(Stolen From our dear @Zerothe10th website)

 Rigged mesh and Bento mesh extraction

This is one of the most popular topics in all of the copy botting
How to extract rig mesh or mesh that can be worn and still have its weight intact

This process requires that you have the meshes sL program installed on your computer, and there is no way to extract rigged
Mash without it


It is worth noting that due to the code change the process is not as smooth as it used to be back in darkstorm . Don't misunderstand it still works however there is a small glitch that causes items to show up as no name instead of its proper item name like it used to do in darkstorm.


What that warning out of the way we can begin The Gauntlet that is extracting rigged mesh from Second Life.



The first thing you'll need to do is to wear the mesh item that you wish to extract
This goes for bodies, heads, clothes, avatars anything that is rigged mesh.

If the mesh item is not worn then the result will be a static mesh
It doesn't matter if the mesh is worn by you or someone else as long as it is worn that is the important part.



Once your item is worn right click on yourself and perform an avatar XML extraction.
It is wise to save the XML file and its own folder and somewhere that is easily accessed.

Once the XML file is exported, the Next Step is to go into the preference menu by pressing Ctrl p inside the preference menu select Network and files then select directories take note of the cache folder location you can press the open Button to open the cache folder you will need the address of your cache folder 2m put into meshes.

Once you have the folders address close hydrastorm
You cannot have Hydra and meshes open at the same time.
Before you open messages open your windows folder option
You can easily do this by going into any folder and pressing F10 then select tools and then folder options what's the folder option menu is open selective View and scroll down and check the following boxes show hidden files folders and drives you may also want to uncheck the box that says hide extensions four known file types.
Once that's done apply and close the folder options
This needs to be done as the default cache folder for Hydra is inside the app folder which is a hidden folder inside a Windows.

If you don't have hidden folders viewable you won't be able to navigate to the folder inside of meshes

Now open meshes
When you open messages you will see 3 text fields
Two of them will have small boxes with dots while the other one does not.
The top two are the ones that you will need to focus on
Let's start with the first box the one that says Data.db2.xx folder path
This text entry once you to point the program in the direction of your cache folder
You cannot copy and paste the location into the box instead you will need to manually navigate and select the folder
Click on the button with the multiple dots.
And navigate to the cache folder if you open the folder that I told you to earlier you have the address and know how to get there
But if you need a little help I'll be happy to help
So for me the default cache folder is this
C:\Users\Ginkgo\AppData\Local\FirestormOS_x64
To get there you would first select computer> local disk drive C >users> (my name)> appdata> local> and then firestorm OS x64 and then press okay if all goes well then the path will fill itself out in the first tab.
If it doesn't fill out you may need to close the program open it up and try it again
Or you may need to have an copy of microsoft Visual Studio installed.
Okay so that's all sorted out we can now move on to the next line which is XML file to read which is pretty self-explanatory.
We're going to select the dots button again.
And this time we're going to navigate to the folder where we saved our mesh XML and select it.
The XML will load in all of the rigged mesh data and show it to you in a list
This is the glitch that I was talking about earlier before it would have each item name listed in this list however most of them will show up as "no name"
Don't worry the mesh still there it's just not named
We'll get to that later
For now press the create dae. Files for all models button and let the program do its job
If you get an error about the VFS then you waited too long and the file was overwritten sign back in and re-export.
You have to remember that the files will save over each other inside the cache folder so you got to be quick with the extract and then conversion to not lose the files.

After the files are converted each of the files will get its own folder with the name of the item and the shortcut to the extracted dae file inside.

Select the folder of the item, open the files to upload folder
Right click on the Dae shortcut then select open file location
It should take you to a folder called. It will highlight the corresponding mesh for example if you selected the shortcut to hair 3 it will send you to the dae file and highlighted for you so you know which one to select
Don't Be Afraid by all the numbers
You can copy this file and put it inside it's folder that way you can access it easier

Now if you have a no-name file it will show you the files associated with the No Name file
I don't really have a shortcut here for this
Other than selecting all of the files and putting them inside their own folder and then opening them up inside a blender or something like that to see which file is which
However you can get around this by extracting each mesh part one at a time
But that'll take forever
This is one of the casualties of the new code and at the moment we don't have a solution to it besides this.
Now one more thing I need to add in about this is that if the file came in unrigged it will say unrigged in the file name
That'll help you identify the item easier.


You can also take these files and directly upload them into second life however you must be ready to face errors
Sometimes you'll get an error about textures or the mesh will be huge
In this case is best to take it into blender and then give it a proper exporting.
Basically imported and then exported as a dae file.



Section 2: Textures
When you are exporting the XML you can check the box for textures to be included the textures will be supported in j2c format.
If you want them to be exported into a more, such as PNG or TGA you will need to manually export the textures from the mesh in world.

I found the best way to do this is to treat it like a static mesh and do the save as collada which will give you a static version of as well as all the textures

This is the best way in my opinion because you get to see how the textures are laid on the mesh if you choose to re-import it.

