Smooth weights no longer smooth in-world

[Adele Bumblefoot]

Hello all.

I have been pulling my hair during the last 6 days trying to resolve this on my own to no avail, I'm at my wit's end. 😢😢😢

I am rigging my clothing item (an ancient roman himation, think of it like a huge shawl) in Maya 2022 where the weights appear smooth. When I move the arms and legs in Maya, the mesh stretches and bends smoothly, it looks fine.

Once I upload it to Second Life, any part of the mesh that is affected by the weights of the arm (any part of the arm armature) gives jagged edges all of a sudden.

I have checked the bones of my skeleton one by one for transformation accidents (scale, rotation etc) but all is exactly like the original bento skeleton from the website.I tried exporting as FBX 2011 and making it into DAE 1.4 in case that was the problem, no difference. I went to the ground level to avoid the bug I read about deformations when over the ground level, again no difference. I tried using the official SL Viewer, again nothing changed.

I also noticed that when a clothing item had weights from both mBones and BONES, then the jagged edges would only disappear if I removed the mBones' influences completely, in previous clothing pieces I made, but this time removing mBones' weights doesn't fix it.

What would you suggest I try next?

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

This is a longshot: do you have any verts weighted to more than 4 bones? The SL animation engine is limited that way, so if you export & import something with more than 4 weights on some verts, some bone influences will be erased when the overloaded verts are stripped down to 4 weights.

[Adele Bumblefoot]

39 minutes ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

This is a longshot: do you have any verts weighted to more than 4 bones? The SL animation engine is limited that way, so if you export & import something with more than 4 weights on some verts, some bone influences will be erased when the overloaded verts are stripped down to 4 weights.

Thank you very much for the response and the reminder about this, I will check that and report back in a new post in a few hours.

[OptimoMaximo]

2 hours ago, Adele Bumblefoot said:

Thank you very much for the response and the reminder about this, I will check that and report back in a new post in a few hours.

When issuing the smooth bind command, make sure to set the max influences to 4, maintain max influences checkbox ticked on and normalization set to interactive.

Alternatively, the newly released Mayastar 7 does it all for you with a single button click, as well as a copy weights feature with another single button click, all tailored and optimized for SL.

Edited October 26, 2022 by OptimoMaximo

[Adele Bumblefoot]

27 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

When issuing the smooth bind command, make sure to set the max influences to 4, maintain max influences checkbox ticked on and normalization set to interactive.

Thanks for your answer OptimoMaximo, I have the first things you mentioned right except the normalization I have to Post. Could you please explain what's the difference between the two in layman's terms?

[OptimoMaximo]

3 hours ago, Adele Bumblefoot said:

Thanks for your answer OptimoMaximo, I have the first things you mentioned right except the normalization I have to Post. Could you please explain what's the difference between the two in layman's terms?

Interactive normalization means that Maya automatically scales the weights on any given vertex so the total always amounts to 1.0 and no more,  upon brush stroke time.

Post instead let's you work with weighting that you paint freely, regardless of the total amount of weights, which at this point can sum up to more than 1.0. The word "Post" refers to the assumption that the user will run the normalization manually after the fact, or it's going to use an automated normalized version that results from the current weighting (but this is reserved to Maya internal usage, for example animation caching and Arnold .ass files export and kick operations... Yeah not a joke, in Arnold the standalone renderer needs Maya to "kick.ass export" 🤣 but I'm digressing... ) 

Edited October 26, 2022 by OptimoMaximo

[Adele Bumblefoot]

22 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Interactive normalization means that Maya automatically scales the weights on any given vertex so the total always amounts to 1.0 and no more,  upon brush stroke time.

Post instead let's you work with weighting that you paint freely, regardless of the total amount of weights, which at this point can sum up to more than 1.0. The word "Post" refers to the assumption that the user will run the normalization manually after the fact, or it's going to use an automated normalized version that results from the current weighting (but this is reserved to Maya internal usage, for example animation caching and Arnold .ass files export and kick operations... Yeah not a joke, in Arnold the standalone renderer needs Maya to "kick.ass export" 🤣 but I'm digressing... ) 

Thank you very much for taking the time to explain this! From now on I am going to only be working with Interactive normalization since...

 

On 10/26/2022 at 8:46 AM, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

This is a longshot: do you have any verts weighted to more than 4 bones? The SL animation engine is limited that way, so if you export & import something with more than 4 weights on some verts, some bone influences will be erased when the overloaded verts are stripped down to 4 weights.

I have been working on the rigging after that and this response and I am back to report that with 4 influences I get no jagged edges. 

I also found out that although I had begun with the male bento skeleton file straight from the website, importing more rigged items had given my skeleton a problem (transformations in the bones I am assuming) where if I wore a female shape my clothing looked right in-world, but when I switched back to male (I am making something for guys) it was distorted. 

I began anew using a Developer Kit file and that problem went away too.

 

Thanks from the bottom of my heart for the help and reminders!

[OptimoMaximo]

6 hours ago, Adele Bumblefoot said:

I also found out that although I had begun with the male bento skeleton file straight from the website, importing more rigged items had given my skeleton a problem (transformations in the bones I am assuming) where if I wore a female shape my clothing looked right in-world, but when I switched back to male (I am making something for guys) it was distorted. 

The difference between a male and female skeleton sits in the scale value of the mJoints and scale+position values for the collision volume joints. So if you import an fbx file, in the import options, you will see that the default operation is "add and update animation",  which means "add whatever isn't already in the scene, otherwise if same name is found in the scene, update its animation data".

So I think you started with a male, imported something made on a female, the bind pose took the latest updated skeleton and therefore bound your stuff to the female avatar.