Male mesh rigging issue

[Psistorm Voxel]

I've lately come across a problem rigging parts for an avatar. I have digitigrade lower legs that are supposed to seamlessly join with the male avatar shape at the knee. So I made sure the vertices are correctly aligned, and i took the weights from the only source available to me - the old old old rigged mesh female body.

Except today i discovered that this creates a very visible gap between the lower legs and the SL body. This gap does not occur on the female version of those legs. So this leads me to believe that the weights on the knee are different for the male and female avatar meshes. And yes, I rigged the male legs to hte male skeleton and the female ones to the female. Still the seam persists.

Since I can't ship the product this way, I need to find out what the correct way of rigging seamlessly to the male body is.

If someone has an OLD - not the fitted mesh rigs, those are actually weighted very VERY wrongly - SL avatar file with the rigged, correctly weighted male mesh, that'd be appreciated greatly. Or if someone could point me to a correctly weighted template mesh for this. Thanks!

[Gaia Clary]

1. The male mesh has exactly the same topology as the female mesh, and both have the same weights. I am pretty sure about that.
2. The fitted mesh avatars from LL do not have "wrong" weights, they have different weights optimised for the fitted mesh bones.

I am just guessing here, but i believe that your problem is related to the fact that the male avatar technically uses a different default shape as the female avatar. But the SL Importer does not care about male/female and it assumes the imported mesh is always based on the technical Avatar rest pose, which happens to be defined for the female Avatar mesh.

So in short words, adjust your male mesh to the female skeleton, then import to SL and hope that setting the male flag will adjust the mesh for you in the correct way.

 

[Psistorm Voxel]

Hmm that's a good pointer, thanks. So you are suggesting I snap the edge vertices to the female body, but keep it rigged to the male skeleton?

And well, the files from the wiki on fitted mesh have very, VERY bad and wrong weights. the entire chest area is done very badly. I imported it into SL once, and it had problems all over in that area. Had to do a lot of cleanup for my purpose. But I'll try that, thanks again!

[Psistorm Voxel]

So after some experimenting, I've come to the following results:

• Male leg shape and male skeleton - nope
• Male leg shape and female skeleton - nope
• Female leg shape and male skeleton - nope
• Female leg shape and female skeleton - nope

So.. unless I'm missing something big, rigging attachments seamlessly to the male body is actually impossible?

[Gaia Clary]

So it is time to provide an example file, so we can see what you are exactly doing ...

If you happen to work with blender you can use http://pasteall.org/blend which is a trusted source (it is hosted by a blender developer, so at least i trust it)

[Psistorm Voxel]

I exported the male body, skeleton and the legs in question as FBX for you, hope this helps:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qjcmiun3zogjjvi/Male%20Legs.FBX

This is all male btw, so what I tried initially because it made the most sense

[Gaia Clary]

The fact that you provide an FBX lets me think you are using Maya or 3DS. I have no experience with these tools (I am from the Blender Fun club :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2: ). So maybe someone from the Autodesk fun club can chime in now ?