Project Bento Feedback Thread

[Gael Streeter]

Ok, perfect I am happy to see that this problem was identified already and fixed in the next release.

I know that Avastar is still in development, that is why I raise the problem I can see...

[Medhue Simoni]

So, I been wrestling with this cobra for a couple of weeks now. It seemed that no matter what kind of constraints I used to keep the Bento bones to my control rig, bones would not always stick perfectly, and bones were getting out of alignment. Then it hit me today, after taking a couple days off of beating my head against a wall about it. Gosh, it's so obvious now when I think about it.

It's the pelvis! Now, maybe this is just how this is in Avastar, but we have all these bones that parent to the pelvis. If the pelvis moves, so do all those bones, no matter how you set up constraints. The solution is to not use, or move the pelvis at all. The good thing is, that I'm using a control rig, which is just the same rig I orginally made for the Unity3D engine. All the animation is really on or done on that rig. So, swapping out a bone, and rearranging the bento skeleton isn't that big of a deal and doesn't ruin the work I've done on it already. I just need to resave and upload the anim files. I hope this helps others that might be seeing something strange like this, and it might also be smart to always use control rigs when feasible.

[Rogue Darkheart]

The goal of making Avatars more ‘human,’ by providing them more natural and precise articulation and facial gestures makes sense, but what’s the long term goal? Are these enhancements solely for the benefit of static photographers who show their work on niche websites?

What I fail to see ‘articulated’ by Linden Lab is how these enhancements fit in with the overall Road Map for current generation (SL) and next generation (Sansar) Virtual Worlds. Does a public Road Map exist? If so, where can I find it?

For Ten Years, I have had a vision of using Virtual Worlds like Second Life to generate Marketing Content for Physical World consumption. Thus far, Linden Lab has Failed to provide the tools, including a ‘Reseller Channel’ or the Copyright Management & Licensing options necessary to do that.

So the ‘Dolls’ have more poses. Big Deal. Show me a way to monetize it, with a seamless migration path to Sansar, and I’ll be interested.

[Ikey Ilex]

So, I've been looking at the Bento Skeleton in world, and expiramenting with it a little, and I have just two concerns I'd like to adress.

Would it be prossible to set up the skeleton links of the tail bones to have physics, and the same potentially for mGroin? I like the idea of being able to animate these bones, but being able to use real physics for these, if desired, would be a huge help.

[Polymath Snuggler]

Thus far physics has only been applied to "Volume" bones, rather than skeletal animation bones.  All the new bones are skeletal animation, rather than volumetic.  So sadly physics can't really be applied to them directly, however something like a "dragging tail" can be faked with animations.

 

Alternatively there are prim ray-cast script solutions that can mimic the behavior you're requesting, but it's a tad bit late in the Bento project to be adding collision physics.

Edit: Also, it's worth mentioning that making things move with the physics engine drastically reduces the number of alternative uses that a bone can be repurposed for ~ as it's suddenly being influenced by the environment.

[Gaborren Penucca]

I found an instance where bento actually ADDS functionality to an existing product instead of breaking it. With the "snaggletooth kobold" mesh body,  there are some shape slider options it does not respond to when over 50. These sliders work over the full range in bento viewers (at least in firestorm 4.7.10, I haven't tested it in the SL RC).

Pre-bento viewer: https://gyazo.com/d7c93436a2d10a3f7656886d009ba6fc

Bento viewer: https://gyazo.com/2d5f3805f13259cfcc3ebaf2a4bde216

 

After posting this someone informed me that this is an issue with the female shape grid wide, not specifically with the kobold. My mistake.

[daFlesh]

Hello, I am having an issue with collision cbones, while I copy weights in maya, they just dont work  

as you can see in two pictures, in 1st picture the breasts are in default pose, in 2nd picture 

I increase breast size but although I did copy skinweights, my mesh's breasts dont respond

and also other collision cbones ( torso muscles, leg muscles, butt size .. ) weights dont work on target either.

but mbones (fingers rotate or shoulders elbows ) working. just collision cbones not working.

one more point : the head's all bones (mbones + cbones) are working fine, they seem like copied pretty good enough, cheeks, eyes, mouth, ears, head size etc. they are pretty good on my mesh (need fixing of course) 

this issue seems like only about body's collision cbones,  What may be the reason ? 

