Chip Midnight

This may be too late to help but there's no need to start over from scratch. Just save your skin weights and reload them after you've brought in your rig at the proper scale and resized your mesh to fit it. If you want to work on a larger rig just import from SLAV at a scale of 1 and then scale it back up. It will work find so long as you remember to adjust the scale factor again when you import to SL.

There are boatloads of tutorials for rigging in max - just google it. There are a bunch of video tutorials on yourube as well. Also, Max's help file and tutorials are very good and that's where you should start. Read up on the skin and skin wrap modifiers.

I hadn't even thought of changing the system units. Good thinking. Glad you got it sorted

Found the Max solution (Thanks Daniel!): Open the troublesome DAE in a text editor and find the following string <Name_array id="Line008Controller-Joints-array" count="26"> If the number is not 26 you need to add the names of the bones that aren't being used, after the ones already listed. Line008 was the name of my model so substitute the name of your mesh.

Would love know a solution for Max too. I've been banging my head against this for hours now.

Are you using SLAV to bring in the rig? If so you need to set the import scale to 1 instead of the default of 40. To make the rig a usable size in Max you can use select and scale to bring it up to an appropriate size. When you import into SL just make sure to set the scale in the modifiers tab so it's again a appropriate size. So you don't lose your work, save your skin weights to a file. After you've brought in the new correct scale rig and scaled it up and fit your model to it again, do a reset xform on it and collapse it. Then add a new skin modifier and import your weights.

I've managed to work around this problem. It seems to be related to the scale of the model when exporting. I use the SLAV importer for 3ds Max. If I import the av skin and rig at anything but a scale of 1, the model is the wrong scale relative to the bones when imported back to SL. Unfortunately this makes for a rig that's tiny in 3ds Max. I've found that if I then use Max's select and scale tool to scale the model and rig up to an approporate real world scale I do not get the problem with the verts when exporting to DAE. I just have to make sure to adjust the scale in the importer so that it's again an appropriate real world scale (around 1.8 meters tall).

I don't think there's ever going to be an automatic way to do it, though the resuluts would likely be better without haviing to wrap to multiple split objects. That at least will give you a good starting point, but it's probably always going to be necessary to go through my hand and tweak the weights on each vert by hand.

You should be able to do this using the Skin Wrap modifier and adding both the upper and lower body to it. Then convert it to a skin.

Uploading the same dae file with tne new version of the mesh project viewer produces just one vert that thinks it's attached to the wrong leg... on the other leg this time.

There definitely seems to be some issues with the current release and beta viewers. I have a model with three vertices on the inside of one leg that swear they're attached to the bones on the other leg even though they're not. I've checked and triple checked the weight table, reassigned the weights a dozen times, and nothing fixes it. With the same model if I add one level of subdivision and use Skin Wrap in 3ds Max to derive the weights from the lower poly version the legs are fine but then I have several verts at the fingertips that flicker and shoot off to infinity. Same kind of deal. The verts are properly assigned to the bones with a weight of 1.0 but no amount of fiddling fixes it. There's definitely a problem with the current versions of the importer.

Maya and Max are both excellent tools and either one would be a fine choice for creating SL avatars. If that's all you plan to do though and have no other professional need for them then they're probably overkill. Blender is a very capable app and getting more powerful all the time so if price is an issue it's an excellent choice. Software wars are always a bit silly. There are a ton of excellent capable apps out there so a lot of it comes down to personal preference, and in a professional setting what works in a particular studio's production pipeline.I really don't recommend dropping several thousand dollars on software unless you're sure you'll make use of it or you inherited a lot of money - and are aware that learning to be a skilled user of these kinds of tools is a long journey, not something you'll pick up over a weekend. If you're just starting out then grab Blender and have at it. If you take to it like a fish to water then you may want to consider investing in other tools. If you discover you don't enjoy it like you thought you would you've gained valuable knowledge without mortgaging the farm.