SL Collada, The mesh fix for Blender

[Gaia Clary]

Hi, all;

After a lot of talking and tweeking and experimenting and sleepless nights and a looot of coffee... Here is a programmed workaround for one of the most disheartening Blender Collada issues, the Export of rigged mesh with or without Joint offsets.

The tool comes as a Blender addon module (Works with Blender 2.59, 2.60, 2.61). It does some weird magic in the background but at the end it creates working Collada Files. It also supports armatures in "blender orientation" (character looks towards you in Front view, thus symmetry tools work with it):

The full story (and the free download) can be found at the Avastar/Mesh page on our Blog. We wish you all a happy and joyfull new Year.

Gaia, Magus, Domino

[Chosen Few]

Spamming again, Gaia?  Geez, some people never learn.

Kidding, OF COURSE!

 

Seriously, you and your team are amazing.  It's truly remarkable what you consistently do to benefit the community.

I have yet to get joint offsets to work at all for me.  I haven't really had a chance to sit down and figure out if it's something I've been doing wrong, or if SL just doesn't like the COLLADA files that Maya is putting out, in that respect.  It's nice to know that if it's the latter, there's a workable solution via Blender.

Thanks for all you do.  (Now, if only the Maya community had more people like you guys, who would script up a storm, every time there's an SL-related usability issue...)

[Siddean Munro]

Oh this is good news, will definitely check this out first thing tomorrow!

[Gaia Clary]

I found a bug, which slipped in during my cleaning up of the code and which affected joints offsets. I just fixed the issue and posted a new version of the addon to our Blog ( SLCollada-1-4.py )

Many thanks to Raz Welles and Eleanora Newell for reporting the issue.

 

[Betty Doyle]

Thank you so much for this, Gaia.  I seem to have hit a snag with the latest script update though.  1.3 was fine, but I can't get 1.4 to enable after installing.  When I click the checkbox, nothing happens.  I'm using Blender 6.1.

[Gaia Clary]

sorry, that was a missing ",". its fixed by now. just download the file again.

[Betty Doyle]

Thanks!

[MaxTux Wonder]

Great job Gaia, you deserve a mesh statue!

[Drago Artful]

My... my hands.... My shoulders! They no longer retract into my body! Thank you Gaia for this glorious gift of anatomical correctness!

[Murgatroyd Zauberflote]

EDIT: Nevermind.  I should have done some more digging before I posted.  Apparently I needed a 2.6 compatible armature as well.  Downloaded the one from the site and everything works now.  Sorry!

 

So I must be doing something wrong still.

I've made a mesh avatar (yay) in blender 2.49b.  Rigged it, exported it with 2.49b with no problems.  Uploaded it and it works pretty much as expected.  I want to use the more recent versions of Blender, but I keep running into problems with rigging.  I thought maybe this script would fix it.  The av is no longer sideways, but now all of the parts are rotated wierd.

The left arm is correct, but all the rest of the body parts are rotated 90 or 180 degrees from their joints, so the fingers of the right hand are pointing to where the elbow should be and the legs are sticking out at 90 degree angles from the hip, etc.  I applied the rotation on the armature and the mesh, rotated to Blender orientation.  I then tried rotating everything to face right, for SL orientation and tried exporting again without the z -90 rotation, but I got the same problem.  I'm using the skeleton from the avatar.blend file and, as I said before, the rigging works when i use 2.49b.  So I don't really know what the problem is.

[ohmarie]

Where can i dowload sl collada 1.3 like this tutorial?? See only sl collada 1.1 on your website Gaia. Thank you

[Gaia Clary]

Hi, ohmarie;

The link is correct. The version is now at 1.11 You need to scroll down a bit since the mesh tools section of Avastar is evolving rapidly at the moment

[ohmarie]

Thank you Gaia !