Tag: Content Creation 2016

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.

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, March 3rd 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.

Skeleton and Viewer Status

Bento viewer work is now focused on finalising the new skeleton, working on bug fixes and investigating hooking the new skeleton into the appearance sliders where is can be done.

It’s anticipated that there will not be any further significant changes to the bones within the skeleton, although there has been some discussion on adding a couple of extra bones into the “hind” limbs. Content creators are therefore being encouraged to develop new test models utilising the skeleton, as available in the current project viewer (version 5.0.0.311861 at the time of writing).

A couple of issues have come to light with the additional bones. In the first, the alternate eye bones weren’t quite lined up with the original eyes, and this is being fixed. There  also appears to be some issues arising from the inclusion of additional spine bones, which is discussed below.

Appearance Sliders

The Lab has been investigating the potential of modifying the appearance sliders (controlled through the avatar.LAD file). This means taking some of the sliders that are based on morphs which deform the default avatar, and allowing them to also be utilised by the Bento skeleton when an avatar mesh employing the skeleton is worn. This work looks “promising”, although the number of sliders means that it is unlikely all of them will be dual-purposed in this way. However, as a part of this work, the Lab will be addressing the slider bugs which have been reported against the latest Bento skeleton as well.

Vir discusses the current status with the Bento skeleton and project viewer

Attachment Points

Some additional attachment points were added specifically for use with the new skeleton, and consideration is being given to adding some more (such as to the new “hind” limbs – which can be used for a variety of purposes other than “just” hind legs, as noted in my last update).  Currently, no clear preference for extra attachment points has been expressed by content creators working on Bento. One group of suggested attach points put forward in the meeting was for rear left leg and rear right leg (upper and lower). rear hip, rear groin, rear left foot, rear right foot, and rear back (for rideable centaurs/saddles).

Responding to this Vir indicated some of these may already be possible, and that others such as those for the hind legs / back are hard to determine as the joints are repositionable,. The suggestion for catering to some of these bones might be to reposition existing attachment point to suit, or the possible inclusion of a new hip root attachment point for the “hind” bones root.

The question was also raised on whether attachment points are lag producing in the same way joints can be. Vir indicated that lag isn’t really an issue with attachment points on their own (although animating them can obviously add an overhead). However, there are other issues with regards to UI / menu management which can make additional attachment points a problem.

For example, there is only a single menu structure available for selecting an attachment point for an item directly from inventory. So the more attachment points added, the more unwieldy the menu gets. The same issue isn’t so apparent when attachment an object from in-world, where the code allows for sub-menus to be added.

Another limiting aspect with attachment points is that there is a hard limit on the total number of joints which can be used (thought to be 255). so if an attachment point was added to every bone, this would likely be exceeded, so things like an attachment point for every finger would probably be out of the question.

Issue Updates

Work is continuing on issues of avatar deformation, but as yet there have been no major breakthroughs.

However, problems appea rto have arisen as a result of the new spine bones. In particular, quadruped avatars appear to “dip” their forelegs and shoulders forward when shifting between certain animations. The precise cause is unclear (this may not even be a new issue, just one that is exacerbated by the new bones), but it could be the result of an interpolation issues, an i-k (inverse kinematics issue) or even some issue relating to bipedal animations (a human avatar tends to lean into something like a walk, and this default movement might be affecting thing). However, the larger the quadruped avatar, the more pronounced the up-and-down motion of the forelegs seems to be.

This problem is further compounded by a problem whereby if the avatar mesh is animated while ignoring the spine bones, then the avatar can end up being distorted following something like a relog; the spine bones must be keyframed in order for the avatar mesh to remain correctly formed.

One possible explanation for this latter issue is that there might be a missing transform in the hierarchy data, such that the weights associated with a joint are skipped, together with any child joints, causing the model to collapse.

As it is, the model in question, animations, etc., are being passed to the Lab so that they can investigate and test things.

