Project Bento Feedback Thread

[Teager]

I tried altering the xml file to insert a new bone between mHead and all of the facial bones called faceBase, which I wanted to be the new parent of every facial bone. I inserted this line between mHead and the face section -

<bone connected="true" end="0.000 0.000 0.079" group="Face" name="faceBase" pivot="0.000000 0.000000 0.000000" pos="0.000 0.000 0.000" rot="0.000000 0.000000 0.000000" scale="1.000 1.000 1.000" support="extended">

With this setup, every time I try to log in to the bento viewer, it crashes before I get online. Can I get some guidance on what I've done wrong?

 Edit - I'm super dumb. For anyone else experiencing the same problem... change the number of bones on the very first line of the file. Everything works; nothing is ruined.

 

 

Having now successfully fixed my xml file to add the new bone "faceBase" and gone to BentoExperimental1, I am still experiencing issues with the viewer not wanting to recognize my new bone.



[MoonHowler Snowpaw]

---

Medhue Simoni wrote:

Avastar just has some constraints on the face bones, to only rotate like LL had wanted. But since LL has openly stated they are allowing and working on bone translation, you just need to go into the bone contrainst in your Properties Window in Blender, and delete those constraints.

 

---

Thank you, i'll do it until Avastar updates to bones translation.

[Gaia Clary]

Bone translation is now fully supported ( in Avastar-2.0.6 ), also see the documentation help page:

http://avastar.online/help/rigging/  ( chapter "Bone Constraints" )

edit: in Avastar 2 there is one more selection "same bone group" which allows to select one face bone for example, then enable location animation for the entire group of "Face" bones.

You also need to enable "Use Translations" in the export options. We can enable this option by default (and remove the option completely when location animation becomes officially supported).

[Code Violet]

For anyone planning on making mesh heads for wide use (more specifically human, but potentially others), I encourage you to contribute ideas towards Polysail's initiative on developing a standard for playing facial expressions.

Such a standard would allow 3rd party scripts to trigger animations in the mesh heads so that furniture designers and others can continue to use facial expressions in their creations, even though the facial animations may now need to be made specifically for each different brand/design of head.

I think Polysail's idea or something similar is really vital to Bento's impact on end users. There's some additional discussion on the AVsitter Q&A.

[Medhue Simoni]

I created some low poly boxy bones for my wolf's skeleton, just for fun. Thought it looks cool with the new bento bones, so here is a look. Working on expression and speech gestures today.

[Vir Linden]

Where were you trying to upload your content? It should work in the BentoExperimental1 region, but fail in other regions on Aditi. If it's failing in BentoExperimental1, could you file a JIRA, and attach a file that shows the problem? Thanks!

[Vir Linden]

We will be meeting tomorrow, Thurs, Jan 14, but 30 minutes later than our usual time slot.

Latest, as usual, is at https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bento_User_Group

Hope to see you there. Please bring questions and cool avatars!

[Teager]

I was indeed on BentoExperimental1. After playing around some more, my horse mesh is consistently unable to upload, with the viewer claiming it doesn't recognize my new bone faceBase. I'm inclined to say I've probably done something wrong in my mesh or .xml, but since I can't seem to find any such error, I went ahead and posted a jira at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-11211

[Vir Linden]

Thanks for filing the bug. It looks like we had a configuration problem on BentoExperimental1. Believe it's fixed now, but please let us know if you are still getting those upload errors.

[Gryphon Ronas]

This has been a question that has come up a few times, it may have been answered here but I did not read 34 pages to find out.

The finger bones seem like a great idea, but the release info I saw looked like we will not be able to attach to each bone as an attachment point.  If this is the case, then one of two things will happen.  Either we render existing jewelry useless, or Bento is useless before it ever goes live.  It's great if the fingers move, not so great if the rings on them don't follow along.

I really hope this has been addressed - I know a lot of work went into this, it would be a shame to have people not use it.

[Etheria Parrott]

There is aLeft Ring Finger and aRight Ring Finger. These both follow the bone movements of those fingers.

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Gryphon Ronas wrote:

This has been a question that has come up a few times, it may have been answered here but I did not read 34 pages to find out.

The finger bones seem like a great idea, but the release info I saw looked like we will not be able to attach to each bone as an attachment point.  If this is the case, then one of two things will happen.  Either we render existing jewelry useless, or Bento is useless before it ever goes live.  It's great if the fingers move, not so great if the rings on them don't follow along.

