Tiny / miniature rigged meshes (Maya)

[CashMoneyMan]

Searched around a bit but can't find anything helpful. Only a dead thread that had no answers.

I'm having problems getting my tiny rigged meshes uploaded. Using Maya 2012.

I've seen the blender videos about scaling the rig. Tried it in maya. nothing. Tried it again and Killed the non-Deformer history. Exported both directly from maya and from FBXconverter 2011.3.  Still it's just the standard size.

Bone offset has worked fine but now I'd like to get just a standard proportioned tiny rig uploaded. any ideas of what to try next or even better if someone knows exactly what to do?

Thanks!

 

Edit: actually, Could someone post a picture of either there avatar not wearing an alpha layer or their hidden avatar while wearing a tiny rig. Does it just bunch up the unalphad avatar? I guess offsetting all the bones manually might have the same effect? It's too late now and my mind isn't working right. Thanks again.

 

 

[CashMoneyMan]

I scaled down the the old rig + model and built a fresh copy on top of it. (guess I could just scale the rig and model before skinning it. Guess Ill try that next)

 

Ignore the mangled body. Didn't paint any weights (or spend any time on that model, for that matter)

 

I'm not exactly a rigger so I'm sure there's more efficient ways of doing it.

[kayla Mekanic]

sorry i don't use maya, but i'm trying to make a small mesh avatar too, do you know where i can find those blender videos?

[Gaia Clary]

I have created such a tutorial some weeks ago for Blender 2.49:

    http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avatar-workbench-tiny-avatar/

But meanwhile you can safely use Blender 2.61 plus the SL Collada-1.11 Exporter (see the sticky thread at the top of this forum) it works as perfect as with Blender 2.49b (Maybe i should redo the tutorial for Blender 2.61 now

[Cathy Foil]

I'm using an older version of Maya.  The way I got it to work was to detach the skin from the skeleton first. Then scale down the skeleton and "Freeze Transformations".  I then scaled down my mesh and did "Freeze Transformations" to it.

After that I weighted the skin again and then exported both the skeleton and mesh like normal.  I then opened up the DAE file in a word processing program and set the up axis to "Z" and saved it in the original DAE format not TXT or RTF.  

If you already weighted your mesh to the original skeleton and don't want to have to go through the process of reweighting it as smaller mesh get a free plugin called "Comet".  With it you can save the weights as a file and then apply them back to the mesh after you have detached the skin and scaled the mesh smaller.  Note: The plugin is only for Maya 6.0 through 2008.  http://www.comet-cartoons.com/maya.html

Once you saved the weights from the larger mesh and detach the skin you will have to weight the smaller mesh to the smaller skeleton first before reloading the weights of the larger mesh version.  When you go to load the file that contains the weight information you will get a warning saying that the file already exists and are you sure you want to replace it. Say YES.  This is just a small glitch in the plugin. You are going to be clicking on the Loading Weights button not the "Save Weights" button which you did when you saved the weights of the larger mesh before Detach Skin process.

Now I am assuming anyone reading this can upload a normal size weighted mesh to SL.  Uploading a weighted mesh to SL from Maya is not covered in this Reply.