Other issues have also been seen with the additional spine bones, which might be down to order of use or correct alignment, as the method by which they have been implemented, in order to preserve backwards compatibility with the avatar skeleton, is complicated.

Continue reading “Project Bento User Group update 8 with audio” →

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, March 3rd 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 does not present the discussion in chronological order; items discussed have, wherever possible and without compromising the discussion itself, have been grouped together to try to present a complete discussion of the topics raised in turn.

New Project Viewer and Bento Skeleton

A new version of the Bento project viewer has been released. Version 5.0.0.311861, dated March 2nd, 2016, includes the updated Bento skeleton, which the Lab hopes will be the final version.  In particular this adds further new bones:

• Four new spine joints: two between mPelvis and mTorso, and two between mTorso and mChest. By default these bones are folded up inside the current spine and will not affect the appearance of the avatar, but like other bones they can be repositioned in uploaded meshes, or animated according to need
• New face bone root: rather than adding extra neck bones, the Lab have added an extra face bone root, which could be used as an extra neck bone if desired
• Three new centre face bones along the mid-line of the face, two on the lips and one on the forehead
• Two new joints for ears, allowing for floppy or otherwise more flexible ears
• An additional pair of limbs, each with 3 joints apiece, and a new root bone to which they are connected. These are named “Hind” limbs, but using the root bone, the can be relocated to be used elsewhere – such as an extra pair of arms
• One new bone for each wing to allow a simple fan as would be used in a bat-type wing.
• Removal of two wing root bones: these were originally included as a workaround for the lack of joint translations. As this is now possible, only a single wing root bone is actually required
• Various bone position changes.

As some of the existing bones have been removed or changed position, this does mean that content made using the original Bento skeleton will need to be updated in order to display as intended. Aditi servers have been updated with the new skeleton.

Vir discusses the new bones and the removal of some bones

The ability to add new spine bones is a direct result of the Lab being able to fix the two issues referred to in my last Bento update, the first of which would crash the Bento viewer if additional spine joints were added, while the second was that new spine bones would break the rendering of the default avatar.

In order for this to work, the new bones have an odd positioning / ordering within the skeleton, so they seem to “zig-zag” (spine 1 is located in chest, spine 2 in the pelvis, then comes the torso, etc). The reason for this was to allow all the original skeleton joints exactly where they had always been located, and to avoid the creation of any zero length bones, with the internal matrix maths (as well as some other programmes) doesn’t particularly like, as Vir explained which discussing the new spine bones.

Vir expands on the new spine bones and ordering

There may be some issues which are causing Blender to incorrectly display the new spine bone positions and orientation. One suggestion for those encountering similar issues is to visualise the bones by setting them to the polyhedral models where it is wider on one end than the other (I’m unfamiliar with blender, so not sure of the precise term for the visualisation) to make it easier to see the orientation of the bones, although this may not work.

Aki Shichiroji, who has experienced the problems, has indicated she’d talk a little more with the Avastar team about things. Certainly, Vir believes working with them is going to require a delicate touch when working with the spine bones in the likes of Maya and Blender, due to the risk of coincident bones.

Next Steps

The Lab intends to freeze the skeleton soon, and those wishing to test it are advised to do so over the next few days. Currently, the easiest way to obtain the latest version of the skeleton is directly from the new version of the project viewer (link above), although hopefully the wiki links, etc., will be updated soon.

There is liable to be one more update to the project viewer once the skeleton is frozen, after which the Lab will be turning attention to the avatar.LAD file, the other major configuration file for the skeleton, and finalising changes and corrections to the shape sliders and potentially adding some new attachment points which can leverage the revised skeleton.

The biggest issue as far as progress the project to initial deployment on the main grid is concerned, is bug fixing. There are still some significant problems yet to be resolved, which are dependent upon understanding the route cause of the problem and having the staff available to investigate them / resolve them:

• Issues with the extra joints, such as the default avatar pose issue (see below)
• The rendering deformations encountered at high altitude
• The general avatar deformation issue seen within the Bento viewer (see here and here for further notes).

