skinned model in maya. How to use as an avatar?

[lacluna]

Hello. I am happy because I can import my meshes from maya into SL. Now I want to import a character. I already have rigged and skinned it for something else. how can I transfer that into SL? Are there any good tutorials somewhere?

[Chosen Few]

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lacluna wrote:

I already have rigged and skinned it for something else.

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That's likely to be a problem.  SL only supports one skeleton, the one that is already in the avatar.  That's the skeleton you have to use for all your rigs, if you want to bring them into SL.  If you already rigged your model with some other arbitrary skeleton, you'll need to unbind it from that, delete all history from it, and then properly bind it to the avatar skeleton.

To bring the avatar skeleton into Maya, you've got two options.  The first is you can either recreate it yourself, from its description in the avatar_skeleton.xml file, which you can find in your SecondLife\Character directory.  The other is you can grab an existing one that somebody else already made.  The one I use was donated to the community by Reed Steamroller, and I can atest that it works perfectly.  I took the liberty of hosting it for free download, at abbloch.com/slmaya/skeleton.ma, since the forum thread where it first appeared was a bit meandering, and has long since been buried.

 

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lacluna wrote:

Are there any good tutorials somewhere?

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You can read up on the basics, at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Exporting_a_mesh_from_Maya.   After reading through it, if you have any questions, come on back here and ask.

By the way, do your best to mentally disregard the ridiculously high poly counts of the example garments in the pictures.  Whoever posted those isn't exactly a genius when it comes to optimizing for realtime usage.  If you're smart, the poly counts of your own garments will be just a tiny fraction of the ones depicted.  When I find the time, I intentd to replace those examples with more practical ones, assuming nobody else doest it before I can.

 

 

[lacluna]

Hi Chosen Few. Thank you for your answer. I was trying to get in the samplebot.dae and even if I when I clicked "skinned weights" I couldn't wear it properly, it was just another lifeless attachment.

 

There is a "joints" option as well can you bring your own joints? what about the people that have animal avatars that walk in fours or body shapes that are different?

 

BTW the http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Exporting_a_mesh_from_Maya link is empty.

 

Thanks for your help