We are excited to announce that the Unified Mesh Importer Beta will now support importing Skinned Rigs and Layered Clothing tech! We know some of you have been anticipating this upgrade, so let’s dive into what this means for your workflow.
Simply, all rigs imported through the new Mesh Importer (skinned or not) should match 1:1 with rigs imported through the old Avatar Importer. Skinned rigs should now work properly and deform when you edit them through the Animation Editor (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The skinned body moves along and deforms with the rig animation.
Layered Clothing
All LC-compatible rigs and items can now be imported with this new update! As always, this can be done by setting up your model with cage meshes before importing it into Studio. The cage meshes will be autodetected by their name convention (see Figure 2) and converted into WrapInstances.
Note: We are aware that the new importer will only process cages for imported files that have joints in them. We are working to remove this constraint and allow you to import non-rigged models with cages just like the old Avatar Importer, and will update this post when we finish!
Figure 2: Importing a LC asset with the appropriate cage naming convention.
There are some additional steps to making your LC accessory work once it’s in Studio. You can either use the Accessory Fitting Tool Beta or follow these steps to get started:
Import your LC item through the Mesh Importer plugin. It should come in as a Model with at least one MeshPart, and under the MeshPart there should be a WrapLayer and Motor6D instance.
Create an Accessory instance with the name of your LC accessory. In this example, we will call it “Shirt”.
Move the MeshPart from your imported model to be a child of the Accessory, or copy and paste it into there.
Rename the MeshPart (now under your Accessory) to be “Handle”.
Under the “Handle” MeshPart, add an attachment instance and name it to connect the item to the correct part of the avatar (for example, we named it “BodyFrontAttachment”). You can find all the available attachment names here.
Drag the Accessory onto the top level of your avatar. Note, this avatar must be a LC-compatible avatar. The clothing should apply and deform automatically (this might take some time).
I’m not sure where to put this since I can’t post in #feature-requests, but;
Can/is there a way to import a file as separate meshes? i.e. a single .obj file can reference different .obj files to render, can there be a way of importing all of them without them being under the same MeshPart?
You’re able to do this with .obj files by ticking Material Groups on when exporting. For some odd reason, they still separate even if the things you’re exporting have the same material. Don’t know if it’s a bug or not, but nice for my workflow either way, and so I don’t have to deal with .fbx files when I don’t need to.
This comes with the caveat of your mesh splitting if an object uses two materials at once, but that’s easily solvable.
Been testing, this seems great! Was the importer’s way of lowering triangle count of objects above 20k changed? Before this change, I was able to import some complex assets with them retaining a similar appearance. However, when I attempt to import the same model now, although it does have the armature, a large majority of meshes over 20k triangles are almost completely eliminated from the mesh. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Overall, a very welcoming update, thank you!
Not that I know of, although it’s possible the inclusion of the armature now affects the auto-simplification (not intended at all). Could you DM me the file you’re trying to import as well as any other details so I can look into the issue? Thanks!
