Maya 2011 Rigging Mesh Problem.

[Cry Hawker]

There are many people who rig and upload Meshes using Maya. I figured the modelling and texturing out but i can not find a solution for the "greyed out weights box" in SL. I follow the instructions of the tutorials especially the one by Sae Luan and Create Mesh Step by Step and it doesnt work at all. I cant even figure out where the problem is as sometimes the box was available and the upload did work but as soon as i tried it again with "serious" work it fails. It seems to be erratic. I tcant be complexity or anything as not even a simple box works. Here is my work flow.

 

I use Maya 2011 64bit with FBX exporter.

 

Open the standard size scene for Maya 2011.

Import the model i would like to rig.

Delete history. Freeze transformation.

Select the skeleton. Select hierarchy. Then shift-select Model.

Chose smooth bind box with selected joints, closest in hierarchy and removal of unused  influences turned off.

painting weights using the paint weight tool

select model > export as DAE_FBX Export.

Editing dae to meters.

Upload in SL = Weight box greyed out.

 

It doesnt matter what model i use. It can be a simple box. It wont be able to upload it with skin weights. Any help would be highly appreciated. I tried as well upload with the skeletton. Same outcome.

 

 

 

[Leviathan Flux]

Not sure if this is the only issue, but one thing I see, you are exporting by clicking your model and then exporting.  When you export, you need to export with the skeleton.  Try clicking the model, then shift+click the pelvis of the skeleton, then export.  Also if you are using the fbx converter, you should export as fbx instead of dae_fbx.  If this doesnt work.  Another common issue can be if the skeleton has any of the joints changed, either their name, rotation, etc, and can be an easy problem to overlook as sometimes you make a change and save over your original file not realizing.  

[Cry Hawker]

It works with a specific scene it seems. I did remove skin weights by flooding every joint with zero weight and used just the few i use for my boot. And there it worked. I got a parsing error but it was an issue with the metric scale i changed using a , instead of a .

Now there is another problem. I wanted to make a pair of boots but the upload is more then weird. It shows one boot only but it should be two. When i rig the boot to the other leg it turns up with a small version of itself in the upload. There is no documentaion whatsoever about this and i am really confused. When i add weights it should be duplicate the boot no?

[Leviathan Flux]

If you want to make a pair of boots that are identical, you can make one, then dupliate across the center axis with a scale of -1.0, then freeze transformations to set scale back to 1.0 and then reverse normals as this should invert the faces (unless you have it set not to).  You should end up with the UVs inverted and shaded red in your UV Editor.  Then you can combine the boots and the same texture should fit each of them.  When you rig it, you can rig one then mirror the weights to the other, then export as one object.