Rigging Mesh to Attachment Points in Avastar

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

I am attempting to make a rigged mesh dragon head that both blinks and "chats" when typing. I have rigged the eyelids to mSkull, which I have moved the location to in between the eyes. I have rigged the jaw to aRight Ear.

Since I cannot figure out how to properly rig the jaw to aRight Ear, I had to delete the bone first in edit mode, create a new bone in the same place and then rename the new bone to aRight Ear. If I do not do this, the exporter thinks the vertices rigged to aRight Ear are unweighed and will not let me export the .dae. When I upload the mesh with the joints included, it looks all distorted.

The eyelids are in place, but the jaw is off to the left. When I play the animation for it, the eyes blink as expected but the jaw is still off to the left and goes up and down in that location. I am wondering if this is the result of deleting and replacing the attachment point or changing the location of mSkull effects the location of aRight Ear. If it's the deleting and replacing of aRight Ear, how do I properly rig the jaw to the attachment point?

 

[Gaia Clary]

I have 2 remarks to this:

First: Rigging to Attachment points is not recommended at all. The problem is actually that many attachment points have names which contain a space character (" ") And this breaks naming conventions in Collada.

One of us has invented a trick to work around this issue and firestorm has adapted this idea. But the Firestorm team has indicated that they might drop this feature again because it is not officially supported by Linden Lab and ight become invalid at any time.

Second: If you still want seriously to use rigged attachment points, then you need to do 2 things to get Avastar to recognize the Attachment points as weighted bones:

 

• You need to enable the "Deform Flag" of the attachment points
• You need to disable the option "Bone Bug Fix" in the Avastar Collada exporter

Now i have warned you and you decide how to proceed. You might be tempted to ignore the warnings and just go ahead. It may work, or not.

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

My head is still not working properly and the mesh is still distorted, despite trying what you suggested. I've tried different arrangments of rigging the jaw and eyelids to mSkull or the head attachment points.

I am able to reposition and rig to mSkull or even a head attachment point and it looks okay in world. However, if I rig another part to another attachment point, that part looks distorted in world, even if that attachment point was not moved. I tried moving two attachment points (aNose and aSkull) and rigging the eyelids and the jaw to them, but the mesh was still distorted in world even though the mesh worked in Blender and I remembered to upload the joints too.

I am guessing this might be occuring because repositioning any bone or attachment point parented by mHead effects the other bones and attachment points parented by mHead. If that's the case, looks like I'll just use mSkull for the jaw and find something else for the blinking. I was aiming to make a seamless head but that doesn't sound likely... at least for the eyelids. Ah well.

 

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

I actually found a solution. I rigged the mesh to aNose and aMouth. Instead of uploading the joints along with the mesh, I uploaded the mesh only. Then I created an animation and used "LocRot", instead of just rotation. When I use the animation, the parts rigged to the attachment points pop right in place.