Chip Midnight

I'll have to experiment with changing rotation order on the bones in Max. If the problem is strictly that it might work. If the issue is the orientation of the bone axes that's probably not fixable since skin vertex weights are axis dependent. If you try and change the pivot orientation of a bone on a skinned character it will also rotate the verts assigned to that bone even though the bone itself doesn't rotate. I don't think it's possible to make a max file from 2013 compatable with Max 8. I can only save for backward compatability back to 2010. We'd probably have to go out as fbx and use the standalone fbx converter to convert it to an eariler fbx version. Any idea if the Max 8 fbx plugin can be upgraded and if not what fbx version it is?

You can search for just name_array and that will find the section you need to edit. No need to type in more than that. You can also just paste the entire list of bone names at the end of the bones already listed and that will work fine. If some bones are listed twice it doesn't matter.

There's no way to get a working SL animation directly out of Max except for your exporter. The only other option was PuppetShop and that's gone now. I've used your exporter for some stuff and it works well, but the idea of going out to MotionBuilder is to be able to animate directly on the rigged character and go out to BVH. That becomes especially important when working with tinies and non-human avatars that need to take the size and shape of the mesh into account. The other option is to use MotionBuilder to retarget the animation created with the original rig in Max to a separate SL compliant rig, bake that and export as BVH. The only downside of that is that it's more work than being able to take the animation straight off the original rig and loses some accuracy. That's the route I'll be going for now. It is possible to get SL compliant BVH out of MotionBuilder. It seems the issues are entirely rig related and it's kind of bizarre that a rig that works for exporting a working mesh avatar won't work for animation. What I don't know if that's an issue with Max specifically or with SL. Are Blender users able to use the same rig for Collada export and BVH export?

Here's a link to a BVH That was created with a SLAV rig, rotated 90 degrees to face front (SLAV rigs are created facing right in Max). Bones were renamed, a sample mocap file was mapped to it and baked back to the skeleton, then exported as BVH. I tested it in Poser with an SL figure and it was a mangled mess.

Abu! You live! Good to see you again. Wasn't sure you were still around. I think you may be right about rotation order. Looking at the BVH files for the default avatar animations they're all written with a XZY rotation order. The BVHs I'm getting out of MotionBuilder are written with a ZXY rotation order. There must be some kind of workaround. Why must everything be so bloody complicated?

I'm trying to figure out a workflow for creating rigged avatars in 3ds Max, exporting them to MotionBuilder for mocap and animation, and then out as bvh for SL, and I've run into a confusing problem. I've been using SLAV for my bone rigs in Max which creates bones that have Y as their length axis. These work fine exported as Collada for SL so I'm guessing that for imported rigged meshes SL expects Y as bone length? When trying to use these rigs for animation though everything goes haywire because it seems that for animation SL expects X to be the bone length axis, which is what pretty much every animation package, game engine, and Poser uses. Does anyone have any insight into this discrepancy?

There are some modeling apps out there that are easier to learn than Blender, like Wings3D. I'd recommend giving it a try, not necessarily trying to make something for SL but just to see if you enjoy it. You might find it's less intimidating than you think which may give you the confidence to try something like Blender for making SL clothing. It's not necessarily more difficult than good texture painting. It's just a different set of skills and like anything else it takes a lot of practice. Start small. If you try and go from not knowing mesh modeling to trying to make a decent clothing item that's a sure recipe for frustration.

It's kind of hard to believe that there's nothing out there for Max but Autodesk wants you to use FBX and then use MotionBuilder for retargetting and conversion. Wish I could afford the full suite.

The only other option I know of was Puppetshop by Lumonix. It was a commercial product, then was free for a while, then went commercial again, and then went away completely when the developer was hired by Autodesk. As far as I'm aware it was the only commercial plugin for Max that would export Biovision format. There doesn't even seem to be anything on ScriptSpot for doing it. I've tried to adapt Abu's rig to something at the right scale for working with SLAV but without any luck so far. I know others had turned it into a full FK/IK rig or adapted it to Biped but nothing that was ever made available AFAIK and I haven't spent much time playing with it, though I have used it to do some straignt FK animations. Not sure whatever happened with Wiz's BVH exporters for Max and Blender. There's no mention of them on his blog. Just the youtube videos.

Another thing you may want to try is adding an unwrap UVW after the boolean and checking the mapping on the faces you're having trouble with. Your geometry may be fine but the boolean may have hosed the UV mapping on the parts where your testure isn't showing up.

Thanks, Peggy It seems incredibly strange having a post count of only 50! haha. I'm back around and creating content again so I should be sticking my head in the forums more often.

