rigging a mesh ...newbiie problem

[MilaChristensen]

hello everyone

i'm trying to learn rigging in maya ..but I'm having some problems..  i follow steps by steps tutorials but when i try to upload it in second life i have skin option disabled ..that mean that i have do something wrong, but i have i a doubt where the problem is ..

All the tutorials i saw begin from one point like it showing in this picture

it seems  like the mesh object is transparent and the skeleton Appears under the mesh before they bind it

 

but my skeleton it not appears like the picturre but it not appears at all under my mesh object ..so can this be the problem? how i can i fix it please ?

 

[Cathy Foil]

The reason you can see the joints in the photo you provided is because they have "X-Ray Joints" tuned on.
It is just a display setting and would not cause the skin option to be disabled in the Second Life upload window.
You can turn on "X-Ray Joints" it is under the "Shading" menu.

There are a bunch of reasons why you may not be able to upload rigged mesh to SL.
There are 159 bones in the SL skeleton now. The maximum number of bones any single mesh can be rigged to is 110 bones.
You may be over that limit. Another possibility is one of the bones you have rigged to is misspelled or one or more the letters does not have the appropriate upper or lower case.
Open up your DAE file in a word processor program. Do a quick search for the following:
Joints-array" count="
Count = will tell you the total number of bones your mesh is rigged to. After the count you will see a list of bones. Go through the list of bones and see if you can find any of the problems I mentioned earlier.

I also suggest try rigging something that is super simple.  Create a cube and move it over the head.  Then select the mHead bone and shift select the cube and do a quick Smooth Bind.  Then export out your DAE file and try to upload it to SL.  If the skin option in the upload window is still disabled then there is probably something wrong with exporter you are using.

Hope that helps. 
Cathy