Category: Content Creation User Group

Updated June 30th – please refer to note following a quoted comment from Matrice.

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, June 23rd at 13:00 SLT at the the Hippotropolis Campfire Circle . For details on the meeting agenda, please refer to the Bento User Group wiki page.

Note that this update is not intended to offer a full transcript of the meeting, nor does it present the discussion points in chronological order. Rather, it represents the core points of discussion, grouped together by subject matter were relevant / possible, whilst maintaining the overall context of the meeting.

Apologies for the quality of Vir’s voice in the recording, this is my fault. I had to go afk just after starting the audio recording, and I hadn’t adjusted my local pick-up of Vir’s voice before doing so. As as consequence, Vir sounds a little distorted.

Facial Bones, Rotation / Translation / Slider Issues and Relative Translations

There has been further forum thread discussions on issues with the position of some of the new facial bones when they are used in combination with the head sliders. The core of this discussion commences here, and Mal Vanbeeck has offered a feature request for “shape slider friendly” facial bone positions. Some of this is also tied to issues relating to the range of movement of bones with the sliders or under animation.

Matrice Laville has been looking into some of the issues, and has come up with a proposal for making some amendments to the Bento skeleton to try to address some of the problems. However, any changes which are implemented will change the structure of the skeleton and how the sliders work, and will likely impact some initial content using the affected parts of the skeleton.

Because of this, it is likely the proposed amendments will be built into a test version of the Bento viewer, rather than the current project viewer, together with some test models to allow independent testing of the updates so it can be determined if they address the issues sufficiently and do not have unanticipated additional impact, so that a decision can be made on whether or not to fully implement them into the project viewer.

Specific changes in this test viewer, when available, are focused on issues raised around eyes and jaws, and so should comprise:

• Changing the eyelids to have the same centre position as the eyebrow
• Changes to the jaw and tongue positions
• Changing the lower teeth so that they are parented to the lower jaw bone
• Associated slider changes.

Adding to this in text, Matrice said:

All jaw related sliders do no longer translate the jaw except the jaw angle slider; the jaw bone has its default position now right below the faceRoot. The jaw angle slider still moves like crazy but I believe it is not an issue any longer. Actually, I propose to remove the [.LAD definitions for the Bento bones from the] jaw angle slider, because it only is needed for the jaw angle. I bet nobody will miss that slider.*

[NB June 30th: This comment has been updated, as some confusion followed the publication of this report, causing Matrice some embarrassment.  The fault is mine, and is the result of copying a text comment verbatim, rather than seeming clarification from Matrice. My apologies to him and any anyone else for the confusion caused.]

As Vir acknowledged, this has been a major amount of work which should hopefully address many of the issues encountered with the complexity of the new face bones and attempting to hook them into a limited set of available sliders.

Vir also noted that when available, Bento avatars using this revised skeleton in the test viewer may look odd when seen on the Bento project viewer, and vice-versa, and that the work has been carried out with the aim of limiting any de-stabilising influences the changes may have if and when they are integrated into Bento as a whole, while at the same time avoiding being so conservative that Bento ends up going live still with issues like these which might impact its adoption and use.

A notification will be placed in the forum thread when the viewer is ready.

Project Viewer Status

There are some bug fixes that will be upcoming in the next Bento project update, which could be appearing sometime in week #26 (week commencing Monday, June 27th).

The Lab is working to get the viewer to Release Candidate status, with the work focused on identifying and prioritising the bugs which really need to be fixed before moving forward. There will also be the work to integrate the modifications to bone positions and sliders noted above, together with associated evaluation, plus the upcoming testing. However, the hope is the viewer will move to RC status in the not-too-distant future.

Tool Chain Issues

Some of the recent bugs Vir has been investigating with regards to specific content appear to be down to potential issues within the tools used to create the content introducing irregularities in the models and animations, rather than anything specific to how Bento itself is handling the uploaded models.