 

 

[Degra Dockal]

Hey again! I've recently started trying to work on the bento hands for my fitted mesh Louisbody, and found one weird little bug or error on my part, and it's driving me nuts trying to figure out what's causing it. I got the fingers all rigged great, and the mesh looks perfect in Blender and the SL preview uploader, and then came across this. 

The lower arm joint seems to be.. shoved away from the body? And is causing a lot of distortion, but only there! 

https://gyazo.com/fe4bcd5fe83e8123a71773902c0566c5 

https://gyazo.com/930f5e148dcc723ef4b95823031f45f7 

And here is the normal uploaded fitted mesh version, what it should look like; 

https://gyazo.com/a917b80b3a2804156f3ba76ebfeee8d8 

https://gyazo.com/9df6297eccf1b6e6ca99bd2a80058048 

 

The hands I finished also look a bit warped (https://gyazo.com/b961fb0b747543694551f1f4cf16de5c) but are fixed quickly with one of its own custom animations as I had to move the finger bones around a bit so it would actually animate them correctly.

What could be causing the elbow distortion, though? Does editing where the finger bones are not support being partially rigged to bones used for fitted mesh? Thanks so much for any help with this! 8D

 

Edited to add that I'm using Avastar for the rigging.

[Teager]

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Project-Bento-Live-on-the-Grid/ba-p/3084426?utm_source=FeaturedBento&utm_medium=Story&utm_term=Social_CM

 

 

So.... celebration this Thursday instead of meeting?

[Krystal Silverweb]

Yay!! Been waiting on this a long time

 



[Melonie Romano]

I am an animator and use Poser Pro and Qavimator for making animations.  Will the new skeleton be usable in my program? 

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Melonie Romano wrote:

I am an animator and use Poser Pro and Qavimator for making animations.  Will the new skeleton be usable in my program? 

---

The last time I used Poser, they had options to import DAE, and FBX files. I would think that you should be able to use those to animate with. Also, Dazstudio has these options, and will also let you export Poser files. Not positive that any of this will work, but they are things you can try.

[Medhue Simoni]

Last night and this morning, I released my new Bento Cobra to the grid. I also sent out the Bento Cobra to everyone that purchased my original cobra. So, there are now potentially hundreds of Bento cobras slithering around the grid. Because this is not just a normal update, I personally messaged every single past purchaser of my old cobra. This literally took ALL day, but I did learn quite a bit in the process. The SL of today is thriving, and I was quite surprised at just how many of these past purchasers messaged me back, or were on the grid while I was messaging them. Personally, I think much of this is due to changes we've seen at the Lab, and many of the new features the Lab has introduces over the past couple of years. Kudos to LL, and please keep it up!

 

Skeletons for NPCs next? :smileywink:

[ReneeThesium]

Just to make sure I understand things...  in regards to the current mesh bodies available, I'm thinking they will be unaffected by Bento's release *unless* you want them to work with things like new hand movements, animations.

In which case, there will have to be an update of some kind.

 

Am I anywhere close to being correct?

[Vir Linden]

That's right, existing mesh content should work the same way before or after Bento. If someone wants to support hand motions, facial expressions, wings, tails, etc then they may want to update their content to take advantage of the new Bento bones.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

You are correct.  Note though that you may be charged for the update.  It remains to be seen what designers will do.  One designer is offering a mesh bento head but is selling it as a new product.  So watch group notices for the body you have.

If you haven't bought a mesh body, I'd hold off to give creators time to put out new content.  There isn't much choice yet.

[Kylie Remsen]

Hello,

 

I'm curious why bento in its current state has not been configured to work with system body? I was quite dissapointed to find that I won't be able to use new facial and hand animations with the system body as it is. And yes i do prefer system body over mesh body for many personal reasons. I feel like a lot of system body users have been shoved aside for a long time now and i would just love some explinations.

 

Thanks

[Cherry Hotaling]

!!Major Issue for 3ds Max users!!

Has anyone been able to successfully export from 3ds max to sl a rigged or fitrigged item for bento?

I cant seem to export anything from 3ds max with bento bones. My guess is that the problem is you cannot set the "Bone Affect Limit" higher than 100 and there are a lot more bones than 100 in bento. I know if you use the dae exporter built in max it will ignore bones not weighted.

In the past I have gooten around this by setting the Bone affect limit to 52 or whatever the fitrigged bone count was and setting all the bone weights to 0 in the weight table for one vert.

Does anyone know of another method of exporting from 3dstudio max to dae that will export all the bones for SL?

