Problems importing fitted mesh in Blender 3.x

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Ada Radius
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Problems importing fitted mesh in Blender 3.x

Post by Ada Radius »

I've been discussing this with Kayaker Magic and Owl Eyes, and also trying to answer questions at other forums. The problem: the dae exporter for OSSL fitted mesh for Blender isn't working in recent versions of Blender - imports into the viewer are coming in badly distorted. Here is a copy of part of a conversation with Quarrel Kukulcan in the Second Life Community forum, re trying to work with the Ruth and Roth mesh body dev files.

my post:
Ya, sorry there are a lot of readme's and other posts at the various areas of the GitHub repos. I wrote the first drafts of many of them, Ai Austin edited them to make them more readable and filed them in logical places. Where to look: GitHub/RuthAndRoth in the Ruth2, Roth2 and Reference/AdaRadius repositories, plus the Issues and Wiki tabs in Git. Lots of information, it's a detailed subject. Much of it outdated almost as soon as we could get it up. We did the best we could. I have some blog entries at adaradius.com, which are now out of date but describe my thinking and research at the time when I was building test armatures from the viewer xml files and trying to figure out what to do about volume bone weighting. 

Fitted mesh is the problem - weighting to volume/collision bones so the Appearance sliders will work. I'm mostly working on weefolk these days when I have time - exporting mesh with custom rigs/joint edits, and that stuff is working fine. 

I deleted the "with armature" blend files at the GitHub/RuthAndRoth repo's this morning. I've spent too much time trying to get Blender dae exporters working with them. The most recent dev files are in GitHub/RuthAndRoth/Ruth2/Mesh and Roth2/Mesh. The dae files in the dae folders at the same locations import to OSSL viewers OK right now, according to Ai, who has been testing Ruth and Roth for years. I can see, looking inside those dae files, that Ruth2's dae files were exported using the Avastar 2-81-35 dae exporter on Blender 2.83.3, and Roth2's with Avastar 2-81-24 on Blender 2.82 (sub 7). I remember having a lot of problems with the exporter, especially for Roth, and I know that I used my armatures, rather than the Avastar armatures.  I assumed that Blender 2.83 would work now, but apparently not. It's a mess.

All of the mesh bits in Ruth2v4Dev.blend and Roth2v4Dev.blend are vertex weighted, and looking at it in Blender now, that weighting still looks the way it should.  I deliberately left the armatures out of those blend files back in 2021 and earlier, in the hopes that people would be able to append a currently OSSL compliant armature, skin the mesh to the armature, use a current dae exporter in a current version of Blender, import to a current version of the viewer and it would work. And that other devs would work on it. No, and no, lol. "Keeping up" has gotten both worse and better, as I love Blender 3.x, and at the same time deeply miss when Avastar's dae exporter was working, before Blender 2.8. 

Note for designers who haven't worked with fitted mesh yet: the Ruth and Roth mesh is mostly weighted to the volume (aka collision or 'fitted") bones so the Appearance sliders inworld will work as well as possible. To see this in Blender, skin the mesh bits to whatever armature you have imported, built or appended, put it into pose mode, and rotate the mBone that is the parent of the volume bone. For example, vertices weighted to the CHEST volume bone will move with the mChest bone.  

I stash armatures I built at GitHub/RuthAndRoth/Reference/AdaRadius, and still append from there.  Bento Buddy has some too, if you can pay the Lindens for them, and his dae exporter may work for fitted mesh. I haven't figured out the BB workflow yet.
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