Seeking tips/advice/knowledge/tuts/whatever for 3DS max

[SeraphInquisitor]

So, I want to create mesh products for SL. I know the basic for 3DS Max, I can model decently bla bla bla.

 

But I have NO idea how to make stuff for SL. I saw some posts about standard size, resources, and some other stuff that my mind already erased from my mind.

 

So I'm wondering if any of you could give me some pointers and what not regarding standard sizes, skinning, resources to import to model around, etc etc.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Going by your question you're especially interested in rigged mesh, so first you need a rigged avatar with skeleton.

Standard sized armatures you can download here. There aren't any .max files included, so you will have to import the fbx files. Because the mesh is rigged to the bones and not the avatar skin, one size won't fit all avatars, at least for now. The same is the case for these five sizes, but you'd certainly reach a bigger group with these.

For smooth deformations, I'd copy the skin weights from the avatar to your build, then paint in the details.

In general that should be it I suppose, you could spice up the avatar with a free skin from this site.

[SeraphInquisitor]

So the workflow I should be going for is..

Model > Unwrap UV > Make different copies and re-scale/re-fit them to the other sizes > skin > export. Right?

 

Another question. I tried making a test dummy avatar (boxes and cylinders), unwrapped and skinned, export to .DAE, and it worked as an avatar. Then I tried making an attachment, just another box, rigged to random bone (Left elbow in this case), followed the same exact steps, and when uploaded on the viewer, the skin weight option is greyed out. What changed?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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SeraphInquisitor wrote:

So the workflow I should be going for is..

 

Model > Unwrap UV > Make different copies and re-scale/re-fit them to the other sizes > skin > export. Right?

 

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Pretty much, I'm not all that experienced with rigging to be honest, but I suspect you can re-use the weights. That would mean you can

model (around the most neutral avatar size) -> unwrap -> skin -> refit to other sizes (rescaling is a tricky choice of words here, although you can rescale at vertex level) -> export

If you can't directly do this I am pretty sure you can make a copy of the weight map in the skin tools. The vertex amount and order won't change as long as you just move them around, so it should be a copy paste kind of situation.

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Another question. I tried making a test dummy avatar (boxes and cylinders), unwrapped and skinned, export to .DAE, and it worked as an avatar. Then I tried making an attachment, just another box, rigged to random bone (Left elbow in this case), followed the same exact steps, and when uploaded on the viewer, the skin weight option is greyed out. What changed?

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It could be missing bone names in the dae file. A complete avatar uses all 26 bones in 3ds max, but a box tied to one bone does not. There are multiple ways to add the bones, all explained in the wiki I posted earlier. I haven't had any luck with the "bonefixer script", so you might want to try the other options.