There are also a number of more general bugs to be corrected as well.

Overview of the next steps in the project from the Lab’s perspective

Default Avatar Pose Issue

There has been further investigation into the default avatar pose issue which can see quadruped avatars unnaturally crossing or folding their forelegs when shifting between animations (for background see here, here, and here).

It had been thought that the issue was due to the way that scripted animation override systems (e.g. the ZHAO and ZHAO 2) overlay the default server-side avatar poses, occasionally allowing these server-side animation to start playing when shifting between poses as a result of a message timing issue between server and viewer. The suggested solution was therefore thought to be to encourage creators to write AO for their Bento avatars which would utilise the llSetAnimationOverride capability introduced in 2013, which overwrites the server-side defaults with the animations of the creator’s choosing, thus preventing the “wrong” animation starting to be played.

However, more recent testing suggests that the issue can still occur when using llSetAnimationOverride.

A problem here has been that the JIRA specifying the issue and providing information on various tests, etc., carried out to date by the Lab has, not been publicly viewable (for valid reasons), making it hard for other outside the Lab attempting to investigate the problem to understand what has happened to date and report their own findings back to the Lab. Arrangements are now being made to clone the JIRA and make is public to eliminate this problem.

Other Items

Removing Mesh Upload and Display Restrictions

Second Life has always had a number of upload and display restrictions wherein creators were required to include certain joint positions whether or not they were in fact using them (the uploader wouldn’t check to verify whether the positions were actually used, just that they are listed). There were some checks which insisted that if the positions of some of these bones were changed, they all had to be changed.

This obviously limited the number of meshes rigged to bones from different creators that an avatar could wear, because there would inevitably be conflicts between the listed joints in each mesh. The checks themselves date back to when the Lab used a different method for tracking joint positions, and they don’t make a lot of sense today, and so work is in hand to remove them, and should be completed with the next release of the project viewer.

The upshot of this is that once done and available, avatars will be able to wear meshes from different creators, providing the mesh items only list the joints they actually use. This would allow, for example, this will allow someone to wear a centaur avatar from one creator and add a set of wings from another creator without the risk that the meshes would conflict because they list the same “required” joint positions. However, for this to work, it does mean that creators will need to ensure they list only the joints they require in order to offer some degree of “interoperability” between meshes.

Vir discusses the removal of the upload and display restrictions

Using Bones to Animate Hair and Clothes

One benefit from being able to rig and list only the bones which are being used, is that it potentially opens the door to creators being about to use some of the additional bones to animate things like hair and dresses.

For example, as bipedal, humanoid avatars are unlikely to require the tail bones or the “hind” limb bones, these could potentially be used to naturally animate a  mesh gown (particularly one with a long train) or long dresses. Similarly, the additional ear bones might be used to animate mesh hair.

Cathy Foil points-out the potential for clothing and hair makers as a result of the removal of the restrictions

Scripted Methods for Bone Positions

BUG-11407 is a feature request to provide scripted control of bone positions, allowing to an LSL command to pass an array of bone positions to the client to animate oneself, or, with permission granted, to animate another user.

Commenting on this at the meeting, Vir indicated that while such an approach is “interesting”, but due to the scope of things, has been considered to big an undertaking for the Bento project, and would likely have to be considered as a project in its own right. Rider Linden further suggested raising the idea for discussion at the Simulator User Group meeting.

Useful Links

• Project Bento Knowledge Base article – Linden Lab
• Project Bento Skeleton Guide – Linden Lab
• Project Bento Testing – Linden Lab
• Project Bento discussion forum
• Project Bento overview – this blog
• Project Bento updates – this blog

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, February 25th 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 the audio excepts are not necessarily chronological, one to the next. Items such as wing bones were discussed at a couple of different points in the meeting, but the comments have been drawn together in an attempt to present a complete discussion of the subject; however, the subjects within each audio extract are provided in the order the discussion proceeded (i.e. the initial part of the discussion on wings is presented first, and the that later additional discussion presented at the end of the audio).