Obviously, in such circumstances, there is only so far the Lab can go in investigating these types of issues, as they have no knowledge of exactly how the models /animations were defined within the creator’s tools of choice, etc., and so content creators who have encountered these specific issues have been asked to take them back to the tools creators to make sure things are behaving correctly at that end of the process.

Continue reading “Project Bento User Group update 16 with audio” →

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, June 16th at 13:00 SLT at the the Hippotropolis Campfire Circle . For details on the meeting agenda, please refer to the Bento User Group wiki page.

Note that this update is not intended to offer a full transcript of the meeting, nor does it present the discussion points in chronological order. Rather, it represents the core points of discussion, grouped together by subject matter were relevant / possible, whilst maintaining the overall context of the meeting.

Viewer Status

As noted in my current viewer releases page and this week’s SL project update, the Bento project viewer updated to version 5.0.0.316366 on June 10th. This release primarily contained bug fixes.

In addition, the pre-jump / jump / landing issue reported in my Bento update #14 (and see BUG-18239) This issue appears to have been related to issues of animations repositioning the avatar pelvis (also the avatar centre) causing conflicts as Vir explained in the meeting.

Eye Bug

Unfortunately, the new project viewer has introduced a fair number of new issues, which the Lab is now looking into, However, one which (as at the time of writing) was awaiting a JIRA, was raised for discussion at the meeting by Medhue Simoni.

In short, the problem is that models uploaded using the latest version of the viewer which do not have eye positions / animation set for poses such as a default stand pose (so they use the default eye positions and will move naturally), have the eyes incorrectly positioned as soon as the avatar is worn.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that even avatars uploaded using the latest version of the viewer (5.0.0.316366) which do display their eyes correctly can have the eyes reset incorrectly in a person’s view in the Reset Skeleton button is used. however, the eyes will also resume their expected position once any animation affecting them is played.

One possible culprit of the issue might be a new head slider, as discussed towards the end of the meeting.

Relative Bone Translations

A recent addition to the Bento project viewer is the ability to reset all bones in the skeleton. The idea is to correctly reset all bone positions in your view should an avatar deform when changing shapes. However, Gael Streeter has come upon situations where partial bone resets might be required, which prompted a discussion on the forum thread (see follow-ups here, here and here) and led to Tapple Gao offering a proposal (which also sparked further discussion in the thread) to address the issue via relative bones translations, which is also now a feature request.

While Vir Linden see the idea as a “nice to do”, it could entail some deep changes to the avatar system as well as having to extend the animation format; as such, it’s more likely to be something the Lab would consider for a “Bento follow-on” project rather than something they’d might try to implement at this point in time.

Leviathan Flux raises the matter of relative bone translations

However, there is a significant set of issues facing makers of mesh heads / faces, while could be resolved through relative bone translations which avoid making the shape sliders unusable (which would be the case if they relied on repositioning the facial bones).

A concern was raised that any changes made at this point in time risked the breakage of Bento content which is currently a work-in-progress for creators; however, most of those present at the meeting took the attitude better a breakage now if it yields an improvement,  than down the road, when breakage would be a much greater risk.

Continue reading “Project Bento User Group update 15 with audio” →

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, May 26th at 13:00 SLT on Aditi. For details on each meeting and the location, please refer to the Bento User Group wiki page.

Note that this update is not intended to offer a full transcript of the meeting, nor does it present the discussion points in chronological order. Rather, it represents the core points of discussion, grouped together by subject matter were relevant / possible, whilst maintaining the overall context of the meeting.

Bento on Agni

It had been hoped that back-end support for Bento would be enabled on Agni (the main grid) during week #21. However, things got held up while a fix was being pushed through QA (possibly the security fix which rolled to LeTigre and then to all channels this week?).

The Lab is now planning to enable Bento in week #22, most likely on Tuesday, May 31st.