I really hope this has been addressed - I know a lot of work went into this, it would be a shame to have people not use it.

---

Regardless if there is an attachment point for each finger, rings can be made to move with the finger that it is intended to be worn on. The ring simply needs to be rigged to that finger bone. No existing content will be useless, as not everyone will be using a bento avatar. That said, if someone does sell rings, it would probably be smart to learn to rig a simple ring to a finger, as this is really the only way it can really be done effectively, attachment points or not.

All that said, after thinking about this for a bit, I see an inherent problem with hands. Fitted mesh uses collision or volume bones to make the mesh morph with SL sliders. With Sliders, there is only 1 for the hand. Well, how does this work out for a ring? If someone is using a fitted mesh body, with bento bones, and they enlarge their hands, how does that work? How would I rig the hands to achieve this? Is that even possible? I'm not sure it is. I'll have to do some tests.

[Venompapa]

Worst part of this we would be unable to mix up different avatar attachments with each other due the mess of the different mesh joint offset have to add my word its a really bad idea to take out the ability to offset joint positions with animations, its not only would making the face and other new joints partially useless but the thing i mentioned above and a lot of people mentioned already. We cant solve everything with the mesh joint offsets alone at all.

[Medhue Simoni]

There is my proposal for the face bones. It's not a major change from the current face, but some major differences in the end, I think.

 

• I added the extra ear bones that I suggested before. The only other bone added was a center forehead bone, to really scruntch the forehead, which could be up higher, looking at the image now.

 

• The cheek bones, I moved somewhat drastically. I kept finding myself not wanting to move the outer cheek bone too much, so I figured the other cheek bone could handle most of the upper cheek movements, but there needed to be a lower cheek bone, to be able to balloon the lower cheek out, or sink them in for sunken cheeks.

 

• The Lips, I moved the top 2 bone in quite a bit, and a little lower. The bottom 2, I moved them together slightly and then up a little.

 

• Other than those things, and some minor adjustments, I also adjusted the lengths of all the bones, because now we can use translations. This is simply a proposal, and not a working set up. These are just my suggestions.

[Medhue Simoni]

Now that my wolf is starting to work and act like I want, I decided to work on something that uses the Bento bones in vastly different ways than intended, whatever that really means. lol

 

I decided to transfer the Elephant that I made for the Unity engine. I use almost all the Bento bones, except the fingers.

I don't know why the gif is so short. It should be longer. Anyways, the ears are made from the wing bones, and the trunk is actually the tail. The Groin bone is being used to animate the tail.

 

[Teager]

I figured I'd add my tinkerings as well, since I've been quiet for a while. Here's my current horse setup, fancy new bones and all:

 



 

The hilighted bone is my added bone, faceBase. FaceBase was inserted between mHead and the facial bones and acts as a new parent bone to the facial bones. This allows me (or anyone else who needs it) to create a two bone neck without inserting any new bones into the existing spine chain or breaking rigging to any existing meshes. If you follow the hilighted faceBase to the right, the next bones in the chain are mHead and mNeck, which are both being used in the horse's neck here, followed by mChest (between the shoulders), mTorso, and mPelvis.

 

* All the gifs are cut short; click the links to view the full motion

 

 

 

(FULL GIF - https://i.gyazo.com/d77d48e965838bfb93a8290305f1eefc.gif )

A look at the two bone neck at work, and a little bit of tail action. I also decided to use mSkull (the long bone above the horse's forehead) to rig the hair falling over the horse's forehead, so it has some motion and isn't stuck flat to the head.

 

 



(FULL GIF - https://i.gyazo.com/3869792a6fb5bde8bf1dcce40cd9e6ca.gif )

The wing bones have been repurposed as the left and right side of the horse's mane. Rigging the mane this way will allow a mesh mane to move, bounce, and drape as though there were physics acting on the mesh hair. The horse here is only wearing the left side mane, but using both wings will allow users to decide if they would like their hair on the left, right, or both to give a little bit more customizability.