This was a short meeting, with the primary topic of conversation being finalising the Bento  skeleton in terms of additional bones and bone sets, following the recent survey (see my week 4 update).

Additional Tail / Limb Bone Sets

Vir indicated that he, Cathy Foil and Matrice Leville have been discussing a couple of ideas. The first is to cull some of the additional wing bones to produce a second set of “tail” bones, which could then be used for a variety of purposes, including creating additional limbs, or a new limb and additional animation options on the existing tail, etc. This approach would see each of the tails have 5 bones, compared to the current tail having six bones.

The second idea revolves around creating a pair of new limb bones using bones taken from the wings, and which would share the same mPelvis anchor point within the skeleton along with the existing tail (which would retain its existing 6 bones). This would simplify the creation of hind legs on avatars, allowing the tail to be moved”backwards” with them. At the same time, it would mean the additional limb bones could also be used for other purposes, if required.

This sparked a discussion on what might be the optimal approach to additional bone sets, naming conventions and whether any additional bones were in fact required, given there is now the ability to translate bone positions as well as rotate them. Vir agreed that naming does need to be considered, as that using terms like “tail” should mean the bones are limited to that particular use.

Concern was also raised on whether adding additional bone might add to the Bento time frame and if there might be other impacts. With regards to the latter, Vir indicated his hope is to run a stress test once the skeleton is finalised.

Other suggestions have been to simple add further bones to existing sets – such as with the hands, as suggested by Gaia Clary in the forums, although this has seen been seen as perhaps not as required as originally thought. Vir also reiterated that any additional limb bones could be used for arms as well as legs,

There has also been some discussion on the forum concerns limitations within the wing bone sets, which could be solved through the addition of wing “fingers” which would allow better animation of bat / dragon wings, with an explanation on how provided by Teager, who also explains the differences involved in animating such wings and those of birds.

Overall Status for Skeleton

In terms of any consensus for additional bones, it is Vir’s view that there is slightly more interest in having additional limb bones rather than a “two tails” approach, together with additional bones for wings (which could also be used for things like ears, etc.).

Vir will be taking this into account when defining the final skeleton, which he hopes to have available for people to review and test by the next meeting. However, he did warn that the overheads in getting the work completed, tested and signed-off might impact on this target, but it is one he’ll push for.

Issues Update

Additional Spine Joints

Vir is investigating problems with adding extra spine joints in the avatar, and has come across two issues. The first is that doing so can cause the current version of the Bento viewer to crash, although he believes he has a fix for this problem. The second, and more serious issue, is that additional spine joints, whilst working for mesh avatars, it will break the rendering of the default avatar. This appears to be a complex issue, and Vir isn’t confident it is one which might be fixed in time for the initial Bento deployment.

Avatar Deformations

Dan Linden continues to try to hunt down the cause of avatar deformations (BUG-11157). It has been noted that this is a complex problem, involving multiple factors – something which makes it hard to reproduce in a consistent manner. Following investigations, as I’ve previously noted, one causes appears to be scripted deformers which can have an adverse impact on avatars, in that they can continue to run when changing from one avatar to the next, causing the newly worn avatar to deform when seen by others.

However, the issue seems to be slightly broader than this, in that it appears a deformer used by one avatar can appear to impact another avatar when seen by others, whether or not that avatar is using the Bento skeleton.

An example of this occurred during the meeting, when Dan Linden, who was using the default avatar skeleton, arrived just as someone else was swapping avatars using deformation scripts. The result was that for myself and another attendee at the meeting, Dan’s avatar appeared deformed when viewed using the Bento viewer, while others who arrived a little later saw him normally. However, even the circumstances under which this situation occurred seemed to vary when put to a short test following the meeting, highlighting the fact that determining precise causes remains difficult.

