Bentley Squeegee

haha, Yup I knew the stuff about the materials, and tried everything you had troubleshooted with me before, but nothing worked, The plugin was the issue, For some odd rason I never thought it applied to 2013 silly me. Thank you so much

Hello there, It has been some time since I posted on here, but I have been doing some searches around to try and find a solution to this problem and I am yet to find one... I have recently swapped my SL mesh building over to 3DS Max Design 2013 as this is what I am most comfortable with when doing architecural renders for clients. However, I have hit an issue with the workflow and I cant for the life of me work it out. Essentially I can assign texture id's and put the corresponding multi-sub material on the item ready for export. However when I import the mesh into secondlife, it withholds either none of the faces, or completely borks entirely, and gives me face id numbers that are not selectable. I was wondering if someone may well have come across this issue before and may be able to shine some light on it for me. With regards Bentley

Cool thanks again, Rightio well this skeleton is the original skeleton but yet it is imported from blender, I used my initiative before hand and infact alinged my bones to them, However I did not mimic their rotations, so maybe I should try that as that could be casuing the issues couldn't it? Is it possible to use the align tool on these bones and tick the align to rotation boxes to? so it copies those over? Or will I need to input the rotations manually? or it seems either the lengths are wrong which is odd considering its actually exactly the same in appearence to the one in blender, or I am infact Just needing to rescale it? I will try them all and see what comes of it, if not I suppose I will have to rig it in blender which I am not looking forward to, mainly becuase its a horrible UI and apain in the butt to use lol Regards, Bentley

Thankyou once again for the comprehensive low down on how to make it all work, I created a successful rig that works in human form with the rotations, Then as a quadro ped it did not work so instead I changed their rotations to zero, Perfecto, it works the correct way up, but now I am getting the following issue and Im not sure how to go about fixing it, Firstly My mesh was very large and mashed up, So I did a second upload with joints incluided to see exactly what was going on, pictures are below: And this is roughly the size it should be to fit the avatar: I am not sure if its simply a case of moving around the points, or if Im doing something wrong, I also tried scaling both the bones and the rug in 3ds max to see if that would remedy the issue but it does not Regards and thanks again for all the help Bentley (Please also bare in mind that I let the enevelopes do the rigging for me hence the terrible stretching in the correctly sized version, I wanted to see if it was going to work before going full on with rigging and then it not work like above.)

However I do have another question, When creating my own skelton with the dummy boxes in the way in which you described, How exactly would I create the rig shown below? It needs to be exact as its for a third party accessorie for an avatar. I imported the rig below from the blender file they gave me to use, however its still messing up so I can only guess its the transition of the bones thats reeking havok on the structure. Would I have to change the box shapes and then attach them? Regards Bentley P.S. I also have a blender image with the same rig and bone names should you need to see this for reference.

Sorry Ignore that last message, a couple of vertexs were not weighted

Hello again Kitsune, I Followed your instructions on the wiki to the letter, yet I am still getting a DAE passing error I know this crops up if there is missing bones so I can only presume its the cause as it did not do it with my passed 'failed' tests. Best regards Bentley

Hello there Rose, A friend of mine has been using sculptris to create a horse avatar and has succedded in doing her texture maps using the suggested blender method. The UV maps that are autogenerated by any program that uilises a clay method are generally very poor and it is a wise choice to take them into an external program and unwrap them properly with a pelt map. I personally made an avatar for my fiancee using sculptris and ended up unwrapping it in Hedus UV Layout (UV specific program) As has been suggested, the more you reduce your tri count the better and easier this task will be. Sculptris although marvelously brillliant is paticularly finnacky and can cause some really annoying edge loops becuase of the way it is tesselated. However if you can suceed to get around this like my friend has you will have a lovely smooth model to work with when rigging

Hi again Kitsune "Ok, now you should have all bones in the skin modifier. Now set the max bones influence to 26 or higher. Select one vertex that is weighted to a single bone (a vertex with 1.0 of weight, this will make easier later to revert to its original weight). For example, lets say that we choose one vertex from the head that have 1.0 weight to the mskull bone. Now select a different bone, and rig that vertex to that new bone. For example, start weighting it to the right eye, then select the left eye and weight to it too, then to neck, torso, etc..." I am actually new to rigging in 3ds max as my area of expertise is more within hard objects. How might I actualy go about this process, How do I select the vertice and weight it to the different points? Thankyou again in advance Regards Bentley

WOW, I emailed you around an hour ago and you replied so quickly with such a comprehensive guide to doing things in max and with bones, Thankyou ever so much. I will follow your steps carefully and recreate thebones of the quadroped using your method, If I have any fuirther questions I will ask. Thank you so much once again. Best regards Bentley

I will say however, Thankyou ever so much for showing me some tips and trying to help me through it, I will continue to play with this until someone who is more experienced in this field can pick this up

