No soft edges on rigged mesh imported from Maya

[Nya Jules]

Hiya,

I've got the following problem:

Usually I press 3, see my non rigged mesh with soft edges in Maya, export it into SL and it's displayed correctly with soft edges.

I tried the same with a rigged mesh, but already in the SL preview window, the Mesh has got no soft edges anymore:

 

The preview of the correctly working non rigged version, it's a simple cube with 2 extrusions.

 

Below the preview after having bound it to skin. Suddenly it's back to hard edges.

 

The way I'm binding my mesh to the skin:

 

Has someone got an idea of what I might be doing wrong?

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

It looks like the subdivision / smoothing edges wasnt applied when being exported into the rigged version.
you could either apply your subdivision or smoothing modifiers already in maya and then export it. 

Or depending on which Maya- DAE exporter you are using look if there is any apply option for the modifiers in the stack.
Which is also important to make  the calculated weights on the only virtually existing vertices become 'real', otherwise all it has to relate to, is the existing vertices of the non subdivided object.

[Rahkis Andel]

You're working with a subdivision surface. That only affects the object while you are editing it in maya. When exported to collada to bring into second life, one of two things can happen to make it stay smooth:

One, the subsurf becomes applied and the vertex data is permanently subdivided. Two, the subsurf is simply lost and you go back to the original shape.

I'm not sure what is causing the difference here because it really doesn't matter if it's rigged or not. I don't know how to apply the subsurf in Maya, but if you do, that's all you have to do before exporting. In Blender, our .dae exporter automatically applies modifiers for us, which is nice.

[Rahkis Andel]

Can't win 'em all.

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

nope you can't =) but hey it's not about the winning anyways it's about the helping, hehe

[Nya Jules]

Oh okay I didn't know that, so far I was of the opinion that I'd save vertices if I don't apply a subdiv and it's just a matter of configuration settings. Thanks for your help

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

no problem =)

And no, apperently when you exported it first it clearly applied the subdivision. Thus you could see the model 'as is' in the preview window.

SL itself has no way of knowing or handling active / un applied subdivisions. And no own subdivision tool or function to use.

Means you allways have to apply it and make it real somewhere along the modeling process. Either before exporting, or with some exporters (which have an option for that) while exporting.