Avatar Upload missing bones, UV maps when exporting from Maya

[drgnkpx]

I've gotten about as far as I can with this and it's just the most frustrating thing really. I have a skeleton model I built from scratch and rigged it using the provided Bento skeleton .ma file, but when I upload it to SL on the beta grid, it appears to be completely missing a bone in the torso area, and the UV maps appear to have been rebuilt, as texture files for normal maps don't work correctly. At least the model uploads and functions in game, but I can't seem to find a solution to the missing bones and textures. OpenCollada no longer exists, the file links on github are all gone. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Fritigern Gothly]

8 hours ago, drgnkpx said:

OpenCollada no longer exists

You can download it via Archive (dot) org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190430122323/https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/opencollada-promotion-artifacts/COLLADA-MAX-PC_Max2019_v1.6.68.zip

Or just compile it yourself. Instructions are at https://github.com/KhronosGroup/OpenCOLLADA below the list of files.

Edited November 9, 2019 by Fritigern Gothly

[OptimoMaximo]

Regarding the UVs not coming through as expected, what may have happened is that you did not delete history after mapping was done and before Rigging was started. In such case, exporting the mesh with all of those construction history nodes gives out a broken UV map. To fix it you can use edit menu, delete by type, delete non deformer history. 

[drgnkpx]

16 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

You can download it via Archive (dot) org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190430122323/https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/opencollada-promotion-artifacts/COLLADA-MAX-PC_Max2019_v1.6.68.zip

Or just compile it yourself. Instructions are at https://github.com/KhronosGroup/OpenCOLLADA below the list of files.

That link is for the 3dsMax version, and I can't compile the source code as I can't install visual studio. 

 

8 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Regarding the UVs not coming through as expected, what may have happened is that you did not delete history after mapping was done and before Rigging was started. In such case, exporting the mesh with all of those construction history nodes gives out a broken UV map. To fix it you can use edit menu, delete by type, delete non deformer history. 

I made sure to do that before and after rigging, and checking the objects there are no more nodes that can be deleted. The UV maps don't just not turn out as expected, the textures are entirely missing unless I tell SL to map by planar and even then I have to mess with the scale settings to get anything to show up at all. 

I'm going to try and rebuild the weights in blender and see what happens later.

[Fritigern Gothly]

2 hours ago, drgnkpx said:

and I can't compile the source code as I can't install visual studio. 

You don't need VS, just Cmake (as the instructions say). Get it from https://cmake.org/download/

Edited November 10, 2019 by Fritigern Gothly

[OptimoMaximo]

11 hours ago, drgnkpx said:

I made sure to do that before and after rigging, and checking the objects there are no more nodes that can be deleted. The UV maps don't just not turn out as expected, the textures are entirely missing unless I tell SL to map by planar and even then I have to mess with the scale settings to get anything to show up at all. 

Then it may be that you have multiple UV sets, and only the first one, map1, is taken in consideration by the uploader. In this case, copy the uv from the additional set over to map1 and delete non deformer history. 

About the weights, that behavior may happen if you don't run skin, edit influences, remove unused influences and / or if you don't limit influences to 4 vertices per joint. This latter can be set in the skincluster node (needing a re-check of all weights) or upon binding in the options windows. Also make sure to turn on the maintain max influences checkbox. 

[drgnkpx]

12 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Then it may be that you have multiple UV sets, and only the first one, map1, is taken in consideration by the uploader. In this case, copy the uv from the additional set over to map1 and delete non deformer history. 

About the weights, that behavior may happen if you don't run skin, edit influences, remove unused influences and / or if you don't limit influences to 4 vertices per joint. This latter can be set in the skincluster node (needing a re-check of all weights) or upon binding in the options windows. Also make sure to turn on the maintain max influences checkbox. 

Thanks for the suggestions, all the bone objects were originally grouped together and exported, so the UV mapping might be an issue, but even after combining all the bones in one mesh with one UV map, copying all the weights over, deleting history, removing influences, limiting influences and so on, none of these had any effect on the upload model except for reducing upload cost and complexity because of the combined mesh. So while I'm certain the UV map has only one set now, textures still don't map correctly when uploaded to SL. The only nodes in the attribute editor for each LOD of the model only has the mesh and materials so I'm certain there's nothing left in the history.

I mapped the influences so that only one joint applies to each skeleton bone object, as there's no need for mesh deformation when animating a skeleton. I'm not sure if this would cause any issues or not. I haven't deleted any bones, and I tried mapping the spine and ribs to different joints to no effect on the 'missing' joint. I have seen some custom avatars that have a skeleton object worn with the avatar, but I don't understand why I would need that since the base skeleton hasn't been significantly altered other than moving joint positions to match the exact points of rotation. I don't know how you would upload just rigging anyways.

So again I guess I'll just try it with Blender later. Maya is ridiculously unstable for a 'industry standard' program, crashing over the slightest things.
 

21 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

You don't need VS, just Cmake (as the instructions say). Get it from https://cmake.org/download/

I can run Cmake, but attempting to compile the OpenCollada master just gives me the error, "configuration error, your project files may be invalid", no matter what version I configure VS in cmake, even though the cmake files are clearly in the folder.

Edited November 10, 2019 by drgnkpx

[drgnkpx]

Upon further testing, I found that using the Undeform Avatar menu option corrects the spinal problem, but appears to reset all the joint positions to their defaults, breaking the hand and foot locations, and attempting to edit the shape or wear a different shape reverts the changes.

[OptimoMaximo]

From the look of things, it appears to me that you're not using the mSpine bento family of joints in your rig. Are those joints still in the skeleton even though not weighted? I'd make sure they are no longer part of the skeleton reparenting mChest to mTorso and this latter to mPelvis. 

For the UV map and your screens hot inworld, it seems that each bone has its own texture, but that most likely goes beyond the limit of 8 materials, so that may be a cause. 

As a final note, I wouldn't trust Maya Collada exporter. Not only it takes ages to complete an export, at least on my machine and my type of content, but it's unreliable. The best method is to export using fbx, version 2011, and convert it to Collada using the free fbx converter software (2013.3 is the latest version) 

[drgnkpx]

On 11/11/2019 at 1:34 AM, OptimoMaximo said:

From the look of things, it appears to me that you're not using the mSpine bento family of joints in your rig. Are those joints still in the skeleton even though not weighted? I'd make sure they are no longer part of the skeleton reparenting mChest to mTorso and this latter to mPelvis. 

For the UV map and your screens hot inworld, it seems that each bone has its own texture, but that most likely goes beyond the limit of 8 materials, so that may be a cause. 

As a final note, I wouldn't trust Maya Collada exporter. Not only it takes ages to complete an export, at least on my machine and my type of content, but it's unreliable. The best method is to export using fbx, version 2011, and convert it to Collada using the free fbx converter software (2013.3 is the latest version) 

Well the converter program was useless, and even after I removed the spine bones, which did fix the rigging thanks, the textures were still broken, and no matter what settings I tried, Maya refuses to export the UV maps with the DAE files or FBX files, a warning to anyone who dares to use Maya with other programs lol.

So the solution I finally came to was importing the DAE files to blender which kept the rigging except for a bone parent and some weird roll which I just recalculated, and then I imported an OBJ file which did keep the UV maps, transferred those to the rigged model in blender, and the Collada exporter there worked flawlessly. There was some weird ***** going on with the Secondlife uploader in the previewer, but wearing the model in game appears to work just fine, and all the normal map textures finally work.

Thanks for all the help, hopefully now that this nightmare is done I won't have so much trouble with future uploads.