Bad Joint Positions

[Rahkis Andel]

Here's the latest progress in my saga. I'm doing a test upload for all of the work I did in skinning this mesh. I'm happy with how it looks in blender, but aren't we all?

As you can see, all of the joints are misaligned.

Meanwhile, in Blender:

Looks fine, doesn't it? Well, here are some of the answers to the inevitable offscreen questions:

The objects are all facing the correct second life direction. None of the objects have any unapplied transformations/ rots /scales. I used the rigged mesh presets and otherwise set everything up correctly for export.

It's obviously an issue somewhere in some or all of the bones -- some might have an odd roll or...something? I don't know. Any help?

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

the only thing i can see being really 'offset' are the legs.
the little variance at arms / ellebows etc just comes from your mesh being parented differently to the aramture (like the distance from the skin to the bones etc)

The legs clearly have an offset since you obviously decided to parent to an edited T-Pose (split legs)
Things can go funky sometimes in that case.

I normally try to only move bones in plain orthographic views. (No rolling at all, just move the tails or tips of the bones) and stick with the rotation / rolls which results from those moves.

The mesh itself looks like its behaving correctly accordingly to how it was parented to the changed armature. I normally ignore the underlaying avatar after those steps because it will of course look out of place / deformed with the changed bone positions.

 

But some consideration in addition. If you don't want to make own custom animations for that avatar, you prolly want to stick with the leg positions and arm positions to the original SL skeleton's t-pose and model your mesh to fit that one. otherwise you will allways have these extreme split-legs and different reactions to certain poses with your model, thus being in need for custom anims. So i'd rather not suggest working with a changed armarture for humans. (unless you don't mind the extrawork for creating a full custom AO for them) unless it's just changes in the bonelength but roll and positions stay exactly like in the original t-pose.

So in your case i'd rather redo it, and make the model fit exactly to the straight untouched T-Pose of the default armature and then parent it again.

[Rahkis Andel]

Thanks Codewarrior.

You're right - the arms look okay and the mesh seems like it walks along with me just fine as I move, except for it really makes my avatar explode and my custom mesh walks in splits.

That brings up a secondary question, after I take off the mesh, my avatar stays all...crushy looking. His eyes pop out of the top of his head and his legs break in 3 places. It's rather bizarre and hilarious. I have to log in and out to get it back to normal. Is there a simple explanation?

But anyway, it's odd. I did just as you said -- I only moved the bones in front and side view from the endpoints as you described. I must have messed something up somewhere along the line. Little mistakes are somewhat easy to make without noticing, I suppose.

As for the t-pose and the custom AO thing, yeah. It makes sense now. SL has no idea what I intend for it to do with my customized version of it's skeleton. For the record, though, this is a test project for me to learn the entire process, so I actually sort of am willing to make a custom AO for it, just for the sake of learning how.

In practice, though, It wouldn't make sense to do that for something that is already no different than the default avatar. I will probably not be doing this yet if I don't absolutely have to.

Now, when you say "redo it" I'm not sure what it you're referring to. Naturally, I've no intention of remaking everything.

You have given me an idea, though. I'm not sure if it will work, so I'll report back with the results and leave it at that rather than try to explain what I am going to do now.

Edit: Okay, it worked fine so I'll explain now.

All I did was use my current armature to easily put my mesh into the default T-Pose and applied the armature modifier to "freeze" it in place with the deformations applied. Then I imported a fresh version of the SL armature and parented my mesh to that instead. Finally, I added a new armature modifier to my mesh and set it to respect the fresh SL armature. It recognizes all my weights just fine, as I expected. The bones are all named exactly the same, after all. It even moves pretty naturally considering the bones are not lined up to the mesh properly.

I'll go ahead and redo the bone positions now, which I'm thinking is what you were talking about, Codewarrior.

Thanks again.

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

hehe yeah that's exactly what i meant by redoing. Just bringing the mesh itself into a straight tpose, then freshly parenting to an untouched rig  and then redoing the positionings etc- as you did : )