Zero Weighted verticies on rigged mesh thrown out

[Windancer Farslider]

Situation:

Rigged a plane to a skeleton in blender. Used envelope wieghts. Check out the posing in Pose Mode... Looks good.

Export COLLADA...

Go to Firestorm, Mesh Upload.

Looks fine in the preview pane.... until I click the Wieghts box. Then only the wieghted pieces show.

Upload anyways... just because...

And lo-and-behold, only the parts of the mesh with non-zero wieghting render. The vertices without a wieght have been removed.

Why am I doing this you ask? "Special Effects"  Replace the plane with a spider web... as the victim struggles the parts of the web touching the avatar pull and stretch with the struggle, but the anchor points remain static. There are other applications of having the zero weighted points still render for effect...

So, my questions are

1) Intended behavior? If so, can it not be intended?

2) Is there a work around to this besides wieghting al the vertices to non-zero values?

3) Is this just something on exports from Blender?

 

Thank you

 

 

[Gaia Clary]

In Blender there is a small difference between "zero weighted" an "not weighted":

 

• zero weighted means the vertex appears in one or more weight groups, but all its weights are zero.
• not weighted" means the vertex does not appear in any weight group.

 

Second Life ignores vertices (and associated faces) when they are not weighted. That is why you see only the weighted parts of the mesh appear in SL. Normally the SL Importer "should" reject meshes when they contain "not weighted vertices (but see below).

Currently (up to Blender 2.66) you could simply add vertices with weight zero to one or more of the bone weight groups, and the SL importer is happy and the faces get visible again. But Blender will probably change how it organizes weights and maybe it will no longer allow zero weighted verts at all.

However you can import not weighted vertices to SL by adding them into an extra weight group (which is not related to the bones). Then the SL importer accepts the vertices as weighted, imports the mesh, ... and forgets the extra weightgroup. And you end up with the situation that you describe.

 

[Windancer Farslider]

The SL uploader seems to ignore zero-wieghts (set the verticies to 0.0 weights to the knee) the same as if they were non-weighted.

 

I am not seeing a way around this limitation of rigged mesh.