Project Bento Feedback Thread

[Kitsune Shan]

Thats quite far from the project objetive. It surely would be nice, but Bento is about extra bones and what you are asking for is morphers support in SL. I dont think we will see morphers support for any time soon. They dont even seem able to implement translation properly yet something like morphers may be out of their capabilities.

[Fiona Branagh]

I did miss this one, Teager! It's a great idea and would cause no issues (as far as I can figure) so long as it's done before Bento goes live and we have a lot of avatars up for sale with the wrong skinning. I hope it gets priority consideration.

I do hope there is a way to get even more neck bones (one is great, more would be really really helpful) but I'll take any improvement especially if the fix is pretty simple.

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Teager wrote:

If the face bones are all parented to mSkull instead of mHead

, an extra neck bone can be added for those avatar creators that need it without affecting anything else on the rig.

 

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[Kitsune Shan]

That would be very problematic. 

There's a lot of content already like hairs which uses the skull bone because it does allow some adjustments. Having face bones rigged to there would lead to incompatibility with several hairs. Rather get two bones on neck instead. 

[Teager]

I wasn't aware any hairs were rigged to mSkull... news to me.

 

If that's the case, an additional bone between mHead and the facial bones - something like faceBase maybe - would do the same job.

[NinjaRisu Ninetails]

Does anyone have the rigged mesh ready with exportable animations that work for SL. I wanna see what I need to do to make them without the use of Avastar.

[Bongo Steampunk]

Hi folks

Just wondering about the use of the new bones in the face. One thing which has been putting me off making mesh heads for ladies and gents is the lack of jaw/mouth functionality. I'm not an expert - but i believe when the new mesh heads blink or pout, it's all a flickbook style of thing, requiring extra meshes to flick between.

The standard avi has the ability to move it's mouth, driven by mic/audio as we all know. Whilst not being brilliant i like it - made interesting machinima with being able to lip synch to whatever soundtrack, just feed in some ineteresting banter via audio - the mic / mouth picks up on it - and hey presto - your avatar can be captured lip syching to whomever one chooses. - there must therefore be a way for anyone to make thier mesh head do the same - and be driven by audio inputs like this.

Scenario: One makes a head - and makes sure the relevant parts of it are rigged to the right mouth / jaw bones and when uploaded, it talks and moves mouth with the audio driving it just as the old heads did. This would bring new life to botox ridden faces of stony stillness!

Now I'm not sure as to how the SL avatar moves it's mouth to the mic - is it just shapekeys or another deformation sequence, with so many assigned to move when voice is enabled?

Can it be possible to make it so that a new mesh head can be rigged to respond to mic like this with the new bones? 

Or is it just that they can be given preset animations only ? [smile, 3 seconds - blank 3 seconds - scowl etc.]

I dream of making mesh heads because I can make them, but I don't script and have no idea about many things pertaining to the mechanics of SL. I can get the eye holes lined up with my mesh heads - so that the old SL eyes are still visible and move, but being able to drive expression and/or jaw movement through mic would be truly amazing I think.

any links to help this one better understand facial animation with SL and blender would be hugely appreciated.

Bongo.

 

[Teager]

Heads rigged with bento would not be limited to preset animations. They'll be limited only by what animations are made for that particular head, either by its creator or by third party creators. [Trying to make a single set of facial animations that works with all heads would be incredibly difficult, even if they were done without translations.]

 

To trigger the animation on the head when a user speaks on voice, you'd just need to use gestures to trigger the animations for /voicelevel1, /voicelevel2, and /voicelevel3, as seen here: https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Using-gestures-and-animations/ta-p/700069#Section_.1.2.1

[MicheloudIgnatio]

This avatar you are improving it and improving it, and it still sucks!!! This must be one of the worst products in history ever. You cannot keep not even one small part of it uncovered, cause it looks so bad.

