Maya: Creating Avatars

[userpay]

So for awhile now I've been dancing around the idea of making mesh/fitted mesh avatars for SL. Primarily what I am worried about is rigging, though a tut that walks through building a avatar for SL would be nice as I'm still beginner tier, which leads to my problem. Namely I seem to repeatedly run into an issue where the only tutorials I can find seem to either be for clothing, other objects, or Blender. For example the video link on the wiki (Mesh/Uploading and wearing a rigged mesh page) for Maya on rigging for SL is a dead link. Can anyone point me at Maya oriented tutorials for avatars themselves?

 

Secondly I've come across a Maya plugin called MayaStar. Is this something that would be useful for avatar designing or is it also oriented towards creating clothing?

 

I've got Maya 2013 at the moment.

[Cathy Foil]

Hi!
Certainly MayaStar can be used to rig avatars.
It would actually be easier to rig an avatar for either Fitted Mesh or Classic Rigging than it would be to say rig a dress or skirt.

I have a bunch of videos on how to rig in Maya using MayaStar.  YouTube Link

MayaStar works with Maya 8.0 all the way to Maya 2016.  PC and Mac.  Linux should work too but not tested yet.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

[userpay]

Glancing through several of those videos it appears that they're about clothing rather than rigging the avatar itself?

 

I saw mentioned in another recent thread that you have to use the default SL skeleton anyway and just move the points around so I guess that kind of partially answers/solves my issue. I was hoping to find a Maya tut to make sure that I would move things around properly and help with making sure the model doesn't distort weirdly when the joints move. Which is the one issue I've been having when I've done small experiments on my own.

 

I suppose I could just make the stuff in Maya and export to Blender for rigging since Blender has so many SL tuts but I'd rather stay in Maya as I prefer its interface...

[Cathy Foil]

I made my video demonstrating rigging clothes because the vast majority of people rigging are making clothes.  A smaller percentage are rigging hair and just a very few people in SL are making mesh avatars though that number is increasing.

Rigging an avatar mesh would be the same process in MayaStar as rigging a jump suit or wet suit.

Create your avatar mesh in the default T-Pose or any other pose such as an A-Pose, because MayaStar has a feature for custom bind poses, and then "Activate MayaStar" which will import all of MayaStar's mesh avatars and skeleton and a bunch of other stuff used by MayaStar.

Place your mesh right on top of the MayaStar's avatar and either do Substitute Geometry or do a quick Smooth Bind of your avatar mesh you made to the skeleton and then use "Copy Weights" to copy the weights from one of the MayaStar Avatars to your custom mesh avatar you made.

You may have a little bit of cleanup of the weights and you are done rigging your avatar mesh.

Rigging an avatar mesh in MayaStar is one of the easiest types of mesh to rig.  I could have a basic Fitted Mesh avatar rigged in 5 minutes with MayaStar.

Why just 5 minutes because I spent two weeks rigging and adjusting the weights of my custom avatars I made specifically designed to transfer weights from.  It literally only takes a couple of minutes to transfer the weights from my MayaStar avatars to your mesh.  I put two weeks of time in so MayaStar customers don't have to.

All rigged mesh uses the same LL default skeleton.  Fitted Mesh uses the Collision Bones and must have the mBones in the skin cluster or it won't upload to SL.  Classic Rigging rigs just to the mBones and doesn't need the Collision Bones in its skin cluster to be able to upload to SL.  

MayaStar has a bunch of animations so after mesh is rigged you can see how your mesh moves.  If you rig your mesh as Fitted Mesh MayaStar has all the Appearance Sliders.  This means besides seeing your mesh move you can see how your mesh changes shape as you move the sliders.  

Without the Appearance Sliders in MayaStar you would have to export and upload to SL a new DAE file and then wear your mesh in SL or the Beta Test Grid to see how your weights look.  This could mean uploading 30 or 40 or 100 or more DAE files as you make weight adustments.  It is kinda like typing a email on your computer without having a monitor and having to print out the email on a printer to see where you made any spelling errors and then going back and editing your email and having to print it out again and again.

You will have the same problem using Blender unless you buy the Avastar plug-in which also has the Appearance Sliders and avatars which you can transfer the weights from.