Well that was fun wasn't it and now we're finally done with exporting rigged mesh from Second Life on to the next topic

Thank you ur a boss

Problems you might face importing rigged mesh and the solutions I found that worked for me:

The following assumes you have already used Meshes SL to successfully rip a model from an .xml file produced in e.g. Hydra and are trying to upload that model.

Problem: Material is Not A subset of reference Model:

Usually caused by a part of the mesh not having a material assigned to that a part or vertex group of the mesh.
Sometimes you will find a mesh that has a part of the mesh A.) alpha channeled B.) Face orientation facing the wrong way. and has no material assigned, especially if you skipped the alpha texture download.

There are two ways to overcome this problem:
1.) Delete all unneeded pats of the mesh. e.g. mesh bodies, only import one Layer at a time and make sure all parts have a material assigned
Including root prim or DEMO sign etc or better; delete all unneeded parts.
Mesh bodies are onioned into different layers for tattoos and cosmetics etc. Import one layer at a time, worst scenario: part-by-part
1a.) Object mode: With mesh selected, press "show overlays" button in the top right hand of the 3d viewer - under geometry, check Show face orientation to ensure all face are facing outwards and are blue, flip normals or delete any part that has the incorrect orientation.

2.) The long way:
Open file in blender and go through each and every part of the mesh and re-assign the materials.
It is important that you have saved all the textures and recreate the materials, by selecting each the part of the mesh.
Selecting the material that blender highlights and drag and drop the textures you saved for the object into the node editor and connect diffuse to base color connect, Normal to normal and Specular to specular connector.
With the part of the mesh selected, hit "Tab" and go into Edit mode and select all by hitting "a" and then select "assign" to assign the correct material to each part of the mesh.
(If you are attempting this with a mesh body, there could be up to 8 materials per part of the mesh. e.g. The chest would have 8 separate materials, all using the e.g. upper body skin texture. You will have to drag and drop and assign for each part, and mesh shapes can have up to 4 layers of mesh for each section... it is tedious work, so just work with one layer at a time. This is the best method and has always worked for me.

Problem: Error importing due to convex hull or physics block etc blah blah:

Solution:
a.) Make a simple cube in blender. Save cube as Dae, unrigged.
When uploading, go to physics Tab in FS or Hyadra etc and choose from file and navigate to the cube, sometimes more that one cube selected works better depending on the size of the mesh.
b.) next option: Open object in Blender and apply a Decimate modifier and make a really bad low poly copy of the mesh. Apply Modifier and hit cntrl+A to apply all (all in object mode).
Save as Dae - Unrigged
Select as physics object.
In both cases reduce LOD to 0 in Lowest field

c.) Reduce LOD in to 0 in Medium, Low , Lowest - and upload. Quick and easy lemon squeazy.. but you cant see Jack from a distance.

d. ) Import each part separately e.g Broberry jeans from Deadwool: i uploaded each leg, the pockets and buttons seperately, wore every thing, selected and linked and then took them off , rezzed and textured.

I use Hydra and the Hydra textures feature to ensue I rip all textures including normals and specular to get a good result.

TIPS:
When importing a Dae into blender 2.8 make sure you hit the gear icon in the impot window and check the following:
Armature Options:
Fix Leaf Bones
Find Bone Chains
Auto Connect
Keep Bind Info

Therefore your mesh will import into blender correctly and not a big messy square pile of unorganised rubbish. Also apply rotation scale etc then transform , set origin to geomirty.
TIP 2.
See Dae file quick and easy without opening Blender etc: opens mesh files as easy as viewing an image
use :https://github.com/acgessler/open3mod

[To see links please register here]

((@Thanks to LetsBeAlpha for the updated links.))
It's also useful for opening files with a Dae cannot parse file error and also quick and easy obj. to dae export



Excuse the typos

I followed the process till I have to import the xml into meshSl and it always say the mesh is malformed, what is weird is that im not wearing any deformer on Sl.

I followed the process till I have to import the xml into meshSl and it always say the mesh is malformed, what is weird is that im not wearing any deformer on Sl.

Does it say the Mesh is malformed or the .xml is malformed. I have never come across the error saying the mesh is malformed, but the .xml is malformed, when it is not a Mesh SL compatible .xml.
In wich case you would have to re-save a fresh .xml and make sure the correct file is selected when ripping the mesh.

so if I understand it Correctly, to copy rigged mesh i need a different viewer.

Correct!
You need a copybot veiwer such as
HydraStorm to export XML files from here:

[To see links please register here]

And you need
MeshesSL to extract the rigged me from here:

[To see links please register here]

1. Make sure the rigged item you want to copy is being worn!
2. Don't wait around - log off and fire up MeshesSL and extract before your cache is overwritten.
3. with item selected copy all the textures > Hydrastorm menu > Inspect Textures > Save
3. Share it on this site!

hi i have not understand which sl mesh program must have for extract, i mean which program and where i can download ?
thank's

Hydrastorm :

[To see links please register here]

MeshesSL

[To see links please register here]

ive been running into an issue with trying to upload rigged mesh tried removing root prim through detail selection which worked but uploads it as normal mesh

Thank you so much :D