(I even tried exporting from 3ds max as fbx and importing it into blender for avastar, It says that the bones are not there)

 

Thanks

[Cathy Foil]

---

Kylie Remsen wrote:

Hello,

 

I'm curious why bento in its current state has not been configured to work with system body? I was quite dissapointed to find that I won't be able to use new facial and hand animations with the system body as it is. And yes i do prefer system body over mesh body for many personal reasons. I feel like a lot of system body users have been shoved aside for a long time now and i would just love some explinations.

 

Thanks

---

The reason the system avatar body mesh doesn't use the new bento Bones is because the max bones a system mesh body can be rigged to is 15 bones.  See the system mesh body or default mesh body isn't regular rig mesh like the kind we upload using DAE files.  The system body is made up of 5 or 6 separate meshes.  Lower body, upper body, head, eyes, hair and skirt.  Each of these can only be rigged to 15 bones max.  It would take a major rewriting of the system avatar mesh code to allow it to be rigged to more than 15 bones per mesh.  This is just something LL doesn't have the resources to do at this time.

 

 

Cathy

[Amethyst Jetaime]

You don't need an entire mesh body to take advantage of the new bones.  Mesh attachements rigged to the new bones will work too. For instance, I imagine that SLink hands will be updated eventually to work with Bento, so you could have individual finger movements but still keep your classic avatar.

I do wonder if the new Bento animations will work with the classic avatar though. 

[Dawne Drebin]

My impression of bento heads so far....thoroughly unimpressed.  They have very limited modability compared to system heads.  While most of the sliders have an effect on shape, the effect it does have is pretty limited, based heavily on the mesh shape of whatever head you buy.  While the bento heads do provide greater customisation than previous mesh heads, it's not that great.  

For example, when using Catwa's mesh head, I noticed that it was impossible to complete remove the droopy/saggy looking eye shape the head has by default.  It was impossible to create a button nose, as well.  

What makes all this worst is when I consider the prices of bento heads.  At 3k and up for halfway decent (and even ugly) mesh heads for the head itself and basic functions like blinking eyes and so on, the price point for such a limited item is absurd.  This is only aggravated by the fact that you have to completley redo your shape with the bento shape, a tedius process.  Creators are asking us to pay thousands of lindens for very limited customisation ability and the annoyance of copying over a few dozen sliders for our body shapes....

I have not investigated bento for mesh bodies.  I personally have no use for finger waggling (certainly not if I have to pay thousands of lindens to do so) and I never use wings or tails, so it's a useless itemfor me.  I think that some people will get some use out of that functionality, but having not tested them, I can't say how well the body skeleton works.

 

 

[Sexiieyes Kohime]

"Project Bento does not affect any existing content in Second Life.  All existing avatars and animations should continue to function as they were designed." -SL Wiki, 12/06/16

Why make this claim when body structures have clearly changed? In particular torso muscles have been given an additional directional scale on the slider that allows them to go further than before, and elongate the shoulders/lats in a manner not seen before the update. This functionality specifically alters the shape of any avatars with torso muscles above 50, which is a high percentage of users - causing them to clip with shoulder, back, and arm attachments in a way that makes them look "broken" upon logging in.

[Gaia Clary]

When we tested the Sliders back in january, we used a mesh copy of the system character. The goal was to make the sliders behave on the mesh clone as close as possible to the sliders behavior on the original mesh. Here is a video that i made during the testing phase (Please ignore the annotations, they are obsolete. What you see in the video should now also work on the Main grid as well) :

You see that while the behavior on the mesh clone is not exactly identical, it still is very close to the system character. In principle the sliders should be capable to work on mesh heads in a similar way.

I know there are issues with mouth and eyes because of some dependencies between the slider system and face animations. But apart from this i am eager to learn what other issues stop creators from getting the sliders to work properly with their mesh heads.

[Gaia Clary]

As far as i know the muscle slider was broken for many years, such that slider values above 50 (half way) had no effect on the female body. I understood that during the Bento project this issue was resolved, so this change seems to not be directly connected to the Bento project itself (but i may be wrong here).

As a side note: in our own tool we always have supported muscle changes above 50 for female bodies. There even was a remark in the program code stating something like "waiting for LL to fix this annoyance" And we never got a complaint about that our tool sliders do not match to what you see in the appearance editor in SL.

[Candi Clawtooth]

Ok , so i dont get all this bones stuff , I have the new viewer but, do i have the bones already in my mesh avatar or do i have to buy them or what???    This is confusing to me and ive read alot on it.   Help ! my fingers are stiff!