Question in relation to compatibility with Rigify and second life

[VirtualKitten]

Hi I am starting my first project in the world of animation and armatures i used the Rigify new armatures for a wolf and after placing bones in right place imported direct into SL at cost as beta site still has no entry  ending up in a building in Adita. This imported successful but I notice none of the  animations I have bought previously work this skeleton to move .Is this a non compatibility bone name convention issue and has this not been resolved in 2.91.2 . I can move the item properly in Blender but this does not seem to transpose to Second life .Am I missing something as others in a group says it doesn't work with Second Life at all they cant be right as this Rigify has just been introduced in Blender 2.51.2  . What do I need to get this to work in Second life Please ?

 

Thanks for looking.

Denise

[OptimoMaximo]

7 minutes ago, VirtualKitten said:

What do I need to get this to work in Second life Please ?

In order to work in SL, the skeleton must have every single bone named exactly as the avatar skeleton AND also respect the same hierarchy structure.

[Beq Janus]

2 hours ago, VirtualKitten said:

Am I missing something as others in a group says it doesn't work with Second Life at all they cant be right as this Rigify has just been introduced in Blender 2.51.2 

They are right, Rigify has nothing to do with Second Life and has no knowledge of the specific skeletal structures used by SL. If you want to make SL targetted animations in Blender then you need to look at the Avastar product instead, or build it manually yourself ensuring that you name every bone properly and adhere to the correct hierarchy as noted by Optimo. Avastar is specifically designed with SL/OpenSim animations and rigging in mind. 

[VirtualKitten]

Uh not again this is becoming ridiculous , why is blender or Second life not getting a handle on this ?

I have now learned to rig on two separate systems and was lead to believe again on nice slick youtube video that blender had now added the software with its utilities and to be fair it was not that hard to rig using it .  The first being bentobuddy harder to use but worked the same. Why does Avastar have control on this import to SL as it appears you are informing me Avastar is the only route and has monopoly?   This is very frustrating Its my first successful mesh I can pose and now you seem to be saying I cant use it as the Rigify names don't suit blender and Second life  if Rigify is so incompatible with SL why did they create and easy system with the wrong bone names? It looks just like the the Linde one you describe as Optimo . Is there not a Rigify translation matrix as Avastar is very very expensive and places itself out of my use with no option to use . I am only having this problem  as a seller on MP has retracted their sale  of contract with me as their product was unfit for purposed and described on MP as something it was not and basically Second life governance think that is is acceptable. Just  closing the ticket! which is very worrying and against its TOS.

Further more avastar is not compatible with 2.91.2 and we all now know you cant save blender files back to 2.78!

Edited February 18, 2021 by VirtualKitten

[Mollymews]

2 minutes ago, VirtualKitten said:

Why does Avastar have control on this import to SL as it appears you are informing me Avastar is the only route and has monopoly?

Avastar doesn't have control nor does it have a monopoly nor is it the only route

the Avastar team are residents, same as the rest of us. What they did was write a scripted toolset with the Blender scripting language, initially for their own use then subsequently released their work as a pay-for product for anyone wanting to buy it

as a resident yourself who does a bit of scripting, I suggest that you look into doing the same. Is quite a lot of people who use Blender (Maya users also) who write their own scripts to do what Avastar does and more

[VirtualKitten]

9 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

In order to work in SL, the skeleton must have every single bone named exactly as the avatar skeleton AND also respect the same hierarchy structure.

Thank Optimo but why didn't rigify do this when it created the slick armature . The public is going to try this as it much easier to use rig using this than anything else that has come before and is available for blender as a bolt on that works with their product  . You all seem to be suggesting Avastar has monopoly how can this occur?

The Rigify mesh looks just like the second life one with a bone hierarchy. I like many other users do not know about this detail of bones when blender is providing this slick new rigging route why has it not somewhat 100 versions on from 2.78 come to grips with this export to Second life dae.

[VirtualKitten]

4 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

Avastar doesn't have control nor does it have a monopoly nor is it the only route

the Avastar team are residents, same as the rest of us. What they did was write a scripted toolset with the Blender scripting language, initially for their own use then subsequently released their work as a pay-for product for anyone wanting to buy it

as a resident yourself who does a bit of scripting, I suggest that you look into doing the same. Is quite a lot of people who use Blender (Maya users also) who write their own scripts to do what Avastar does and more

@Molly I understand you say its not a monopoly but everyone I mean everyone has told me to use Avastar . This new Rigify bolt on to blender 2.92.1 with super slick youtube videos is just what everyone has been wanting  to rig its much easier to use and gives good results quickly . The only draw back to all of your avastar suggestions is that Avastar  is limited to the support for earlier versions of blender . I am not being harsh on Avastar as have never had option to use it . As clearly this is now becoming a new standard why has this not been dealt within export for exporting dae to Secondlife or why are these rigify armatures not using the correct naming conventions ?Linden  really need to get a handle on this in second life as I expect with these new slick videos this will come up with this again. 