UV mapping controls the way the texture wraps onto the surface of the model. Here's a video that explains the basics:

You always want to try to have your models consist of only as many polygons as absolutely necessary for two reasons. First because it impacts framerates and viewer performance for everyone in eyeshot of your object, and second because the higher the polygon count the higher the land impact and the less stuff you'll be able to have on your land. Typically what you do with an object created in a sculpting app like Zbrush or 3D-Coat is to sculpt the high resolution model with all the details and use that to generate a normal map to be applied to the low polygon version. You can use that to render the object as if it had all the detail and generate specular highlights and shadows accordingly. Or, when we get normal map support in SL which is coming in the near future you can use that directly in SL. If you compare the two pics you posted of the cake with the deocrative piping on the side. The top one has all the nice shadows from the piping details, but that detail isn't really necessary to describe the overall shape of the object. You just want to end up with those details in the shading of your texture map.

You can use Zbrush but you don't want to use models from Zbrush for SL because of the extremely high polygon count. You'll want to retopologize it first. The latest version of Zbrush has an auto-retopo feature. (http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Topology_and_Reflow_Lab) 3D-Coat also does automatic retopo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEnwxnNMPk4). Other than that you'll need to remodel it manually. retopo in maya: retopo in Blender

Bentley Squeegee wrote: Just a question, is there some where to view unseeable faces? maybe the face that is causing this problem is somehow invisible in the viewer? its a rather confusing situation as I have used boolean many times before and its imported just fine, yet I have tried remaking these boxes twice now and nothing has changed... On the display panel uncheck "Edges Only" to be able to see hidden edges in wireframe views or shaded views with edged faces enabled. If an edge you were depending on to separate material IDs shows as dashed instead of solid recreate it (if working with editable poly) or select it and hit "make visible" (if working with editable mesh). You can check for errors like double faces, double edges, double verts, and missing faces using xView which you can enable in the + menu in the upper left of the active viewport. You can also check for errors using the STL Check modifier.

Booleans can be messy and sometimes create unnecessary faces, double edges, double verts, or remove edges where you actually want them, and other weirdness that the converter might be having trouble parsing. I'd convert to an editable poly after the boolean and do any neccessary cleanup then manually check your material IDs, Make sure you aren't losing edges that are needed to separate your mat IDs.

I tried that, and tried adding reset xforms to all the bones after resetting their scale and stretch. It still comes in huge. There has to be an issue with the original scale of the rig and I'm just undoing whatever it was I did to make it the correct scale to begin with. Max is pretty awful with the way it handle's scaling at the object level. The one thing I haven't tried yet is changing scene scale but I'm probably going to have to bite the bullet and start with a new rig I think.

You can also export your current worn shape as an XML file from SL and get it into Maya with Wiz Daxter's SLAV. http://wiz-bg.blogspot.com/ I'm not sure what Maya versions it supports but you could use the Blender version and go from there to Maya. I think Avastar can do this as well, and there may be other tools out there.

Well that worked sort of, Oblong, but in the wrong direction. I ended up with a mesh av about 15 meters tall, lol. Maybe I scaled down too much and it went the other way. At least it actually changed the rig scale that time so I'm on the right track. I'd completely forgotten about reset scale in bone tools. I didn't want to start with a fresh SLAV rig since I'm experimenting with an avatar I've already created. Thanks for the pointers, both of you.

Has anyone figured out a workflow to get a tiny av out of Max? So far I haven't had any luck. I tried to follow equivelant steps for how it's done in Blender by scaling the pelvis down to the desired scale and resetting xform on it, then exporting the weights from the skin, doing a snapshot of the mesh to get a clean copy at the correct scale, added skin and loaded the saved weights, then exported. I imported into SL with joint positions. The rigged mesh comes in fine but the rig's scale is ignored. It's no different than if I'd never scaled down the pelvis.

You probably already know this but bone names can be repeated without any problems in the array so you don't have to go through and remove the duplicates. Just paste the whole bone list at the end of the array. That's simple enough that you could probably set up a macro with something like WinAutomation to do it.

Nice. I will definitely try that next time. Now if only we could eliminate having to edit the name_array,

So you're going straight out of Max 2013 as DAE? I've not ever tried that since I assumed SL was still using an earlier version of Collada. I've never had any luck with SL automatically bringing in the materials though. I just set up the MatID's and drop the maps on manually after upload.

I've kept doing it because I have no idea what version of Collada the 2013 converter is putting out so I just stuck with what works. I'd try it just for the sake of argument to see if it clears up your problem. I've never had any issues getting multiface meshes into SL,

I'm using 2013 at the moment but my workflow is to export from max as fbx, take it into the 2013 standalone fbx converter and convert it to 2011 fbx, then into the 2011 standalone fbx converter to convert to collada. I think the problem may be the fbx version and you'll need to run it through a newer version of the converter and save as fbx 2011 before using 2011.3 to convert to collada.