Useful Links

• Project Bento overview – this blog
• Project Bento Knowledge Base article – Linden Lab
• Project Bento Skeleton Guide – Linden Lab
• Project Bento Testing – Linden Lab
• Project Bento discussion forum

The following notes and audio were taken from the weekly Bento User Group meeting, held on Thursday, February 18th at 13:00 SLT on Aditi.  For details on each meeting and the location, please refer to the Bento User Group wiki page. Audio extracts are provided, however, due to circumstances beyond my control, I missed the first 20 minutes of the meeting, so the following update is not a full summary of all that was discussed.

The Default Avatar Mesh and Bento

An area of concern regarding Bento is that while custom-built avatars can make use of the new Bento skeleton, and some work has been done on making some of the appearance sliders for the default avatar mesh compatible with Bento, there is next to no way at presents for the default Second Life avatar mesh to make full use of a Bento extensions. Much of this wouldn’t actually matter,  given that many of the circumstances where the new bones are being used would likely require the use of a custom mesh avatar. However, there are two noticeable areas where the it does have an impact: hands and faces.

Essentially, Bento introduces 30 bones into the face and 30 bones into the hands. However, these cannot currently be leveraged by the default avatar mesh, as demonstrated in the first 20 seconds of the video below.

As such, there has been discussion over the last couple of Bento meetings on ways in which this might be addressed. However, there are significant problems in trying to make the existing default SL avatar compatible with the Bento skeleton. One of these is that the default skeleton is designed in three core sections (head, upper body, lower body), each of which can only be rigged to utilise a maximum of 15 bones.

This means that trying to rig the default avatar to make correct use of the Bento skeleton additions isn’t that easy; the head and hands, for example, simply cannot support the number of bones offered by the Bento project. A further complication as that when it comes to facial expressions, the default avatar uses morphs rather than pure animations to achieve various expressions, and these could conflict with animations which utilise the Bento bones.

One solution would be to completely overhaul the default avatar or replace it. However, this is a massive undertaking, and one which could easily result in a lot of existing content breakage, as such it is not something the Lab is entirely sanguine about doing. Another idea put forward was for the Lab to provide two default heads, one utilising the default morphs and the other Bento bones and their associated animations. However, the limit of how many bones the default avatar mesh can support made this idea a non-starter.

Cathy Foil summaries the discusses on the avatar head, which occurred prior to my arrival at the meeting

During the discussion, Vir and Oz revealed that having the default avatar make use of the Bento skeleton is something the Lab has been pondering. However, it is not something that will be implemented during this initial phase of Bento due to the amount of work involved. However, it could be looked at as part of follow-on work from Bento.

Vir and Oz Linden raise the potential for Bento follow-on work to provide a means of making the default avatar head and hands more compatible with the Bento bones

That the Lab are considering trying to make some changes to the SL default avatar to leverage Bento capabilities lead to the suggestion by Medhue Simoni that perhaps the Lab should at the same time more broadly overhaul the avatar to provide a consistent set of vertices and weights throughout.

The idea here would be to present an avatar form which content creators could more readily use to model and rig fitted mesh items to a single, consistent set of vertices and weights, rather than each having to work to their own weightings. This would allow fitted mesh clothes to work more precisely with the avatar appearance sliders than is currently the case, and thus provide a more consistent and better feature set going forward.

The problem here is again exiting content breakage. One suggestion for dealing with this, put forward by Cathy, is that if the Lab decided to go the route suggested by Medhue, they could need to provide two default avatars, which users could swap between as needed dictated, by means of something like the gender change options currently found in the avatar appearance panel.

Comments on a wider re-working of the avatar skeleton

Appearance Sliders and Bento

As noted above, there has been some work completed on hooking some of the Bento bones to the appearance sliders – notably around the head and hands. Now that the updated skeleton is moving towards a final design, the hope is that perhaps more bones within it can be linked to the sliders.

Vir and Cathy on Bento and the appearance sliders

Continue reading “Project Bento User Group update 5 with audio” →