Mesh Uploading Issues [error: material of model is not a subset of reference model]

[Ngozi Faith]

Ok, so I've been practicing rigging mesh for a few weeks and have been able to successfully upload models in the past. Recently, I've been having some uploading issues. I get this error message, "material of model is not a subset of reference model"

I've googled this to see what it means but I'm still not clear on a solution.

I've rigged the mesh in Maya 2012 and a few days ago, I was able to upload the same rigged model with no problems. The only thing I've done differently this time around was that I imported the non rigged model in Zbrush 4 to for sculpting. Then I exported it back into Maya for rigging.

I notice when I exported the model to .dae in Maya the object appeared jagged and I have no clue why. I uploaded it anyway just to see if it would work and it did. After that, I went back to maya and added smoothing (by 1) to the object and tried to upload the model again and I got the error message.

I don't know if its Zbrush causing this problem and since its the same model I doubt the poly count has anything to do with it. Any suggestions is much appreciated, thanks in advance.

[Drongle McMahon]

Did you try the reset button in the uploader?

[Ngozi Faith]

Yes I've tried resetting the mesh upload and continued to get the same error. I even relogged a few times as well as switching viewers but I still have the same issue. I'm at a loss of what to do.

[Drongle McMahon]

Trying to narrow down possibilities....

A couple more questions - Are you supplying LOD meshes or are you using auto generated LODs? If you are supplying LOD meshes, have you checked that they have the same materials in each one? Is your model just one mesh object, or more than one? (that would be separate objects in Blender, nothing to do with contiguity within a mesh. I don't know the terminology in Maya.)

If you like doing some digging, you could also try ...

If you have collada files for your LOD meshes, search them for "<triangle", "<polygon" and "<ploylist". These lines should have an attribute like material="xxx" before the closing ">". Note what the "xxx" are for each one in the order they appear in the file. This can indicate two kinds of problems that can give this error: (1) if the same materials have been given different names in the different files. (2) if these sections that define the geometries are in a different order in the different files. (The latter can cause the error if objects have different materials because it leads to the wrong associations of objects at different LODs.)

[Ngozi Faith]

Yes, it is one object and I currently use auto generated LODs. I believe I'm using the same material. So I wonder if during the import/export process from Zbrush back to Maya causes this change. I noticed when the model was not imported into Zbrush the .dae file size was 1.4MB. After importing/exporting from Zbrush the file size jumped up to 28.2MB.  As you can tell I'm still learning lol. Thanks for your quick responses!

[Drongle McMahon]

That rules out several possibilities. It can't be wrong mesh association at different LODs, and it can't be wrong material names because you only have one file. Unfortunately, I can't immediately think of another reason that I have experience of*. However, 28 Mb is HUGE, suggesting that Zb has wildly increased your vertex count. What does the uploader say the vertices are for all the LOD meshes? There is a limit of 65536 per material. You shouldn't ever go anywhere near that though. LI would be prohibitive.

*Unless you are using a very old viewer, or maybe some TPV viewer?