New creator, distorted rigged mesh

[wolf Rosea]

Hello, I'm very new to rigging meshes and my understanding of the COLLADA format is limited.
I do not have Avastar and use Blender exclusively.
I have modeled a robe for the Solarian Avatar (later tried to rig it to the default male body from the wiki only to be met with the same issues)
I have been tweaking around with the uploading options for hours and I still cannot get my mesh to upload properly. ) :
All help is greatly appreciated!

The joints seem fine in the mesh preview when uploading, the mesh faces the same direction as the armature in the preview when skin weights are deselected.

So far I have tried :
general 

• Working with the model facing the X axis in Blender
• Applying all transformations
• Parenting the robe to the armature using automatic weights
• Cleaning up the unused vertex groups with a plugin
• Cleaning up the seemingly unused vertex groups by hand
• Getting rid of all vertex groups attached to bones that start with "m" (like mWristLeft), as suggested by a tutorial
• Entering the custom properties recommended on the Avastar website before exporting into the armature and robe alike
• Object>Clean Vertex Group Weights
• Object>Limit Total Vertex Groups

exporting

• Exporting using the SL rigged mesh preset
• Storing bind info + not storing it
• All Global Orientation options with Z as the head + apply global orientation checked and unchecked combinations as well

in-game

• skin weights, joint position overrides
• include joint positions  = non-identity bind shape rot. mat is { -0.46309, 0, 0, 0; 0, -0.91281, 0, 0; 0, 0, 1.51221, 0; 0.0213797, -0.0024529, 1.00136, 1 } bind_rot { 0, 0, 1, 0 } in the Log menu
• "Warning: bind shape matrix is not in standard X-forward orientation." apprears no matter what I do with the model or with the exporting global orientation options.

Solarian avatar specific

Since the Solarian blender file that comes with it seems to have an Avastar specific rig I have tried:

• Rigging with automatic weights without any modifications
• Removing all bones that start with a capital letter, like Pelvis, then renaming all the ones that start with "a" from Avastar to their normal counterparts
• Removing all bone constraints

 

If any further information is needed, I am more that happy to provide. Thank you so much in advance.

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

Well, initially I didn't think it was possible to export a SL-usable .dae file from an Avastar-specific save file using vanilla Blender, but I tried it again just to make sure I don't mislead you, and I actually succeeded. The only steps you mention that I had to follow were reorienting toward +X (and applying) and exporting with bind info.

Color me surprised.

What's the nature of the distortion? Can you post a screenshot? Deflated limbs and chest indicate bad or missing Fitted Mesh bind info. Limbs zig-zagging or swung forward and back are an orientation problem.

Regarding

Quote

Getting rid of all vertex groups attached to bones that start with "m" (like mWristLeft), as suggested by a tutorial

and

Quote

Rigging with automatic weights without any modifications

You don't want to do either of these. If you're making clothes to fit a dev kit body, your first step once your clothes are modeled is to transfer weights from the body to your clothes, then maybe do some fine-tune painting.

Quote

Removing all bones that start with a capital letter, like Pelvis, then renaming all the ones that start with "a" from Avastar to their normal counterparts

The only bones SL cares about either start with "m" or are in ALL_CAPS. (Well, plus attachment point bones, but those aren't intended to be weighted to.) Anything else in your armature is added by Avastar for its own internal use and excluded from the export. If your mesh is actually weighted to these non-SL bones, I suspect Avastar does internally during every export what you manually did yourself.

If the dev kit rig lacks SL's m-bones, I'm not sure you can reconstruct the basic SL skeleton simply by renaming Avastar's internal-use bones. There could be all kinds of subtle internal transforms it puts those through behind the scenes.

[wolf Rosea]

On 6/12/2021 at 1:17 AM, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Well, initially I didn't think it was possible to export a SL-usable .dae file from an Avastar-specific save file using vanilla Blender, but I tried it again just to make sure I don't mislead you, and I actually succeeded. The only steps you mention that I had to follow were reorienting toward +X (and applying) and exporting with bind info.

Color me surprised.

What's the nature of the distortion? Can you post a screenshot? Deflated limbs and chest indicate bad or missing Fitted Mesh bind info. Limbs zig-zagging or swung forward and back are an orientation problem.

Regarding

and

You don't want to do either of these. If you're making clothes to fit a dev kit body, your first step once your clothes are modeled is to transfer weights from the body to your clothes, then maybe do some fine-tune painting.

The only bones SL cares about either start with "m" or are in ALL_CAPS. (Well, plus attachment point bones, but those aren't intended to be weighted to.) Anything else in your armature is added by Avastar for its own internal use and excluded from the export. If your mesh is actually weighted to these non-SL bones, I suspect Avastar does internally during every export what you manually did yourself.

If the dev kit rig lacks SL's m-bones, I'm not sure you can reconstruct the basic SL skeleton simply by renaming Avastar's internal-use bones. There could be all kinds of subtle internal transforms it puts those through behind the scenes.

I copied over the vertex weights from the model itself as you mentioned and it seems that it's looking a lot better, but it's still crushed and distorted.
This is without any further changes.
By the way, I forgot to mention that the clothing moves just fine in Blender in pose mode.
I also tried copying the vertex weights and getting rid of the vertex groups that were not being used and it didn't change much
I will attach the results below.
 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

That looks like missing Fitted Mesh info from the way the chest and biceps pull in. I'm not sure what the fix is if exporting with bind info didn't work. That's how I succeeded with the Kemono dev kit.

Is the Solarian kit free access?

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

On 6/11/2021 at 3:17 PM, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Well, initially I didn't think it was possible to export a SL-usable .dae file from an Avastar-specific save file using vanilla Blender, but I tried it again just to make sure I don't mislead you, and I actually succeeded. The only steps you mention that I had to follow were reorienting toward +X (and applying) and exporting with bind info.

Color me surprised.

I was wrong.

My export worked because the dev kit mesh had no Fitted Mesh weights. (I presume it relies on Avastar to auto-generate them during export.) I tried a different one and it failed the same way as yours.

Edited June 15, 2021 by Quarrel Kukulcan