I mean how could you make it so ugly at the beggining? Despite giving us wigs an tails, for which I don't care AT ALL, is there going to be a real improvement on it? All these years you were not doing anything because increasing the polygons would creata lag, and now we are wearing mesh bodies, mesh heads that look like clones and mesh clothes on top of those, creating a hudge lag, plus I am paying extra for the lag. 

Maybe you should finaly reconcider the whole thing and introduce a completely new avatar in paralel with the old one?

[AyumeYumeai]

Project Bento is Great in my view.

Is not so struggling to set up a single time script Addon on Blender, Maya or other to convert natural face shape vertex translations using runtime bone scale fit runtime face scan vertex positions to be compatible with any modelers out there..

 

Instead of talking against, Im requesting a new script to scale bones into facial shape capture vertex positions of well stabilished facial capture softwares.

Seems complex but is quite simple

. A single runtime algorithm would translate easy all face-shape into  bones-scale movement, being scale normalized fixed or dinamic. Is just angle, scale, to track any other modeller facial vertex runtime.

Im not into math, but that was easy.

When you will release?

Need some help scripting in C?

Give me directions.

 

 

 

[Wanders Nowhere]

Going to weigh in on this one.

I make dinosaur avatars for Second Life, I am sure everyone's seen them.

I had hoped Project Bento would be the breakthrough for me, allowing my dinosaurs to have flexible tails and talons and otherwise be the best thing that happened to my creations since Mesh itself.

However, if bone translations are locked/blocked, it will instead destroy my business and force me to leave Second Life, because I can't exactly make a 40-foot long Tyrannosaurus Rex with the skeleton of a tiny winged human unless I can do some serious modification of the position, size and length of the bones.

Seriously, what the hell are they thinking? Do they not see what people are already making inworld, and what the whole purpose of Bento would be?

Am I right in misunderstanding this and thinking Joint positions etc would still be a thing?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Wanders Nowhere wrote:

 

However, if bone translations are locked/blocked, it will instead destroy my business and force me to leave Second Life, because I can't exactly make a 40-foot long Tyrannosaurus Rex with the skeleton of a tiny winged human unless I can do some serious modification of the position, size and length of the bones.

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I think you misunderstood the bone translation issue. You can still upload avatar models with translated bones in the rig, you just can't translate them (anymore) by animating them. So unless you used special animations, you'll still be able to upload your dino's plus you can now add a tail using a couple of extra bones. Or wings. Or you can add two arms for an insect or centaur. Or you can...

[Lamp Alpha]

I might be missing something, but how does one make facial expression without translating the facial bones if they're not part of a joint chain? Rotations won't do much in the way of animating facial expressions if they're not actually moving another joint via that rotation. 

[Medhue Simoni]

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Kitsune Shan wrote:

I'm not sure why the reuse of animations is so important. I don't think anyone expect animations to be reusable between different meshes like heads and custom avatars. There is no way, even limiting animations to just rotations, to do such thing. Every mesh head or avatar may require custom animations. Due a mesh head being so different between them and different positions on mesh joints offsets, this is expected. I don't think we will ever see "AOs" for heads unless they make it on purpose for certain models purposely. This is the same for mesh avatars, having different shapes and proportions, no one should expect for animations to be compatible between them. So, basically, I'm just trying to say that this is something totally irrelevant. Even now, you can't use an humanoid AO on an animal avatar. If this didn't matter before, it shouldn't matter now. 

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I think it is also worth pointing out that rigs are not as protected by creators than meshes. So, if a creator makes a line of unusual avatars, they could easily share the rig with the community, for anyone to create animations for them.

