Category: SL User Group Meetings

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, March 31st 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 to Project Bento, grouped together by subject matter were relevant / possible.

Viewer Status

A new version of the Bento project viewer was released on Tuesday, March 29th. Version 5.0.0.313150 includes the latest updates to the Bento skeleton and the work that has been undertaken to hook-up some of the Bento bones to respond to the appearance sliders in the viewer. The skeleton changes are:

• Some renaming and position tweaks for the face joints
• New face joints to allow better slider support, including teeth, eye corners
• The EyeAlt bones are no longer children of mFaceRoot
• 4th joint added to the hind limbs.

The slider updates mean that many of the face sliders will now work for suitably rigged mesh heads.

The focus now is very much on finalising the skeleton, and subject to possible show stoppers turning up as more work is done on hooking bones into the appearance sliders, the hope is that the skeleton will not now undergo further significant change.  This should allow for in-depth testing of the skeleton without risk of further updates breaking content.

In particular, the Lab is looking to get feedback on any problems encountered with the skeleton, and whether some of the new additional bones are actually useful in achieving what has been hoped in requesting them – such as the additional joints requested for hexapods, etc.

Should it turn out that these joints are not useful, then the Lab needs to know sooner rather than later so that they can be tweaked, if possible. Also, if the joints are seen as not useful at all, than the Lab would also like to know, so that some might be removed to help reduce the overall complexity of the skeleton.

The areas the Lab are keen to see feedback on comprise:

• The new “hind” limbs
• The four additional spine joints
• The additional branch in the wings to allow for wing folding
• Testing the face sliders with animations – there is a concern that animations may conflict with slider settings used to reposition the facial bones.

There are also new .dae models which work with the new skeleton available on the Bento test page on the wiki.

Next Steps: Viewer and Sliders

From the Lab’s perspective, the immediate next steps in the projects are:

• Have a final skeleton and slider configuration by the end of week #14 (week commencing Monday April 4th (allowing a few more days for the Avastar team to complete work on linking facial bones, etc., to the appearance sliders
• Issue an updated project viewer ASAP after next week, which will include the finalised skeleton and sliders, together with available bug fixes (see below)
• Once the updated project viewer is out, the Lab will be focused on the remaining bug fixes and collecting feedback based on creators’ experiences in using the new skeleton, testing the sliders with and without animations, etc.
• To help people with this, the Lab encourage anyone working on content exercising elements of the new skeleton they are comfortable in sharing to the common pool of work on the wiki (link above)
• There are also some additional attachment points to be added to allow for things like the “hind” limbs. However as noted in my week #8 report, there are a number of limiting factors in adding attachment points, one of which is presenting them through the viewer UI, which has certain limitations. Another issue is that there is a hard limit to the total number of attachment points, which makes it difficult to accommodate every which might logically require attachment points associated with it.

Slider Work

It should be made clear that no new appearance sliders are being added to the viewer’s appearance controls for Bento. Rather, as noted in my week #9 update, a  slider parameter has been identified which allows some of the existing sliders to work with bone rotations / translations (for Bento) as well as with the morphs used to animate the default avatar skeleton.

There are some sliders in the head which don’t currently seem to work, although this may be due to further work waiting to be carried out in hooking things up. A suggestion has been made to add a new chin joint to make the chin more mobile and allow for versatile jaw shapes, but it’s not clear if further joints will be added at this point in time due to the growing complexity of the skeleton.

In addition to the facial slider support means that things like increasing height should allow wings to increase proportionally. However, documentation on what has been hooked-up to the sliders has yet to be written, mainly because the work is still ongoing, so currently the only way to get the information is via the avatar.lad XML file.

A couple of discussion points on bones and sliders revolve around the wings and “hind” leg bones. On the one hand, there are instances where having these hooked into sliders makes sense – such as having the “hind” leg bones for quadruped avatars, so that if the avatar’s height is increased, the hind legs adjust as well.

However, as things like the “hind” leg bones and the wing bones are designed to be re-tasked, there are potential use cases where this linking could be undesirable, and tends to steer various bones to only be used for certain types of content, rather than leaving things more open for content creators to determine how to just the bones. One potential work-around for things like the “hind” bones would be to provide an additional set of sliders specifically for them; however, due to the amount of work involved in developing and implementing the necessary viewer updates, including the UI changes that would be required, this is currently out-of-scope for Bento.

