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Messiah and rigged mesh


Jackal Ennui
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I've been trying to get a rigged mesh out of Messiah but am kinda stuck. Here's what I've managed to do so far:

- Imported the SL avatar bvh, using the BVHreader plugin from here: http://setuptab.com/index.php?topic=33.0
 (using Messiah's built-in importer makes it crash on that file)

- Imported the SL avatar obj

- Targeted the AV object with a "bone deform" effect to rig the mesh, following the procedure outlined at http://www.eggswhyzed.com/messiah_docs/generalinfo_mocap.htm bottom of the page (Replacing the character makes Messiah crash). At this point, I can succesfully move the avatar mesh by manipulating the skeleton bones

I then exported the scene as fbx (including Bones data) and used Autodesk's free fbx to dae converter to get a Collada file. (Messiah has Collada export, but according to the Messiah forums it is somewhat buggy, so I didn't want to risk it). The file uploaded properly, but without rigging.

So I compared this dae file with the simplebot.dae from the SL wiki. It looks like my dae file is completely missing the "library_controllers" container, which has all the bones information. To double-check whether the problem was with the exporter or with the original scene, I took the Butch_01 sample scene that is included with Messiah, exported that as fbx and converted to dae file, again with the Autodesk converter. This time, the dae contained a "library_controllers" container, which looked similar to the one in the simplebot.dae file. (Obviously I didn't try to upload it to SL, as the skeleton in that sample scene is nothing like the SL avatar skeleton).

This makes me believe that I am missing a crucial step in the rigging process, since the already rigged sample scene generates a dae file with all necessary parts but mine doesn't. I know a lot of SL folks took advantage of the Messiah promotion earlier this year, so I hope someone has some good tips or pointers on how to proceed from here :)

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As great a deal as Messiah was, Blender is free!  And the armature that people are using successfully to skin with their meshes on the beta mesh is a blender file you can download from Gaia Clary's Machimatrix website:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/blender-meshes-trail/meshes-overview/

I'm not sure what the advantage is of redoing the work in Messiah, as opposed to Blender, but perhaps you can export this armature from blender in a format acceptable to Messiah for rigging your mesh.

(I'm no expert here, and perhaps this should be the same as the bvh model, but I'm guessing if that was the case, everyone would be doing it :P)

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Hey Nacy,

Thank you for your reply. I have the blender file, but there does not seem to be an obvious export/import path to get the fully rigged model from Blender to Messiah. Believe me, I've tried :) Alas, Messiah does not import fbx or dae files. From what I've gathered on the net, importing the obj file and the bvh rig separately seems to be the way to go. As to exporting the armature from Blender - that basically is the same as the bvh file, plus information as to the mesh weighing, but Messiah takes care of that last part automagically.

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Sorry I couldn't be of more help.  I do have a copy of Messiah, but I haven't cracked it open yet since I'm very comfortable with Blender.  Having tried mostly unsuccessfully (and believe me I'm quite a beginer at this) to rigg my avatar shape I extracted from SL in Poser,  I've learned its no easy thing starting from scratch.  Someone else with animating skills may jump in here and if I learn anything messing around with Messiah, I'll chime back in.

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I messed around with Messiah this afternoon for a while.  I didn't experience the crashing you described with exporting in  fbx or its collada version.  That's the only good news.  I was able to skin the avie to the armature captured from the bvh file, but I too was unsuccessful in exporting this data.  Tried in Blender and in SL..only got the mesh.  Frustrating, but it works so well in Blender you might use Blender to skin your mesh to the default armature and reserve Messiah to send out BVH data.

In blender its very simple to copy the bone weight data from the armature  via parenting  wiith just a bit of clean up  needed and there's also a script to copy the bone weights from one mesh to another from the objects menu.  To date you can't get fancy with the bone structure, the mesh has to conform to the bones from basic avatar.  I haven't found it at all difficult to deform them into other sizes/shapes and I'm a beginner at all this.

Good luck!

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Small update .. I was doing the effect targetting wrong, which was causing the skeleton not to show up in the export. Also, for whatever reason, the imported bvh ended up having 24 bones, instead of the 21 SL expects. After editing the skeleton in Messiah and exporting with Messiah's Collada export - not going the FBX / converter route, that led to the mesh viewer crashing on upload of the collada file - I managed to get a rigged mesh into SL:

5681737706_3c7973762b_z.jpg

Well, if you squint and don't look to close it looks like a proper avatar, right?! Not giving up yet ... and no, not ready to switch to Blender either ;)

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Jackai, this looks like the rotation problems that max and maya users were having at the start of the public mesh beta. If you look up the old forum archives maya best practice you should find a link to the maya skeleton fbx, it may help you work out whats going on. To import properly it was on it's side and rotated 90 degrees in the app. 3ds Max was the same but also had a world Zup axis issue. I don't think its much use rotating the bones after they are linked unless the traslations/xforms are reset to zero.

In the DAE you may be able to adjust using the SID translation tags inside the   <library_visual_scenes> section

Keep at it and good luck!

 

 

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That's fantastic that you got it to work!  I hope when you perfect it you'll post here the work flow.  I'm still finding blender so simple to use that I'd probably not switch over, but I had purchased Messiah during that great promotion,so it would be interesting to know how it works for this purpose.  Meanwhile I appreciated the challege in trying to make it work, I learned a lot from my unsuccesfull efforts.

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Oblong,

indeed, looks like it's exactly the same problem. Still no progress getting a correctly rotated skeleton imported, but your pointer was very helpful, thank you! Now back to learning more about Messiah, and hopefully figuring things out.

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I made this skeleton which imports with Messiah's native BVH importer/parser. It seems that a Messiah BVH needs to have tabs and spaces between number data also some filler frames rather than nothing.

How does this compare to your file? I havn't done a test upload to SL yet as I am new to the app and just working out the skinning process but it looks right on its side facing the same way as the maya one. I took the data from the viewers avatar_skeleton.xml file and multiplied by 100 so the size was usable.

messiahSLbones.bvh

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Oblong,

that skeleton looks good, and does upload when rigged, though I'm still trying to figure out how to rig it so that the result is not a mess. So far I've only been using the automagic "bone deform" method, but of course in the setup tab the rotated bones do not correspond to the mesh anymore, so the result is a pretty wacky mesh. I suppose one could weight each vertex group individually, or perhaps rig first then rotate the bones, but I'm still going through the docs to learn more about the rigging process.

One ugly gotcha with the DAE export: if I export a scene as DAE and then save the same scene as fxs (native messiah format), the resulting fxs file is corrupted, with all decimal points being replaced by decimal commas. Luckily this can be fixed in a text editor, if one happens to have such a corrupted file, but the easier workaround is to quit / restart messiah after each DAE save. (How annoying ..)

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Thanks Wiz

The BVH doesnt have any data in the animation frames, the file is just to import the bones. I only applied x 100 to make the skeleton a good working size for the viewport. Like the blender export py fix.

Good news for us you are here. Do you have plans for a 'Messiah_SLAV'? scripting seems to be in C

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Rig first and dont rotate might work thats what I had to do in max with the old skeleton. Hope you find it soon without too much frustration. I may be some time,, as I am way behind you trying to work out where evrything is. )

Finding it quite confusing so far, whenever I go to the setup tab all the bones move around but in all other tabs it looks right. wasnt like that yesterday. Anyway if i can work this UI out I might even be able to have a go at blender.  Lol

 

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