Yes you could download the Fitted Mesh avatar that was rigged and weighted by Linden Lab and just move the vertices of the mesh around a bit.  If you move them too much yes the avatar would start to look weird as it moved.  

Honestly the weights of the default Fitted Mesh avatar are horrible.  They are horrible because when Linden Lab did them they did them in Maya without having the Appearance Sliders in Maya.  They couldn't see how the weights looked unless they uploaded a DAE file and then wore the mesh.

Here is my video on the basic concept of Fitted Mesh and a bit of its history.

Here's my video on how to rig mesh in MayaStar using Substitute Geometry.
Just instead of a mesh clothes you would be doing the same thing with your mesh avatar you made.

I hope that helps answer your questions.
Cathy

[userpay]

That does help quite a bit. Was having trouble finding a easy and up to date breakdown like that. Might look into MayaStar this weekend.

[Hanna Lockwood]

Mayastar is an excellent tool userpay but if it is copying the mesh weights that SL uses you definitely don't want to do that. Th SL avatar has the worst skin binding in gaming history by far.

[Gaia Clary]

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Hanna Lockwood wrote:

Mayastar is an excellent tool userpay but if it is copying the mesh weights that SL uses you definitely don't want to do that. Th SL avatar has the worst skin binding in gaming history by far.

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I think that the Weights of the default Avatar are actually not so bad for the given mesh and for the anticipated usage. You have to take into account that this avatar was constructed to support a huge variety of shapes for male and female characters. And you also need to remind that the weights are optimized for a certain range of poses. Here is an example regarding the posing of the spine:

on the left side i have used a rather big angle between the torso and the chest. This gives rather bad distortions near the stomach. However these 2 bones are simply not weighted for this to work properly. When you restrict the rotation range of the bones to something more realistic (right side) then the mesh distortions get much less.

The same is true when you look at the collars. If you allow a too large range of rotation angles for the collar then you see how the shoulder sinks into the mesh. You can get much nicer results when you keep the collar bones side rotation mostly untouched (rotation < 5° ) and do the majority of lifting the arms up/down by using the Shoulder bones.

Of course it is doubtful to use the weights of the default avatar on an arbitrary mesh. And so i also do not recommend to use the same weights as the default avatar uses, unless your mesh is mostly compatible with the default avatar (has same topology) and you aim for creating tight fitting attachments.

However even this is questionable because the default avatar uses morph shapes while for mesh we can only weight to the collision Volume Bones. And both techniques do not create fully compatible results (regarding the shape) so it will almost ever be better to create your own weights instead of reusing the avatar weights.

And then at last if you create your own mesh for just one specific shape, then it is always better to optimize the weights for just that shape. This will always give the best possible result at least compared to the "average weights" for the default SL avatar.

[Daemon Sella]

Hi you all,

and thanks for helping me with the following issue.

I'm trying to rig a custom made avatar with MayaStar.

My custom made avatar is a really big Orc, so fat, with very large shoulders and big arms, legs and muscles.

I tryied to rig it just connecting the skeleton to the mesh shape using the "Smooth Bind Skin" feature from the MayaStar plug-in menu.

Before lauching the "Smooth Bind Skin" command I moved and rotate some nodes of the skeleton with the Maya Move-Tool and Rotate-Tool to aling them to the shape's joints, just because, as it was, the skeleton will never match properly the mesh shape, being the mesh a non-standard.

I moved and rotate the mCollarLeft, the mElbowLeft and the mWristLef and some other legs'nodes and then I created a Bind Pose to use for rigging.

After lauching the "Smooth Bind Skin" command  I made some weights adjustments to almost every bones and, in Maya, it woks pretty good with each of the animations built in MayaStar. Moreover, starting from the T-Pose, the mesh deforms properly every time I do a rotation on any node.

But...

when I export it as DAE_FBX and import in Second Life I have an issue. It seems that those nodes I moved and rotated before rigging, go back to the original position and settings, making my avatar's shoulders crushing into the torso. Many deforming issues also on the arms and hands of the avatar.

How to do when rigging such a big mass avatars and when the skeleton needs to be adapted to the mesh shape before binding the skin?

I'm new to rigging and MayaStar as well, I would apprechiate so much a response rich in details and the simpliest english ever, as mine is too poor.

Thanks everyone for reading and helping, take care and have fun.