 

Or........... another good example is my werewolf/lycan animation. I know a number of the other creators of Werewolves and the like, and I'm sure I could get their rigs, especially with bento. Before bento, it would have been harder, as we all had special tricks to get things to happen. Now, with a bento rig, we can all use something similar. So, of course, I can't speak for other creators, but I'd have no problem handing over my rigs to the public to do as they please with. In the case where others would give me their werewolf rigs, I could transfer my animations over to their rig, and customize the fit of the animations to their rig. My point here is, that some times there is no way that compatibility is truly possible. It's not really even possible on our avatars. Every single animator in SL knows this. As we speak, people are running around with my Lycan AO, on avatars it was never made for, and accepting the problems, because they love the animations that much. There is no way to standardize a werewolf rig that all creators would accept, so the best way is to just allow the animators to customize the animations to those special rigs, and now everything works perfectly. I might not fix all my animations to fix custom avatars, but something like my Lycan AO is more than worth it. Or, it could work in the reverse. For example, as an animator, I release my rig, for any avatar creator to use to fit their werewolf to, and then they know my animations will work and instead of worrying about animation, they focus on the avatar.

 

If LL truly wants compatibility, then they need to go back to the default rig and make a praying animation fit both a tiny and a huge avatar, Right? I mean, that logic totally follows. So, if they don't give a crap if the 1 praying animation fits everyone, as they obviously do not, then why are they harping on facial animations being compatible?

 

Heck, even the wing bone, talking about compatibility. Here is what I did with them.

[Alisha Ultsch]

Although this obviously seems exciting to developers here, has anybody considered whether it will actually attract more users to SecondLife ?   SL succeeded early on because you could build everything in-world and I suspect that some effort expended on integrating in-world mesh building tools that the average user could use would create far more new interest in SL than facial bones or whatever.  People mostly look at the back of their own head, and others are usually at a distance where they are not going to see facial bones moving anyway.  SL isn't really about having characters of the quality in Frozen or any other film, but more in being able to create environments of that style without spending endless hours importing models from third party toolsets.

[Kitsune Shan]

How long have you been playing SL?

At this point, if youe ven reached the forum, you should know that where people spend more money and time is dressing, changing and decoratin their avatar hence why Bento is here. We cant focus on inworld tools because whatever tool you try to make for SL inworld it will always lack on or another feature and people will end doing things outside. SL is just so advanced that people wont rely on tools that gives worst results than using a 3D app out of it. If someone is mad at this project just because have no way or know how to use it, they can simply start learning like everyone does. We cant live in the past just because people lacks the knowledge to move forward. This reminds me to those that blame meshes just because they have no idea how to do them.

[Vir Linden]

Hi all. We're back from the holidays and looking forward to getting back into Bento work. Thanks for all the feedback over the last couple of weeks. We'll be responding to individual issues and in some cases asking followup questions over the next few days.

As before, if you have specific bugs or feature requests, the best way to follow up with us is to file a bug report with [bENTO] in the summary, and as much detail as possible in the body. More about filing bug reports is at https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-report-a-bug/ta-p/733545. If you have data files for upload we can test (mesh or animation), that would be especially useful - please attach any relevant test files or images to the bug report.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Here is a little inspiration for you guys at the Lab.

We could totally have rigs like this for our SL characters if LL gave us the translation feature

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The setup looks quite a bit more complicated than just some translatable bones in a rig, so I don't think we can totally have rigs like this in SL, unfortunately.

 

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Actually, some of that is also done with scaling. Now, let's be realistic, I didn't mean all the features of this rig, or the expressions, just for the most part. Pretty much all the controls, to do all those expressions that quickly, are mostly drivers in Blender. So, I could connect all those facial bones to drives, which would dictate how they all work together. Something like this rig, is easily doable in Blender. Expect a video from me this year, showing it off. And really, that 2nd window isn't even needed for the Blender version.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

So what was your point then? What can be done in a seperate dedicated 3d application? I thought you tried to give an example of what could be possible in SL with some minor additions.

If you ask me, you're comparing apples and oranges, or apples and pears as we say over here.

[Kitsune Shan]

That rig is done in Maya and that little window its the rig itself. For face animations you always needs a rig for easy manipulation of bones. Usually rig is done with elements inside of viewport but this one is kinda more advanced using scripting.

