[Blender / Second Life] SL import ruins rigged mesh's weight.

[Bobb2]

Hello there.

I am a 3D artist and while I don't use Second Life at all, I'm currently giving computer graphics lesson to a SL user. His goal was to be able to create his own meshes, rig them and export them to the game. Being done with the modeling and rigging process of project, I tried to import the whole thing into SL. And that's where it stops to work.

To make things clear : the model is a fairly low-poly character (less than 8k faces). I manually re-created the SL rig from a basic male avatar I found in the game's documentation. Blender's auto-weight tool gave me a decent result so I went to export it with COLLADA (I enabled the "export rigged mesh to SL" in the options) but as soon as I try load it into the game, the weight painting gets totally degraded and the mesh is barely recognizable. The character is rotated 90° along the Z axis, I tried to separate it into three parts (lower - upper body - head) but I can't seem to get it working. So, if anyone could give me a hint, I'd be very grateful, thank you !

Here are a few screenshots to make things clearer :

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/104288 (static mesh import - OK)

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/104287 (weighted mesh import - broken)

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/104289 (complete bones hierarchy)

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/104290 (viewport snapshot)

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/104291 (fully rendered / posed character)

[Medhue Simoni]

First, I would get rid of that rotation, by Applying Scale and Rotation.

2nd, the SL collada file will only accept 4 bones weighted to each vertice. You likely have more than 4 bones per vert, and the system is choosing only the top 4 bones with the highest weights.

[Bobb2]

Hi, thanks for your answer ! The rotation was already applied when I exported the mesh, so I assume it's not part of the problem. I wasn't aware of the vertices limitation, though. I'll give that a try with a manual weight painting and let you know how it turns out.