Kwakkelde Kwak

Did you by any chance miss the obvious (something I missed myself recently) and did check the joints and skin under "Display" but forgot to check them in the upload options tab? Slappy Kennedy wrote: Also if I get another link from someone to this http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Exporting_a_mesh_from_3ds_Max as if that page has the solution you need to be punched in the face. Excuse me?

It might be possible to use the biped, but I haven't seen anyone trying, let alone succeeding. As long as I've used 3ds max, I never got into character animation until mesh hit SL.

Sheena Foxdale wrote: ...even set the mega to phantom and still a no go... Don't set it to phantom, set the physics type to "none" instead, that has pretty much the same effect but leaves you with zero physics cost. Joining normal prims and meshes can have unexpected results, but in many cases it will be a pleasant surprise. What you didn't post yet is if it is indeed the physics weight that makes the landimpact so high.

Zoe Aria wrote: Lumiya runs on Driod tablets and phones that clearly do not have the horsepower of a desktop/lap top machine so there goes that theory. You can see your avi, inventory work poseballs etc ... I have a feeling LL won't be the ones developing it. We just need someone to writie it for the IOS platform and not just a chat client. There goes what theory? In my post I even link to Lumiya. I said it WOULD be possible to write a viewer for tablets. I also said it can't be a simple port of the normal viewer which only runs so so on a high end desktop with tons of memory, fast CPU's and powerful GPU's. All of which aren't found on a tablet. That means there are compromises. Anyway, good to see Alina is making progress with her viewer.

Ormand Lionheart wrote: I was surprised that Linden Realms uses my GPU at 98%. There's not much there is there That's exactly why your GPU can run so high. It's what I see everywhere. Lots of things to render and lots of lag and my GTX670 doesn't do a whole lot, then go to a near empty place where fps go skyhigh and the card will be working much much harder.

You're not doing anything wrong. Normal prims, whether they are simple cubes or hollow tori (or a sculpty), are weighted at 1 prim = 1 landimpact. The landimpact of a mesh object is based on the impact it will have on the SL servers and end user's systems. These impacts are split into 3 groups: download, physics and server. The landimpact is the highest of these 3 values. So far so good, but when you link a normal prim (or a sculpty) to a mesh object, the normal prim will have a landimpact based on the "mesh rules". You can see what impact your normal prims will have by editing them (before linking), then selecting "more info" from the menu (object tab I think). If the download weight is very high, there's not a lot you can do but rebuild your item. Chances however are the physics weight is very high. You can select the individual prims and set the physics shape to either "convex hull" or "none" (features tab). Obviously by setting the physics shape to "none", you can no longer walk into the object, but it also means the physics weight will be 0. You can't set the physics shape of the main prim (yellow in the linkset) to "none". PS.. V1 based viewers like Phoenix do not have the "more info" button as far as I know.

As said before, the rigging itself shouldn't be an issue if your friend does this on a professional level. A couple of things you really need to know about SL rigging and 3ds max though: - You need an exact copy of the SL armature, hierarchy and bone names - 3ds max skips unused bones on export, they have to be added by hand to the dae file - Some versions of the collada exporter don't seem to work, at least for some people It's all explained a more detailed here: Mesh/Exporting a mesh from 3ds Max And as Chosen said about Maya, 3d max has excellent free documentation and tutorials, all downloadable from the autodesk website. I think the tutorials of 2007 to 2013 are available.

I'm not familiar with any CAT skeleton (unless you mean an actual cat), but you could use SLAV to import a working skeleton into 3ds Max. If you do mean just a normal cat, you can move the bones of the standard skeleton around and include the joints in the upload. When you build your own skeleton, you need to make sure the entire hierarchy and naming is exactly the same as the SL skeleton. There are some catches when using 3ds max to rig. Biggest one is the need to add missing bones to the dae file by hand. Maybe you missed that. It's all explained here: Mesh/Exporting a mesh from 3ds Max

autodesk collada should work

Don't bother about the collada version then, 2011 shouldn't give problems. Do add all the bones, I think that will fix your issue.

I can think of a couple of things that might cause the problem: - You absolutely need to add the missing bones to the dae file by hand. Even though you added all 26 bones in 3ds max, in the export to dae all bones except the ones actually used are skipped. This means you only have the head and neck and possibly the torso in there. You need the rest aswell. - You need to use an editable poly, not editable mesh in 3ds max - The exporter you're using doesn't support the collada version SL uses What version of 3ds max are you using?

You lost me, how can you get any flatter than a triangle? that's as flat as anything can be. And a texture? huh? Size shouldn't matter on upload costs anyway, if that was the case all you had to do to reduce upload costs would be uploading it tiny then stretching it. Geometry makes a difference and nothing has less geometry than a single triangle, it only has 3 vertices.

Baloo Uriza wrote: Theoretically, L$10. Good luck actually hitting that, though. Now I'm curious what the theory is I have uploaded a single triangle before, but as far as I know that still costs 11 lindens, I could be wrong...

You're right about the rigging part, but what good will a Blender tutorial do for a 3ds max user? @OP You should get yourself a second life skeleton and rig the model to it. Mesh/Exporting a mesh from 3ds Max

Those rotations should be in degrees yes..so that's not it then....

perfectslam wrote: The T-pose in the modeller appears proper inside my modeller; the knees are not bent. Yes that by no means excludes the possibility that they are bent though. "Appear" doesn't equal "is". What do the numbers say? I logged back into Aditi to see if unchecking joint rotations would have any effect Joint rotations??

perfectslam wrote: If I include the skinweights, the mesh appears as it should in the viewer window, but if I import or display the weights in the preview window in the uploader, the mesh goes bonkers. You mean when you include joint positions? All the more reason to believe your knee is rotated. As for the knee rotation, it's not appearing in my modeller. It appears zero'd on export. How do you mean "appears zero'd" ? Before export? does it somehow show during export? After export?(in the dae file) Do you mean the model looks as it should before export or do you mean all the numbers are correct?

When you select the "weights" in the uploader, you activate everything related to your rig, not just the weights. Going by the picture you posted I suspect a rotated knee in your armature.

OxLilyxO Calcutt wrote: By 'adding alpha mask' I meant alpha channel As far as I know you can't draw directly on the alpha channel in gimp like you can in photoshop. You need to use a mask, where deleting doesn't do you any good.Like the alpha channel you need to use grayscale brushes. Black is invisible, white is opaque.

Do you have a lot of sharp edges by any chance, or a lot of smoothing groups? Second Life splits all vertices on those edges into two seperate ones.

yes I was just kidding... although I don't think you can unsubscribe from DAZ and still use their free versions of commercial software. Didn't even look if it's possible to uncheck the mail, that might be the case.

So the only catch is endless spam, like with DAZ

I use 3ds max myself, so I can't tell you how to bake in Maya. Just google "texture baking maya" and you'll get pages of tutorials.

That really depends on what you want. If you want your build to be as customisable as possible, eight materials per object probably don't cover the entire house so you need more objects. More objects mean more LoD switches which might look bad. I'd try to keep the exterior of a house as one piece and at least each room as one piece. But things differ from object to object so it's really hard to say something useful. You could look up Maeve Balfour (I hope I spell it correctly) in the forums, she did a lot of testing with different setups for mesh houses and at the time she started she was a novice mesh builder from what I remember. Best advice I can give is "just try it out", I suspect you as a Maya user aren't exactly new to 3d modelling in general.

A planar map for each wall to begin with is what I would do yes. How I'd texture the wall with windows would depend on how you set up the geometry of it.