Now, as for the video itself, that rig its totally possible in SL. Lets take few things into account tho. One thing is a rig, another different is the level of realism that it canachieved. An exact same rig can be used in SL as long as it fits into the number of bones. The one on video surely have more bones than SL Bento but thats not really an issue at time of having a good rig. Doing a rig like that one is very hard because it uses lot of controls, but as I said, the base which are bones are the same. What some people dont know is the realism on that rig also comes from blending normal and displacement maps. When polygons stretch or expand they change normal maps to make it look like its getting wrinkes but it doesnt. Whoever tell you that this isnt realistic or that its bad to compare with SL, its wrong. Facial realism isnt limited by the platform but by the creative side. Basically I just meant that SL can be very realistic on facial animations. It wont have blending maps but animation can be 100% realistic. A different thing is to achieve that for the average user, but the tools and possibilities are there. I think isnt a bad example and anyway that video were shown as "inspirational".

 

Going back to the subject, lets see in which state is bone translation right now and which are those problems that seems to make it so hard to get it done properly.

[Vir Linden]

Inarra, you wrote:

"What is *really* needed is more options on upload.  The extensions to the skeleton are good and certainly will increase the opportunities for unusual avatars.  For humans, how many bones are there now of the 206 in the human body?"

Even with the additional joints, we are by no means including all the bones of the human body. For performance reasons, it would not really be possible to include all the bones of the human body in our skeleton. Also, some joints don't really correspond to parts of the skeleton at all (for example, the new face ones) and others correspond to parts of a non-human skeleton (for example, the wings). Are there particular bones that you expecially think should be included? And are there other upload options you have in mind besides adding more bones?

Thanks!

 

[Medhue Simoni]

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

So what was your point then? What can be done in a seperate dedicated 3d application? I thought you tried to give an example of what could be possible in SL with some minor additions.

If you ask me, you're comparing apples and oranges, or apples and pears as we say over here.

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My point was that we could have a rig, like that, with similar controls to pose our new bones with. Part of the beauty of rigs, is how you control the bones. Just laying the skeleton out is only the first step to creating a working rig. Me loves a well designed total rig system, as most animators would. The person who initiated this exchange was intimidated by this rig, and I was just assuring them something similar is possible in Blender, and someone, would likely make an advanced face rig, like this, for SL Blender users. I'd also be willing to bet, that a certain Miss Foil will create something nice in Maya also.

Personally, I'm a little more familiar with setting up shape key facial rigs, but I have had to work with numerous facial bone rigs for Unity contracts.

[Vir Linden]

Re: using "Right" vs "R" and so on in attachment point names: unfortunately the older attachment points aren't named consistently either, so we have "Right Ear", "Right Pec", but "R Uppper Arm", "R Forearm", so you could legitimately make a case for naming the new attachment points either way. Since the long form, with "Right" and "Left" fully spelled out, is more common in the existing attachment points, as well as in other existing bones, I think it may make more sense to standardize on that.

[Vir Linden]

Polysail, thanks much for adding your JIRA with the detailed discussion of facial animations and translations. We are very much still looking at the issue, and specific examples like this are very helpful.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Maybe it's just late, maybe I am missing something.

First you said you'd need translatable bones for such a rig (excluding the shiny extras). In a rig like bento, what would have to be added? You pick up a bone and move it around. That can be done by hand, modifier or script.

Without being able to translate the bones, wouldn't you just need a very short IK chain? Then you can again move around the end, be it in a limited manner.

The art or hard work or combination of those two would be the skinning if you ask me and that will have to be done for every unique figure.

So, back to "I am missing something", what is it you are going to do, and Cathy for that matter.

[Vir Linden]

Tornleaf, thanks for the feedback. I like the fox! Could you describe what the problem is with trying to close the eyes using only rotations?

You've probably seen this by now, but there is a bit more info on the different joints at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/BentoSkeletonGuide. Alt eyes are intended primarily for people who want to control their gaze direction explicitly, but could also be used for extra eyes if desired.