Quenemue Cyberstar

I have the same problem, i read the doc that came with the files. Hip just doesnt animate in SL whatever im doing. Hope you have figured out something to get this working. Another problem with this whole toolset is that I havent been able get the script working with anything else but this rig. this rig is pretty hard to use if you are planning to make a non human avatar where you need to offset joints a lot. Now that we have mesh and all we are able to do anything if we had the tools to do it.. im trying to make a workaround that would be compatible with this rig. What i do is i use the human rig to control another non human skeleton as a reference.

Here's some new information that probably many don't know. I use maya 2012 and i use the fbx export 2011 in it(not the dae one). then i convert it to dae with 2011.3 converted found from autodesk website. Easiest to find is by just googling it. Some of the info i give here i wont explain deeply cos you can find info about them easily just by googling a bit. I made my own base skeleton using the info inside the avatar_skeleton.xml file that you can find in second life install folder. just search it from there. The file shows the hierarchy structure, names, rotations, position and scales of the joints. Thats all you need to build it. Now comes the new stuff. display Local rotation axis of all the joints. All of them need to be facing the same way. Now if you try to move a joint check what happens. the local rotation axis flips pointing at its parent joint. This is probably what messes up the possibility to move joints. You can disable auto orient joints from translate tool settings. Also there is orient joint tool in the skeleton menu. You can also manually rotate the local rotation axis of the joints by going to component mode and selecting all of the local rotation axis components and using command: rotate -sw 0 0 0; This way you can move your joints however you want and you are not stuck with the default avatar pose. you could even make a dog or whatever. Trick to scale your skeleton in scene if you made the mistake that you built it in centimeters. Select your skeleton root. then group it(ctrl + g) now scale the group however you want. then just freeze the groups translations and the scales will be baked into the skeleton. Then just ungroup the skeleton after. Make sure you dont have any connections to the skeleton otherwise it wont allow you to freeze. Also if you have the skeleton posed the rotations will be baked in the joints aswell which you dont want. Now here is stuff im a bit confuced about. which of the local rotation axis should be pointing upward? Y or Z? im quessing Z. i went with that. it worked when i imported the mesh but im still unsure. Should i make the skeleton so that scene up is Z axis? That can be changed in preferences. Also im quessing the unit size should be meters right.. I made the same mistake by making the skeleton in centimeters. Theres scene up axis setting in the exporter aswell i suspect it has to be Z aswell. Now a bit offtopic but important anyway How about animation. lets say i want to make this dog avatar. its abvious that default anims wont work on it. How in earth do i get working anims out of Maya. perfect workflow would be to use the same skeleton i used to skin the mesh for the animation. But nooo.....! the skeleton for animation need to have completely different names and god knows what else different than the skinning skeleton. Ok, i maniged to build the new skeleton with right names and all. i downloaded some suspicious BVH exporter with no documentation whatsoever. Maya natively has .anim exporter aswell. Then i did some testing. So i read that first frame need to be keyed to 0 0 0 rotations. i did that. then i put some random pose to second frame so that all the joints has some rotations other than 0 0 0. i exported it in bvh format. It imported without errors to SL except the pose looked nothing like i made it in maya and also all the default animations were playing on top of it even with priority of 4. I also tried the anim format that simply imported an empty anim without error. it just didnt play anything. This last stuff went totally off topic but i think if people wants to make avatars that differs from the basic skeleton pose a lot then there should be a working workflow to get it done. It's theoretically possible but seems like Maya simply isnt supported for SL content creation. It's a shame because it's one of the best animation softwares out there.