Rigging timelapse of Mancandy for Second Life HD

This video shows the process of a basic rigging of the Mancandy character for Second Life.
If I'll have the time I will probably upload a slower version of the video and make it as a tutorial with annotations explaining the whole process. For now I hope the video would be clear enough to self explain itself.
I know the rigging is not perfect at all, but the humble purpose of this video is just to give a glance at the rigging process.

This is the basic workflow of rigging an avatar for Second Life:
1. I used the rig made from Domino Marama available on his website here http://www.dominodesigns.info (direct download here http://j.mp/bo214T )
2. Then import or create your mesh, align it with the skeleton and parent to it as an armature and let it create vertex groups from bones heat; this will generate the needed vertex group for each bone, giving them a quite reasonable weighting.
3. Verify each vertex group automatically created with the parenting process to be sure they reflects your true needs.
4. Eventually fine tune the weighting if needed.
5. Make the armature real.
6. If you have added subsurface or other modifiers, it's time to apply them now.
5. Export in Collada 1.4 format.

I think it's pretty much it, of course you can assign different materials to vertex groups (up to 8 materials that will be translated as texture faces after the import process).
I may update the description further, or add annotations on the video, or upload another one, I can't guarantee at the moment.

Hope this video was useful to start with your first rigged mesh avatar for Second Life :)

--
SLB Wirefly

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Blender
• 3D
• CG
• Animation
• Render
• Mesh
• Avatar
• Material
• UV
• Map
• Mapping
• Texture
• Paint
• Painting
• Rigging
• Mancandy
• Bones
• SecondLife
• Second
• Life
• SL
• HD
• SLB

[monsieurtoutlemonde1]

the model is all deformed when i import it in second life...

i dont understand because the model looks perfectly rigged in blender when i use the pose mode...

any help ?

[Kikuchi81]

@monsieurtoutlemonde1 I think it has to do with vertex groups, I know I'm being vague saying that but I hope you can get some info from the videos, takes some time which I can't have right now

[monsieurtoutlemonde1]

awesome

any tutorial ?

and did you find a way ta add the textures on the model ?

[Kikuchi81]

@monsieurtoutlemonde1 thanks :) for a tutorial you can try to google for: rigg your avatar machinimatrix

about the textures, i haven't had the time to try yet

[Kikuchi81]

@Lokiboy welcome :) ah i think in 2.5 the weighting for collada doesn't work yet, I don't know of anyone that made it work so far. As for the missing make real button yes that wont come back in 2.5, it was the old way to add an armature modifier and it's no longer in use.

[Lokiboy]

@Kikuchi81 thanx for replying :) im realising im using 2.5 while this vid is in 2.4x so its all different anyways :-p

[Kikuchi81]

@Lokiboy I know, sorry, that was not meant to be a tutorial, just a timelapse of what I did. If you have parented the mesh to the armature correctly, then make armature real button is located in the same place where you would find for example a subsurf modifier in the modifiers panel. You have to select first only the skeleton, then you should see the modifier and its button to make it real.

[Lokiboy]

for a new it's pretty insane trying to see all the tiny buttons you whizz through, im stuck on locating how to make "armature real", searching high and low for that one

[gameexe]

does anyone know anything about exporting joint positions along with your rigged avi? weightmaps alone dont really do the trick because my avatar ends up all mangled after i import it because i need costom joint positions and the joint position checkbox does nothing

[Kikuchi81]

@MrRasmusBeck welcome :)