[VirtualKitten]

@Molly To be frank if you are going to not make it easy for people to make animated mesh and  animesh  and some of your linden Market place sellers don't sell what they have described is on sale  on Market Place for 3000L how are people using  Secondlife going adopt Animesh  and why should anyone  bother spending weeks scripting for something that still has not become usable  with clear rigging routes its very frustrating and to be honest not workable in practice  ? Seriously if i bought an item on MP and i received order number and delivery  I thought I owned it . Clearly this is no longer the case !

I am very disappointed in this and the waste of my time and hard effort i have put in just to have accomplished nothing! How can you learn something when the tools which are out there are either not available to expensive or to many that it is unclear why they don't work.  Really Linden Labs needs to get a grip on this or they will become disillusioned with this Animesh like how i am becoming .

I visited the Avastar  in world store in world and didn't find much more than with the other  rigging clients .Now how can i pay 11,000 L$ for just another avatar kit deployment like blenderbuddy to do this when two others don't work either . Will you refund my 11,000 L$ if it doesn't I doubt it .

 

This is what it created 

Edited February 18, 2021 by VirtualKitten
to add image

[VirtualKitten]

One last try I am going to rig these:

 

Bento meshes: (without any warranty)

•  Bento Female-2017-01-09 (.blend)
•  Bento Female-2017-01-09 (.dae)
•  Bento Angel-2017-01-09 (.blend)
•  Bento Angel-2017-01-09 (.dae)

[OptimoMaximo]

10 hours ago, VirtualKitten said:

Thank Optimo but why didn't rigify do this when it created the slick armature . The public is going to try this as it much easier to use rig using this than anything else that has come before and is available for blender as a bolt on that works with their product  . You all seem to be suggesting Avastar has monopoly how can this occur?

The Rigify mesh looks just like the second life one with a bone hierarchy. I like many other users do not know about this detail of bones when blender is providing this slick new rigging route why has it not somewhat 100 versions on from 2.78 come to grips with this export to Second life dae.

You're starting from the assumption that Blender is built around SL, when in facts it is not so. Blender is built to be a CG package, and rigify follows. In an animation pipeline you can have joints AKA bones to be named as you like, and rigify provides a standardized set of names that makes a rig asset more versatile in such a production. SL on the other hand is a software where the system has only one character definition and that is written in stone, with all the other parts of the system, like the animation engine, geared to expect that definition, and that one only. That's why the Avastar team, as well as @Cathy Foil, have made a specific set of scripted tools, to get a compliant asset for the SL platform to accept, instead of my random skeleton with joints named John doe, Jane doe and such, because if I wanted to get a character working and running within Maya or Blender with such bone names, I could, even when the skeletal structure and parent to child relationships don't look anything like a general shape for the intended character, since I can build a control rig to make it behave how I want it to. 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

10 hours ago, VirtualKitten said:

Thank Optimo but why didn't rigify do this when it created the slick armature . The public is going to try this as it much easier to use rig using this than anything else that has come before and is available for blender as a bolt on that works with their product  . You all seem to be suggesting Avastar has monopoly how can this occur?

I never got the impression Rigify was intended to make armatures specifically for SL. They'll look similar, sure, but that is only because they're both basic human rigs. SL has exact specifications that must be met when uploading content; you shouldn't expect things that were not designed to that same exact spec to work.

Avastar has a monopoly because it was the first add-on made for a popular free 3D modeling tool that smoothed over the difficulty handling Fitted Mesh bones. (It also handles animation exporting in a straightfoward and better way, which is a separate but also important bonus.) Linden Lab implemented Fitted Mesh in a terrible way; making clothes and bodies with plain Blender that use that feature is hard. To this day there is no officially-provided base skeleton that contains both Fitted Mesh bones and Bento bones (which are different!) and that works with vanilla Blender.

Edited February 18, 2021 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[OptimoMaximo]

8 minutes ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Linden Lab implemented Fitted Mesh in a terrible way

You mean the need for a bind pose capable software, perhaps? In that case, that is Blenders shortcoming. The fact that it doesn't support multiple and/or custom bind poses does not imply that the method is terrible, rather that the software is not on par with all the others. 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

7 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

You mean the need for a bind pose capable software, perhaps? In that case, that is Blenders shortcoming. The fact that it doesn't support multiple and/or custom bind poses does not imply that the method is terrible, rather that the software is not on par with all the others. 

None of SL's other bones need a custom bind pose (whatever that is) -- including the ones that were added to support the same kind of shape deforming to the head that Fitted Mesh bones provide the body. Clearly, LL didn't have to implement this feature in a way that required more complicated software to handle...yes? No?