Damn I am yet to find a decent tutorial on how to edit bones like the ones that the SLAV option gives me, plenty on CAT, but no other methods that I have found

This is a skeleton I imported from blender, it works perfectly in control terms so its all good to go in that sense, however when I reset the xforms on the pelvis (the controlling bone) it flips on its side, Should I rig it on its side or should I flip[ it back up so its standing straight? Regards and thanks for all the help so far Bentley

Coolio, I have reset the xforms on the mesh and the bones, interestingly the bones grew quite a bit bigger and flipped on their side, So if this is the case, Should I flip them so they are standing back up again? or does that defeat the object of resetting the xforms? Otherwise ill have to rig it on its side lol

I thought I would also add this to show what im getting and what I should be getting, In the hope it someone can inform me whats wrong :

Awesome, Now the upload sees the weighted stuff, but its twisted on its side when adding it to the avi (Quardoped) However I have followed the instructions with the z-up for the up-axis, Not quite sure whats going wrong here Is there a particular way that my model should be rotated? or some other method point I am missing out that is twisting it? Thankyou for your help so far once again kwakke, Its always appreciated Bentley

Hello, I solved my issue in a jiffy, however now I have run into another issue... The actual exporting of the mesh with skin weights. I have followed the instructions on the SL wiki and after trying to export the mesh with the modifier on its own and the mesh with the bones, I have come to a head where by I cannot seem to find the lines of code needed to be changed within the document, once the dae has been exported and nor is the mesh showing any available skin weights in the uploader. I have the fbx plugin on my max 2010 installed that the wiki suggested. I would be really greatful if someone could provide a or indepth guide or at least some pointers to get me on my way to at least being able to get this out of 3ds max with its weights. Regards and thankyou in advance Bentley

Scratch this: I found it by myself. However for those who wish to know, Use the skin modifier and then selected the bones in the bone selection panel, Then edit those envelopes to your hearts content Regards Bentley

Hello folks, Now I have exported a rig that I need to use from blender as an FBX file, and too my shock it imported and works fine in respect to where each bone is attached and targeted too, However now I am at a complete loss as to how to skin my mesh to this. I have applied the physique modifier to my mesh, but it will only allow me to seelct 1 of the bones to iniatilise. Im guesing im eiother doing it wrong or there is a way around this. I would be greatly appreciative if someone could a shine light on this one. Thanks in advance. Regards Bentley

Hello there folks, I have another issue once again that I am struggling with, I recently have taken my first item into blender to rig using an existing rig for the horse avatar that I am creating the accessory for. The mesh is fine, uploads and manipulates fine in a multitude of programs, however after importing I find completely torn holes out of my mesh as well as a complete lacking existance of the straps in the mesh, While I understand the straps may be an issue becuase of the automatic weight painting, the holes however are very strange and I would greatly appreciate if someone who has experienced this or knows how to fix it can shed some light on it, Thankyou Best Regards Bentley

Hello there folks, Not sure if anyone else has experienced this, but I am having an issue with a physical mesh vehicle. I have create a tobbogan that runs on a physical vehicle script, it has a couple animation within using two poseballs, however when the avatars sit on the said poseballs, it hovers at a ludicrous height above the ground, I have attempted to change the positon of the pose balls which did not work and it seems that it is the avatar that is for some reason making it hover, I have even tried stripping the avatar to the bare but nothing seems to work, I am not sure if there is a possible workaround or fix for this, but its awfully annoying and making my product unsellable :( Hoping someone maybe able to shed some light on this Regards Bentley

Hello folks, I have another two questions that I would be delted if someone could answer for me, Firstly, Ground shadows, What is the best method for creating and baking these without a stupidly wide bleed effect whereby you can see the edges of the ground shadow as they are clipped, even after have a huge plane underneath in 3ds max? and secondly, I am not sure if you know anything about the SL skeletal system and how it works in 3ds max, But i have been trying for the last week to change bone sizes so that I can create a bone structure for a quad legged creature, however if I change the size it completely messes up, I know its soemthing to do with a pivot point, but there are absolutely no tutorials detailing this and how to do it. I would greatly appreciate if you could shien alight on that too. Best Regards Bentley

Yippeeeeee, it worked, Thankyou ever so much, What a crazy turn of events from one tiny mistake, Oh how we love these

I have tried the suggested STL check, and tried using xview but nothing is cropping up, I cannot however uncheck edges only as that area is greyed out I could post up the file somewhere but will need to send that alkong privately, obviously I dont want the entireity of this forum getting their paws on it lol, even though its nothing special.

By invisible faces I meant, maybe there is polies over the holes yet I cannot see them, not sure why or how though just a suggestion of maybe why. As to naming, they are named by default. but strangely when I change the name of the Material that seems to be causing the issue in sl, 4 of the other change to the same name along with it. Its such a bizzarre issue, im not sure why or how, but its very irritating. haha