya 2012. One was telling he extruded some parts of his char and after closing and reopening his file this parts were totally broken. he gave his file to someone else having 2012 and he also encountered that problem. opening it in 2011 everything was ok. also someone mentionend that maya, although having the hotfix 1, he could not save clearly everything he made. Yesterday i got another weird bug with some poly ive tried to smooth. everytime i saved it or made an export all into fbx my object resets to the lower version. although im not a beginner these bugs in maya 2012 would drive someone crazy. In first place the randomness of that glitches sounded to me that theres a problem with the uploader not with the DAE generated.:matte-motes-sick:

Thank you Jack for telling me you also had some problems with the newer maya versions. I switch then to my other license. Hope i will get quite good results then.

For UVW unwrapping i dont need a plugin for im working in a way that i start with low objects unwrap it and do then my cuts merges and so on always switching between 1 and 3 to see where im getting. when its finished i check my mapping again(mostly quite before ill do my smoothing) to see if it needs to be worked over(after being smoothed some borders need to be worked over). most time i dont need to do all the unwrapping again(except when doing belts or anything else sticking to the middle part of the body). Maya also has some quite good tools for unwrapping, like snap tool or cut tool or layout or letting my map be colored so i can see if my normals are right... err im happy with that.

But ive heard the new ZBrush has a nice retopo tool build into This would be interesting. Mudbox is ok for sculpting but all in all its crap.

[JackRipper666]

Yea hope it helps, my understaind is finding usually the least buggy approach that works for SL. The workflow seems to be very important for best results. I tend to be stubborn myself and really like Maya even though Blender is probably better option from my own testing and numerous posts/video tutorials suggesting to use it lol. Not to discourage Maya users though it can be done once you kinda tackle what versions an plugins work best etc. 

 

About the mapping though yea I recommend how you're doing it this way you'll find what works and doesn't before you maybe do high polygon count mapping only to find something isn't working for SL. lol

[Sabanco]

Bout the mapping. Thats the right way. Testing, testing, testing...screaming.

 

Tried to import my 2012 Scene files and all ended up in maya 2011 crash or reporting an error.(Before you ask, yes ignore version is on^^). Theres sth strange about 2012. Never seen that happening before although I worked with it since Alias depolyed it. I managed to import it via export into OBJ and also in FBX.

Going to tell you more when I found a solution thats working for the uploader.

[Sabanco]

Ive found sth interesting. I updated my Maya version to Service Pack 2 build a cloth and rigged it and get glitches and holes again when uploading it. Then I gave my .MB file to my colleague to see hows her export into dae and what if she and I upload that file. She got sucessful, me not. So I came to the conclusion that its sth with my system or the viewer. I renamed the Firestorm folder in C: "User"/AppData/Roaming and tried again to upload any files i made and everything worked fine! Renaming the folder back and trying to upload the dae files will result again in glitches.

So here we go: I suppose that some files created in maya will corrupt a file in your "Users" folder and this will cause a bug that will affect every dae file you try to upload after that. Everytime this happens: delete your Firestorm folder in "User"/AppData/Roaming.

Im not a programmer so idk whats wrong with maya and dae files but i would like to know if i could prevent sth or not. So I opened a ticket in Firestorm. I will do the same for LLViewer.

Cheers!

[JackRipper666]

Yea wow, can be a headache at times that's for sure. I'm using SL Beta viewer and SL Viewer myself just to help with any mesh/bug issues I might have. Firestorm is really impressive though with what they have achieved staying what seems very current to the SL Viewer even thoughI know everyone hates it lol. I use to hate it to but then I got a Nvidia video card and that solved my extreme lag issues. So lesson learned there no more AMD radeon cards for SL LOL. 

But yea best bet is to contact them I'd agree with ya there. I'm also not much of a programmer just some scripting that I have been learn for more control over characters I create. My progress there though is thanks to these forms lol.

[Sabanco]

Hey yeah alright but the thing was it happened with both llviewer and firestorm. Ive found out they use shared files somehow. it was not the viewer by 100% but a file ive created with blank maya 2012. what was buggy at this time. uploaded it and uploading it caused sth to be writen in the cache files or other files in your roaming folder. and these files inherit you to upload any further mesh dae files without glitches, although they are ok.

weirdo stuff iknow but im not a programmer at all so i cant tell whats exactly causing that probs.

llviewer told me yesterday to download newer version. perhaps that bug will dissappear then but in firestorm it stays for they do not realease so many versions at all.

Edit: in Firestom you can delete the graphics cache. this will also do it.

[Cry Hawker]

I had those spikes cause of the triangulation done before upload. Triangulate before you rig the mesh and see if you still got those artifacts. It helped me a lot to do it that way.