Problems when trying to import a rigged mesh

[omnesvanitas]

Hello people. So my plan has been to make my avatar from scratch. This is my first time doing something like this.

After I finished my rigging and weight painting in maya 2013 I decided to see if I could upload it in SL.

I exported it from maya as collada but that didn't really work because it lacked the joints and such as in they were greyed out.. So I got myself an FBX converter and exported the model from maya as FBX then converted it as a collada that should work with SL.

It loaded a bit and I got a strange error: Material of model is not a subset of reference model.

I assumed it had to do with my materials of my model, but I only had the basic lambert since I can't delete it. I did delete my texture earlier on so that I can add it later on to the mesh. I googled about it and I found out stuff about it doing something with the LOD's but I haven't set up any levels of detail since I'm only going to let it generate them for myself.

Another problem I had is that joints and skin weight are greyed out in the SL importer. I also googled this and found out that I need to set the joint number or something like that via notepad or a similar program from the .DAE file to 26. I did that but that didn't help it. 

Those were the errors I've been working on for now. But there are others that have been very unclear to me. Such as:  Mesh model failed to upload: The model contains no meshes. And something about a control block. 

I've also noticed that I've been using collada 1.4.1 which I'm not sure if it is supported by SL. So I downloaded older versions of FBX converter but I've gotten nothing but even sillier results. Seemed to turn my model into a kite.

Also if I used the newest FBX exporter to make a dae, it works just fine if imported to maya but it lacks all the joints and skin weighting in SL.

This is pretty much everything I can sum up to a readable size about what I've been experiencing. It might be that I knackered up the entire rigging process. But I'm not so sure if that is the case entirely.

And here is some extra info: I first used maya to create the basic mesh, then gave it detail and textures with UV's in ZBrush then goZ'd it into maya back and rigged it. Then I skinned it and tested it out extensively inside maya. And what I'm using is Phoenix Firestorm so I'm not using the default one. And for some reason my rig likes to strike an interesting pose after I've exported it as collada in maya. But that was not the case when I export as FBX to later convert to dae. And finally there is the last thing bothering me: when I was making the rig, no matter what I did the arms always seem to not be paraller to the X axis, whatever that means. (http://gyazo.com/2ddd08b82767ff3a7c123a02ac2af32d.png) 

I hope that covered most of my problems.

[Medhue Simoni]

First let me say that I know almost nothing about Maya.

The texture issue is likely that you don't have any texture on it. You don't need to make LODs, at this point, as you are just testing this out, and the uploader will do it for you, as long as you have a texture applied to the object.

As for the rigging issues, I can't say much about Maya. I rigged my 1st character in 3ds Max, and that was about as big a headache as you are having. Luckily, my rig worked out. I just made another avatar and this time, I modeled it in 3ds Max and then did everything else in Avastar, which is a Blender plugin to rig and animate character for SL. If you really want to make avatars for SL, I would suggest getting Avastar and learning a little about how to use Blender. Some other people have gotten Maya to work, so maybe they will chime in.

Maybe this link will help also: http://www.autodesk.com/products/fbx/overview

[omnesvanitas]

Avastar sounds really interesting, I'll look into it right away. Thanks.

 

The reason I removed the texture was because in the preview screen it was really messed up so I tought I could save some lindens in the import by not including the texture and applying it later, if that would work.

[Medhue Simoni]

You can choose to not upload the texture. Actually, that is the default.

[Cry Hawker]

I gave up rigging with maya. I rig with blender importing the obj files. I know maya 2010 works just fine if you want to rig but i dont have that version. Maya 2011 and above are causing problems. Some people dont have them. Some people have.