How to get a mesh avatar imported into OpenSim?

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How to get a mesh avatar imported into OpenSim?

Postby onefang_0 » Sun Nov 25, 2018 3:06 am

I've been tearing my hair out for a long time trying to figure out how to create a mesh avatar for OpenSim and Second Life. No matter which tutorials or forum topics or other helpful stuff I can find on the web, I always have that exact same bad looking shoulders problem lots of people have. Does any one have definitive, this will always work, method for doing this? I'd prefer to not watch videos, they are a pain for this sort of thing. Also, I'm not paying money for Avastar, nor installing any closed source software.

I am currently using Devuan ASCII, which is based on Debian Stretch (so latest stable releases). I did try it on Debian Jessie before. I am using the Blender from the Blender PPA, though I was also trying it with the Blender that came with my OS. MakeHuman is also the version that comes with the OS, though I see you have a PPA for nightly Debian builds. These are the brief notes for how I'm trying to do it -

In MakeHuman -
Geometries -> Eyes -> Low poly
Pose / Animate -> Skeleton -> Opensim
Pose / Animate -> Pose -> Tpose
Remember to add teeth.
Files -> Export -> Collada; Feet on ground; Z up, face X; Local = global; meter
pick a file name.

In Blender -
File -> New
delete the box
File -> Import -> Collada
File -> Export -> Collada
Export Collada -> Operator Presets -> "Sl + Open Sim Rigged"
Export Collada -> Armature Options -> turn off "Deform Bones only"
pick a file name.

In viewer
File -> Upload mesh
pick a file
This model represents -> Avatar shape
Wait awhile.
Physics -> Level of detail -> Lowest
Upload options -> turn on "Include skin weight" and "Include joint positions"
The "Include textures" doesn't. Better off just uploading the individual textures once, a lot are shared anyway.
Calculate weights & fee
DO NOT hit the Analyze button, apparently it screws with the mesh. Sometimes.
Wait forever.
Upload
Wait even longer.


I'm happy to try other versions of Makehuman, other versions of Blender, even other Linux operating systems, or macOS Sierra on my old Mac Mini, just not Windows. I'm happy to try other OpenSim viewers, have been trying with Singularity.

I have seen there was some effort to make direct MakeHuman to OpenSim without going via Blender work. That didn't work either.

Can anyone help me please?
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Re: How to get a mesh avatar imported into OpenSim?

Postby Elvaerwyn » Fri Nov 30, 2018 7:57 am

Greetings!
Im not sure why ...but I expected this to not work at all no matter my approach as its been months since uploading a personal avatar-and previous experiences have always been trying at best.
However I found that using the old approach of simply exporting a dae, and bringing it to blender for a quick turnaround(blender puts whatever skeletal and skin information in the dae file necessary- as it bloats to about double the size in this quick turnaround). Also I did this by trying straight from mh to opensim with failure as expected.

The quick turnaround seemed to be the same as your procedure tbh but will post images of my choices to arrive at success :) This has me actually quite exited as a couple of months ago I was unable to even accomplish this most times using avastar also lol!

Upload with textures simply does not work, upload them separately and simply click them onto the avatar in the spot they belong for quick paste of textures. This test was done with a naked avatar using high poly eyes and a custom hair. She has os/sl compliant skeleton in her and is in the standard TPose.
Attachments
upload to os.png
exported settings.png
mhexportsettings.png
mhexportsettings.png (9.45 KiB) Viewed 8604 times
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Re: How to get a mesh avatar imported into OpenSim?

Postby Elvaerwyn » Sun Dec 02, 2018 2:39 am

So I followed up for due diligence with a fully dressed model and had similar success. The only thing that I have noticed, I was unable to resolve, is the flappy or jazz hands that are due to opensim skeleton not recognizing the hands of makehuman models properly and therefore not changing to bento on upload to opensim. I also found alpha masking is still necessary to have the eyes appear in opensim properly. This test was done on a female model and used a mix of both tri and quad meshes that blended effortlessly after the dae.py fix that punduck imposed for me. Prior to this small hotfix the tri meshes were not loading correctly from both dae and mhx2 in blender. However this never affected the base mesh to transfer to opensim, only the few tri meshes affected by makehuman. Love to hear if you have found any success yet? Elv
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