A couple of points to remember with the move to Agni:

• This isn’t in any way a “final” release of Bento, although the Skeleton and slider updates are now frozen (unless a really significant issue / bug is found. At this point, enabling Bento on Agni, which includes the ability to upload Bento items to the main grid, is to expose the capabilities to a wider audience of content creators and allow broader testing
• Until the Bento code comes into wider circulation among TPVs, any mesh avatars, etc., rigged to the new bones will look deformed in non-Bento viewer, and may cause some viewer instability / crashes.

Details are still TBD, but one aspect of the move to Agni will be a further stress test to see how large numbers of Bento avatars impact performance, region crossings, etc. Details, including date and time will be made available in due course.

Date and Location of Next Meeting

With the deployment of Bento to the main grid, Bento User Group meetings will also swap over to Agni as well to encourage attendance. Details of where meetings will take place will be announced via the User Group wiki page and through the Bento forum thread.

With regards to the next meeting, due on Thursday, June 2nd, there is a Lab internal meeting taking place that day. It is therefore unclear if the Bento meeting will take place or will be cancelled (Vir would prefer for the latter not to happen, given the scheduled Bento deployment to the main grid). A decision on whether, when and where it will be held will again be made via the User Group wiki page, etc., once decided.

Project Viewer Update

The Bento Project viewer updated to version 5.0.0.315657 on Thursday, May 26th. This version includes the following significant updates:

A “Reset Skeleton” option, intended to fix cases where an avatar is distorted in your world view as a result of incorrectly applied joint updates. For example, a non-human avatar may show as “crunched up” because it is still in a human pose.

Right-clicking on the affected avatar (your own or another) and selecting Reset Skeleton from the avatar context menu should correct the avatar’s appearance in your view. As this is a viewer-side update, it will not affect how anyone else sees the affected avatar until they use Reset Skeleton. The Lab has requested feedback on the capability if it fails to work as intended.

The viewer also includes a few late-breaking changes to the slider support for mesh avatars, including jaw shape and head shape. Sliders that affect the scale of mPelvis now also alter mHindLimbsRoot, to better keep the front and hind legs synced up.

Updated Skeleton and Test Files

At the time of writing, the Bento test files have yet to be updated to reflect the most recent viewer changes. When this has happened, they will be linked via the Bento Testing page. Matrice Lavalle from Avastar and Cathy foil of MayaStar are working on getting the skeleton files updated for their respective plug-ins, and ensuring the are consistent with one another, something they hope have finished in the very near future.

Once this has been done, both Avastar and Mayastar will be updated, and will include collision volumes and some other weighting tweaks which should help improve slider behaviour when editing an avatar’s appearance.

Vir has started putting together a repository for supporting test models and animations which can be made available through the wiki Bento test page, so if there are other Bento creators / animators who have test models and files they would like to submit, he asks that they drop him a line.

There was also discussion on how to present the models to ensure those using different modelling tools (e.g 3D Max) can obtain a full set of bones with which to work.

Other Items

BVH File Interpreter

The Second Life BVH interpreter has apparently been updated so it will allow the upload of position data. However, if problems are found when doing so, the Lab requests a JIRA is filed to let them know,

Animation Exports and Mayastar / Maya

Mayastar is the skeleton plug-in Cathy Foil produces for Maya users (Avastar being the plug-in for Blender). Mayastar will current export  .BVH files with bone rotations for the entire skeleton, but translations for the mPelvis bone only. This works reasonably well with these restrictions, although it does have an issue with feet Cathy is currently looking to fix. As far as skinning, etc., is concerned, Maya works “pretty good”.

However, and in her own time, Aura Linden is working on an exporter for Maya which is intended to support export .ANIM files with both rotation and translation of all bones in the skeleton.

This should eliminate the need to sue two skeletons for Mayastar – one for rigging and one for animations. Subject to confirmation, the .BVH uploader may also have been updated to eliminate the need to use two skeletons.

Continue reading “Project Bento User Group update 14 with audio” →