Maya to SL rigged mesh twisting up

[Satu Moreau]

So I worked one problem out and now I have another. When I try to upload a rigged mesh av from Maya to SL, it twists it up. All the joint rotations are at 0.

It should look like this

 

But ends up like this

[Satu Moreau]

This was fixed by using a different skeleton someone linked me to, but now I have a new problem. It doesn't rearrange my av's proportions to that of the skeleton, instead stretching the skeleton and mesh to fit the av.

[Azriel Drumheller]

Satu, can you link us that skeleton?  Thanks!

[Cathy Foil]

Sorry wrote the following response before I saw you got it fixed with a different skeleton:

Looks like your skeleton may be facing the wrong way.  The front of the skeleton should be facing X.  Detach the skin and turn your skeleton 180 degrees around.  You will of course have to spin your mesh 180 degrees as well.  Freeze your mesh and delete its history before skinning it again with Smooth Bind.

Here's a link to another skeleton you might want to try. http://abbloch.com/slmaya/skeleton.ma

I found it in a post by Chosen Few.  He said he got it from Reed Steamroller.

I hope that helps.

[CashMoneyMan]

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Satu Moreau wrote:

This was fixed by using a different skeleton someone linked me to, but now I have a new problem. It doesn't rearrange my av's proportions to that of the skeleton, instead stretching the skeleton and mesh to fit the av.

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Did you just scale down the skeleton? I've been having to rebuild the skeleton to get something that's smaller than the default. In SL I then left all the appearance sliders on 50. It left my rigged model slightly stretched which was annoying. I didnt feel like playing around with the sliders or attempt anything else after that as it was all just got too much and I had to step away from it, heh. Gonna get back to it soon and see if I can get it perfect

Let us know if you work it out and what you did

[Cathy Foil]

Hi CashMoneyMan,

You will be happy to know that Satu and I worked out all the problems and in fact I think I can help you as well.  Well at least you won't have to keep rebuilding the skeleton each time you want a different size avatar or have joints in different positions and or rotations from the standard avatar skeleton.  I am going to copy and paste a reply to another posting on another thread that I wrote giving detailed instructions on how to do this in Maya.  

You will be happy to know that Maya can indeed change the joint positions and import them into SL.

I remember reading someplace that you can't rotate joints but that you could only lengthen or shorten the joints.

This turns out not to be entirely true.  

You can rotate the joints and put them anywhere.  I haven't tested all the joints yet so there may be some limitations but none that I can find so far.  Anyway it is true that if you rotate a joint it will just export with zero rotations anyway but this turns out to be the key to placing your joints any place you like with Maya.

First rotate the joints and lengthen or shorten them till you get the skeleton in the position you need.  Then you need to "Freeze Transformations".  Basically what you are doing is making all the joints have zero rotations in their new positions by freezing them.  First time I tried this on a joint that wasn't the pelvis bone I got this error "Error: Freeze Transform was not applied because my_rig:mTorso.translateX has incoming connection.".  If you get that error what you have to do is the following: 

In the channel editor you will see all your channels Translate X, Y Z, Rotate X,Y,Z etc.  If they are all highlighted with like a pink or orange color or grayed out then they have connections to them. 

Click the top on then hold shift and click the bottom one "Scale Z" to select them all. Now right click on them a menu pops up select "break connections" The highlight color should disappear. 

Now you can select the Pelvis joint and "Freeze Transformations" and all the joints will have zero rotations.  At this point I delete history for the skeleton and mesh.   After that you can "Bind Skin" with  "Smooth Bind" and export your mesh and skeleton as normal. 

I hope that helps.

P.S. You can't "Freeze Transformations" of the skeleton with the skin attached.  What I do is with the meshes skin attached I move my joints to where I want them. Meaning I rotate and or lengthen or shorten them.  The mesh will move with the joints.  This means you can scale the mesh bigger or smaller or into new positions just by editing the joints.  Then what I do is "Delete History" of the mesh.  This detaches the skin and the mesh is now in its new position.  Now you can do a "Freeze Transformation" on both the joints and the mesh.