Continue reading “Project Bento User Group update 10 with audio” →

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, March 24th 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 to Project Bento, grouped together by subject matter were relevant / possible, together with any additional discussion on potential future projects the Lab might be willing to examine for possible adoption in the future.

Bento Skeleton and Appearance Sliders

Recent efforts within the Bento project have been on trying to hook the appearance sliders up to the new skeleton so that they might be used to adjust various Bento bones. This involves a fair amount of work, as the sliders apply morphs to the basic avatar form, and for Bento enabled meshes they need to be able to operate with bone positions / rotations.

Gaia Clary and Matrice Laville have been working on this, and have identified a slider parameter which can be used to achieve just this, and have been specifically looking at using the facial sliders (given the face  / head is one of the largest collections of new bones), as shown in the video below.

Skeleton and Viewer Status

The “downside” of this is that this requires further work on the Bento skeleton, includes the possible addition of further bones, which are currently under consideration. This means that there will at least one further update to the viewer, which will contain the updated slider capabilities and some updates / fixes for the skeleton.

It is hoped that this will surface in week #13 (week commencing Monday, March 28th); however, this is dependent upon final updates and getting the viewer through the Lab’s QA.  Once it has been issued, the Lab is particularly keen to see the spine bones exercised within this viewer once released, as these have been causing some problems (see my last Bento update).

One potential addition to the skeleton is a set of teeth bones, as described by Cathy Foil in the meeting. Again, it’s not certain these will make the final selection, but the potential with them is interesting.

Obtaining the Latest Version of the Skeleton

Currently, the most direct way to obtain the latest version of the Bento Skeleton is via the latest version of the Bento viewer installed on your computer (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\SecondLife\character) and using the Avatar_skeleton.XML and Avatar_lad.XML files – the latter of which contains the shape slider capabilities. The major reason the skeleton files haven’t been updated on the wiki is because the skeleton has been going through updates and changes, and Vir has been concerned about any version put on the wiki becoming out-of-date.

Shipping Bento to the Main (Agni) Grid

Troy Linden, the product lead for Bento indicated that current thinking among the product team at the Lab is that Bento will likely move to the main (Agni) grid some time in the second quarter of 2016. This doesn’t mean the project will necessarily be declared complete by then, but it does mean that the Lab expect to have all major skeleton and viewer work wrapped up, with the emphasis firmly shifting to more widespread testing, together with any required bug fixing.

Vir did caveat this with the point that there could be reasons  – significant bugs, other work requiring release, etc., – which might cause this to slip, but the focus would appear to be firmly on moving Bento to Agni some time between April and June 2016.

Issues

Incorrect Display of Legacy Rigged Content

It is unclear how widespread this issue is, or what the precise cause is. Currently it has only been noted with GOS shoes / feet, and manifests in the Bento viewer in the left foot / shoe appearing incorrectly aligned to the left leg when worn, as shown in the image on the right – note the left shoe / foot appears partially rendered because it has “sunk” into the terrain. Details of the issue can be found in  BUG-11617.

One suggestion put forward is that the issue is down to the very high poly count used in these shoes / feet; another that it might be due to the shoes feet being uploaded as individual mesh models, which might be creating issues.

However, why either of these cases should be so is unclear: the feet / shoes render correctly in non-Bento viewers, and there have been no intentional changes made to the rendering pipeline for Bento. A further suggestion is that it might be a result of attempting to rig to and animate an attachment point; it may even be related to an old issue of float issues in the LLVolumeOctree (BUG-2058 – see FIRE-8266 for a public version).

The issue has been accepted by the Lab as a bug, and will undergo further investigation on a number of fronts, including obtaining versions of the items seen to be exhibiting problems, testing the effect using other high poly count objects, etc.

Wing Mesh Upload Issues

There is also a possible issue with the mesh uploader failing to recognise the revised Bento wing bones as bones. This apparently manifests itself by a refusal to upload rigged wings weighted to the wing bones.

Next Meetings

The next Bento meeting will take place on Thursday, March 31st at 13:00 SLT. The meeting following that should be on Thursday, April 7th, but the time is TBC, so as to avoid it clashing with a Lab internal meeting.