[OptimoMaximo]

1 hour ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

None of SL's other bones need a custom bind pose (whatever that is)

That is inexact. The whole shape system relies on joint scaling, for which the default shape already is a custom bind pose. The fact that tools like avastar handle that for the user, so that users never see that reflected in the skeleton, doesn't mean that these things aren't in place. Indeed, one of the very first requests made during the project bento development was the absence of odd numbers in the base pose, reason for the mFace joint, the "useless" root of all facial joints, was included with the clear intend and indication to not use it for animation purposes, as it served as reference point. Through that joint, all the scaling operations were performed, exploiting transform inheritance so to avoid single face joints handling, leaving only their offset to be handled individually. 

[VirtualKitten]

Rigify bones are not the same bones as that from second life  boning . I looked and they are all different presumably this is why they don't work . The Rigify rig was better than the bento one i have now but this has manifested another problem. This works  in edit mode get bone alignment but clicking on anything else alters this pose it has not been automatic weighted as yet so why does clicking on part of mesh remove position of this to somewhere else . No one in groups had an answer:

in object mode 

[OptimoMaximo]

1 hour ago, VirtualKitten said:

Rigify bones are not the same bones as that from second life  boning . I looked and they are all different presumably this is why they don't work . The Rigify rig was better than the bento one i have now but this has manifested another problem. This works  in edit mode get bone alignment but clicking on anything else alters this pose it has not been automatic weighted as yet so why does clicking on part of mesh remove position of this to somewhere else . No one in groups had an answer:

in object mode 

Judging from the skewed appearance of those bones, I would suspect that there is some scale transformation involved while editing the skeleton structure. Once imported the skeleton, move the bones in edit mode just by actually moving them, don't rotate or scale to ease the placement process. If you do so, when switching back to object mode, things should stay put in place. 

Also, you may want to either reset or apply rotation and scale on the skeleton before you even begin reshaping. As I mentioned in a earlier post, the default avatars, both male and female, already show some shape sliders adjustments. Resetting will shrink them down a little, as the scales will be reset, while applying will keep the overall proportions, turning the scale back to 1 on all axis

[VirtualKitten]

When i try and make the automatic weights this completely disfigures the mesh entirely. I am going to try drop box blender file to you in world if you would be so kind to have a look

Edited February 19, 2021 by VirtualKitten
i forgot something

[VirtualKitten]

Hi @OptimoMaximo i send you my blender file in world by transfernow.com  link its in your IM box now I would be grateful of your kindness if you could take a quick look and let me know what is wrong please ?

[VirtualKitten]

@OptimoMaximoHi again, I have been trying to think what I did with Rigify which was differant . I remember I deleted the bones, I was not using and with this bento one I was told to hide them. This consists of four feet and other facial lip and eye brow bone components  not being currently used . Could these bones be the problem and how is best to remove them temporarirly or must they be deleted like when I rigged with Rigify?

 

Thanks for looking. D. xD

[VirtualKitten]

Oh well i removed the bones like i did in Rigify that I wasn't using it did not help either in fact it remained the same between object  pose mode and not with edit mode . in fact restoring them with Shift + H did nothing to help, neither did deleing the bones I haven't used. Considering this is the default bent skeleton made for second life and am using 2.91.2  is this likely to be a fault in blender?  or something else I did send @optimomaximo my blender file in world  by a transfer program on line but have not heard anything so far.

[OptimoMaximo]

7 hours ago, VirtualKitten said:

@OptimoMaximoHi again, I have been trying to think what I did with Rigify which was differant . I remember I deleted the bones, I was not using and with this bento one I was told to hide them. This consists of four feet and other facial lip and eye brow bone components  not being currently used . Could these bones be the problem and how is best to remove them temporarirly or must they be deleted like when I rigged with Rigify?

 

Thanks for looking. D.

Sorry, but 8 don't log in that often. Moreover, I'm no longer acquainted with blender since I dropped it many years ago by now. Rigging is a matter of concept and that is what my comments were founded onto. The specific technicalities within blender may slip off from my grasp now, so I don't think I can be of much help anyway. 

[VirtualKitten]

Hi @OptimoMaximo

 

I tried to change the rigify bones to the same name as bento angel starting on the ring finger end mHandRing3Right I opened the outliner and could not edit the bones names or any useful properties. currently [outline data operation][Select|Deselect|Hide|Unhide|New Collection|paste Data Blocks|View[Show active|Show Heirachy|Show one Level hide One Level]]|Area[etc misc  to change view]] This currently leaves no way to make this without creating or having the knowledge to create a skeleton from scratch its very poor please get it together second life and make this easier for others who are not as talented as the gods of riggers cant make things too. Thank you

Edited February 26, 2021 by VirtualKitten

[VirtualKitten]

I still don't have an answer how to get this completed if i save for the thing in world costing 11k lindens will this be of benefit to get this working please?

[Kyrah Abattoir]

If your mesh cost 11KL$ to upload you *****ed up somewhere when preparing your files.

I'd save those 11KL$ and put them towards buying an avastar license.

[VirtualKitten]

@Kyrah Abattoir no avatar cost 11L$ its to expensive for me at present  the failure i have on import is on another thread .