cannot upload any mesh for over 3 months! (using maya, open collada and offical sl viewer)

[livinglight Yiyuan]

Hello,

i have not been able to upload any rigged mesh for months now and i don't know why.

i created the mesh in Maya and rigged it . it worked in Maya and i selected the rigged mesh first then the skeleton in outliner selecting each piece until i got to pelvis at the top.  and exported using open collada . 

i went into the normal sl viewer then the beta viewer. it gave me no trouble and i clicked for it to include the rigging and did the physics on it. i then clicked calculate and it did that. then i tried upload. and it was grayed out but then nothing happened after. it waited for over an hour sometimes half an hour each time i tried this.

this went on for months until i decided to try it with a box today.  and it still happened whyen i tried to upload! and i didn't get one error!

i dont know what is wrong, but i really need to know so i can fix it.

 

could someone point me to a very good tutorial on rigging in Maya and on uploading ?

or maybe if you could explain what the steps are to rigging and uploading. any information you could give!

...i'm also wondering if there is a problum with my skeleton. when i downloaded it it was slightly rotated on the pelvis. i think it was at 0.5 ...so i put it back to 0.0 on that and every rotation. 

if someone could help me with this problem i would be very happy

[JackRipper666]

Hi, So you're saying you tried upload options and they were greyed out? Were able to see a preview of your mesh rigged with the preview check boxes? If you're losing data some where you could always try export all in Maya. Are you using 2011? 

What I use is export all I keep a very clean scene, no parts or extra's in the rigging scene for Maya. because maya exports tend to add or create errors for you. One way to check if your scene is a little messy is do a export all and export to FBX format. Then download FBXConverterUI from Autodesk. Don't download 2012 or 2013!!! Too many bugs with it. Example textures is one of them. You won't be able to select faces of your mesh if you have say two parts rigged together. Yet they are separate mesh parts like a fur piece rigged around the neck or something to move with your character. You would only be able to select one UV map instead of two if you created one for fur and one for the character. That's one but example I have had. 

 

So again I always do

- export all from Maya 2011 as FBX * will give you warnings if something is wrong with you scene file*

- Then FBXconverterUI2011 ONLY! to a .dae file

- Upload and see if your upload options show up.

 

Other notes I can think of check your orientation. I don't know if you mirrored your joints or anything. Make sure you have it correct might cause an error but usually just half your mesh comes out backwards in world. Sometimes I forget to mirror by orientation lol.

[Cathy Foil]

Here is an excellent video tutorial on how to rig and export mesh for SL.

It was created by Sae Luan.  She did a fantastic job!

http://saeluan.com/tutorials/maya/rigging-mesh-in-maya/

Hope that helps.

Cathy