Rigged Mesh Upload Issue

[Spibe]

I'm a 3ds Max user, and I'm having to learn Blender just to rig a mesh.  It's all confusing.

I've successfully rigged a mesh within blender.  Posing the parts around it looks all good.  When I upload it into Second Life, I get this crazy deformation issue, along with the inability to upload it into SL anyway.  The first picture is what it looks like when I uploaded it.  (I even included the model in the upload so if you look closely, you can see the avatar to get a better understanding of the deformation.  In blender the dress is attached to the avatar, but when its uploaded it deforms and detaches from the avatar as you can see.

 

I used a combination of a few tutorials to do this.  It turns out one of those tutorials was outdated.  I'm using the most up to date version of blender.  I used this tutorial to match the rigging.  I'm looking for the simplest way to rig a piece, and since it seemed to rig correctly in blender, I would be happy if I can find a way to get this to work right.  Or even better find a 3ds max equivalent of a simple way to rig.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh6RBvoGo-E

I'm just not sure if I might have skipped steps or something, since I'm unfamiliar with blender.  I saw another tutorial for an outdated version.  Where they clicked "Make Real" but with the version I'm using... there is no "Make Real" option.

Also... maybe it's an issue with the collada itself? I'm not sure.  Anyone know this problem?

[Gaia Clary]

The first thing to check is always "Are rotation and scale applied ?" :

 

• Ensure that you are in Object Mode
• Open the Properties sidebar (Press "n" on the keyboard while the mouse hovers over the 3D View)

For each Object:

 

• Select the Object (Right Mouse click)
• (1) Check that Rotation is <0,0,0>
• (2) check that Scale is <1,1,1>

If scale and/or rotation differs for an object, then:

 

• (3) : Object -> Apply -> Rotation & Scale

Note: You could also simply select all parts at once without checking each of them separately, then Object -> Apply -> Rotation & Scale

After yopu have fixed Scale & Rotation:

 

• Select all to be exported parts
• Then File -> export -> Collada /Default
• In the Operator panel (left lower corner of the export window) ensure that the "Second Life rigged" Preset is enabled:
  
  

• And finally export

 

Note that the Presets work a bit funny. When you select a Preset then only the various options in the panel are preset, but you can not see which preset you actually have used. That's a user interface bug (ok, they name it "feature" ).

If that does not help, then looking at the Blend file would make it easy to figure out whats going on.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Spibe wrote:

Or even better find a 3ds max equivalent of a simple way to rig.

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Rigging in 3ds Max for SL is the same as rigging in 3ds Max for any other purpose. You can't use the full biped rig, which has more bones than the SL avatar, but it will work with "normal"  bones. What exactly is the problem?

Everything you need to know to create a rigged mesh can be found in the Wiki.

[Spibe]

It worked!  Thank you so much!  Now I just have to make it not giant.  I scaled the tiny body to match the size of my model that I uploaded from 3ds max, since it was scaled correctly in 3ds max.  I'm assuming I might need to scale it back down to its tiny size?

[Spibe]

Blender has an addon script that allows you to copy the weights from the SL model that you modeled off of.  As far as I'm aware, I don't think 3ds Max has one.

[Gaia Clary]

Some questions:

 

1. Do you have made your own armature or do you use one from a different source like avatar workbench ?
2. Do you want to create a tiny avatar or is it just your model that has a different scale than the rig ?

If you want to create a "normal" character, then do not import the joints to Second Life. Only check "with skin weights".

If you want to create a tiny

For Avatar Workbench and avatar.blend:

 

1. Resize the skeleton in Object mode.
2. Apply Scale
3. Export the mesh AND the armature.
4. In the importer check "with skin weights" and "with joint offsets"

For Avastar:

 

1. Resize the skeleton in Object mode
2. Export the Mesh using the Avastar Exporter.
3. Take care to check the "apply scale" option of the exporter
4. In the SL importer check "with skin weights" and "with joint offsets"

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Spibe wrote:

Blender has an addon script that allows you to copy the weights from the SL model that you modeled off of.  As far as I'm aware, I don't think 3ds Max has one.

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Of course any serious 3d program has such a function. 3ds Max has it by default, it's called skin wrap.

[Spibe]

I thought there would be D:  I'm just now learning rigging.  I saw tutorials on Physique and Skin, and even somewhat got my mesh rigged, but it was a long drawn out process and it didn't even look good in the end.  But because there's not really any tutorials for 3ds max, specifically for SL.  I was having difficulties figuring out how to rig it with 3ds max.  D:

 

Skin Wrap can actually be imported without a problem in SL though?

[Spibe]

I think my issue was, when I uploaded my mesh from 3ds max, I did the stupid thing of scaling the skeleton to fit my mesh instead of scaling my mesh to fit the skeleton.

 

But the avatar i modeled off of doesn't have a fancy name that I'm aware of.  It was just some thing I downloaded that had the default mesh modeling sizes in it.  Maybe it's just avatar.blend.  It was just some ZIP file that contained the 5 sizes.  I think I downloaded it off some SL wiki page or something.  I can't remember.

It should work now that I fit it to Blender's scale instead of 3ds Max's.  Once I get everything uploaded I'll keep you posted :3

[Spibe]

I did re-scale it to Blender size.  The dress itself is fine, but its attachments that are seperate pieces are unalligning.  I mean simple solution would be to just attach everything as one model instead of 3 parts.  But I suppose I like allowing people to re-color the seperate pieces instead of everything being in one uvw map.  

 

 

The picture on top is just showing that it works within blender.  The 3 orange boxes is showing the scales/rotation of the three items (And the skeleton and the model are both the same rotation/scale as well.)  The last picture in the red box is what comes up in the uploader.  I also get a MAV error with one, which might be because there was apparently one "turned edge". when I exported the DAE from 3ds max.  I'm not sure >.<  If I upload just the dress itself without the attachments it works fine though

[Gaia Clary]

I guess you have rigged only the 3 parts of the dress itself ? And you keep the attachments as solid non rigged objects ? If so, then you probably need to rescale the attachments anyways later in SL.

But probably at the end you will want to have the entire dress plus attachments in one set. Now you can do that in a more convenient way (for the customer):

 

1. You can join multiple parts into one Mesh Object and give them (up to 8) different materials.
2. Hence you can join the 3 mesh parts into one mesh object with 3 materials.
3. And you can even join the dress and all its attachments into one rigged part.
4. Each material can use "its own UV map" (well.. not correct technically.... but see below)

Actually one Object can have only one UV map. But since each material uses the entire UV space, you can say that there is one UV "submap" for each material. While UV-submap is not any official term (as far as i know...) it still describes what happens in practice reasonably well.

Here is a tutorial which explains what i mean and it can be done in Blender:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/from-uv-map-to-multiple-textures/

 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Spibe wrote:

 

Skin Wrap can actually be imported without a problem in SL though?

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Skin wrap is a modifier, you can't import a modifier, just like you can't import a "bend" or "twist". You can export the resulting model, which I assume is what you ment. Just add the modifier to your clothing, pick the avatar pieces and it will move with your skeleton. Then for finetuning, which is most likely needed as well, add a skin modifier so you can paint in or type in some corrections. You can upload the result to SL, in my personal experience without a problem.

DAE export and SL import details can be found on the Wiki page I posted earlier.

If you have no intentions to ever rig anything besides SL models, you could be better off using Blender. You said it yourself, there are a lot more residents using Blender and there are a lot more tutorials on the subject. 3ds Max is the industry standard for games though, so if you consider broadening your market past SL, that might be the better choice and time invested will pay itself off.