Jarmade Spires

I had the same problem in 3ds max a few times, i think its caused when you want joint positions but you haven't weighted all 26 bones, and it seems to put the unweighted bones in random positions, and the mSkull bone seems to make your camera go crazy. To fix with included joint positions just make sure you select all the bones with the mesh before you export, so that the positions for the unweighted bones are stored in the dae file

Don't worry about modeling it 4 times... just finish your model and unwrap it then for the LOD's just copy your High LOD mesh and delete some edge loops, then copy that LOD and delete some more edges for the low lod.. etc. Be sure to have your unwrap window visible to see how the deleted edges/vertices effect it, maya does a good job of preserving your uvs. Bake your texture on the high lod and apply it to your mesh so you can see how it looks on your lower lods as you create them. For physics i suggest using the lowest lod or something basic like a cube or low poly sphere/cylinder and snapping it to fit the bounding box of your mesh, the uploader will automatically scale any physics to fit the mesh anyway.

Is there a way to move the shoulders and arms inwards? You will notice in SL, if you move the shape slider shoulder width down from 50%, it also scales the chest inwards deforming it. The max slav skeleton is at 50% shoulder width which is WAY too wide and broad for a female, i want the shoulder width at about 15% in SL. But if i scale it down to 15%, the breasts and chest are squeezed inwards and look really long, even if the chest/breasts are weighted 100% to the mChest bone.

well thanks a lot, you two. Really helped me understand things a lot more. The other day on my mesh avatar, i did a quick default unwrap to set all the faces (quads) on my mesh to fit the uv space, so that i could apply a bordered texture and see the wireframe.. now that really explains why the upload cost went up tonnes! hehe

Thanks for the advice. Those snapshots were just to show the vertex counts. I've actually made some custom LOD's i'm gonna use once i figure out all this smoothing.

Thats so strange! I set all as smoothing group 1, and it shows normal vertices. Set it with no smoothing at all. and it shows 11k vertex. So.. smooth stuff costs less to render? (less prims at least) O_______O

hmm i just noticed the .dae file my friend was giving me is 1.4.1, and its not importing to 3ds max properly (it lost its smoothing groups) In blender it shows as all smoothed. and also i did do a quick default unwrap on it.. so taht probably added more vertices too! I think i understand now. thanks a lot!!

the blender dae has smoothing groups too. and its vertex count is normal? I simply tried to import the .dae into 3ds and export it back out as .dae, it shows 11k vertices with no changes.

I never noticed this before until today. My friend gave me a .dae file exported from blender to optimize for him, I managed to get it from 5454 polys to 3774 using 3ds max 2011. but it costs more to upload. Notice the vertex counts... Blender dae: 3DS with 2011.3.1 dae exporter: You can see the vertex count is completely wrong, and the generated LOD's are wrong too. It makes the prim count and upload cost go up A LOT. this 3000 poly one costs more to upload than the old 5000 poly one I tried to upload some of my old meshes and noticed they are also showing too mny vertices.. the sl uploader says a simple cube has 24 vertexes, when 3ds says 8: the meshes look fine in sl, and all the material ids and smoothing groups import fine. its just the prim cost is a lot more than it should be. I have tried sl v3, second life development viewer, phoenix and firestorm, they all do the same.

The only way i can seem to successfully rig with the max slav plugin without it deforming, is to import the skeleton from max slav really small (scale 1.0) , then scale my model down to fit the tiny skeleton and reset xform, which makes it really hard to work with in max, e.g. you try to zoom in a tiny bit and the whole model vanishes. I read other threads which say to scale it up to a workable size, which works well, apart from when i want to go back and edit my model, some modifiers like edit poly are hard to work with when your models displayed at about 2000% of its size, e.g. welding vertices. Why does the skeleton have to be so small to import to sl properly, and is there a work around? If i try at default scale 40, the model gets deformed when i enable skinning in the sl uploader.

Thank you! ^^ working fine now

I still can't upload mesh, tells me I need payment info and that i haven't completed the quiz, even though i have done both. Any help?