 

 



(FULL GIF - https://i.gyazo.com/925d998b6f69e9aeec92d74c64356182.gif )

Some tail motion. Yay tail

 

 



(FULL GIF - https://i.gyazo.com/94571d72d83b8060dc2330b5fd606445.gif )

And some simple facial expressions. I haven't yet rigged the eyelids or eyebrows, but have set up my face rig with the intention to rig those later. The ears, nostrils, nose, upper lip, lower lip, lip corner, tongue, jaw, and eyeballs are rigged here.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

As far as I can see you didn't use the wing bones for the manes... that would look nice I bet

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Teager wrote:

 

The hilighted bone is my added bone, faceBase. FaceBase was inserted between mHead and the facial bones and acts as a new parent bone to the facial bones. This allows me (or anyone else who needs it) to create a two bone neck without inserting any new bones into the existing spine chain or breaking rigging to any existing meshes.

---

What you could do, is constrain all the facial bones to the skull bone, in Blender, and have the same effect without adding new bones. I think the Facebone idea was great when we didn't not have translations, but now that we do, it's not as needed. Would be interesting to hear what you think.

 

I saw your tongue animation and I had to post my own.

 https://gyazo.com/447cf838cb8bdc75bd6ed3981b6c98ad

[Teager]

@ Kwakkelde - I did, though the weighting on the mane definitely isn't the best. You can see the mane motion in this gif - https://i.gyazo.com/3869792a6fb5bde8bf1dcce40cd9e6ca.gif

 

@ Medhue - Using translations to lock parent and create an extra bone that way was what I was doing originally, before bento was launched, and is still my backup plan in case no ability for an extra neck bone gets added. For now I've posted this version of the rig as my example for LL to go along with my suggestion for an extra neck bone, to show a little of what can be done with it.

Having an extra bone would definitely be preferable over using translations to force a bone where there was no bone previously. If I use translations to lock the facial bones to mSkull and rig the head to mSkull, I will be unable to animate the head and neck independently, which means I cannot make animations for just the face which play on top of whatever else the horse is doing in the background. Using translations to lock the shoulders to mTorso so I can use mChest and mNeck for the neck, and keep mHead as the head, means I cannot animate the front legs independently of the neck. That second option would offer a little more freedom, since there are fewer situations where I'd want to animate the legs and the neck independently, but is still a limitation.

Adding the extra bone would mean no such limitations and would make me a very happy animator.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

First I thought you didn't, wrote the post, then I thought you did and pulled the post, then I again thought you didn't and reposted...but apparently you did

[Vir Linden]

The horse looks great! So you needed just one additional bone for this? Does it cause any problems for the default avatar running with the modified skeleton? I'm thinking it should be OK if the default av doesn't use mSkull.

Using the wings as a mane is a cool twist. Nice to see bones getting interesting uses that no one had originally planned for.

[Teager]

Yep, it uses just one additional bone. I attended this last bento meeting with my modified xml file still active, and everyone looked perfectly fine. Theoretically it should only affect anyone wearing a rigged face - the rest of the avatar skeleton is unaffected.

My original thought was that if the facial bones were parented to mSkull instead of mHead, that would allow anyone needing a 2 bone neck to use mNeck and mHead for the neck and mSkull for the head without breaking any compatibility with the existing avatar. It was pointed out though that some hair is rigged to mSkull, so it's possible that there may be some negative effects there, though I can't think of what they might be. 

Just to be safe, for the purpose of demonstration, I added a new bone instead. FaceBase is a child of mHead and the new parent of all of the facial bones. For the creators who don't need it, it essentially does nothing. All they need to do is not rig it. For the creators who do need it, it'll allow us to scoot bones around to create a third bone on the head and neck chain.

 



Here's a shot of the bones labeled. You can see I added faceBase parallel to mSkull, then continued the chain along the faceBase line with all of the facial bones. So if you follow the bone chains, mSkull is a dead end just as it's always been, and the new bones are the ones to lengthen the chain. That way it can't possibly break compatibility with anything anyone is currently using mSkull for.

 



Here's an example of what it would look like on the standard avatar. I've moved mSkull out of the way a bit so you can see both bones forking off from mHead. Note that the standard set of eye bones will still need to be parented to mHead as they were before to avoid any possible negative effects - only the bento bones have had any changes made.

[Medhue Simoni]

 

In this video, I'm using a rig that I made up from the Bento bones. This face rig has special controls to more quickly animate the face. At the same time tho, I'm not using any ik or other bones to make it all happen, just the original Bento Face bones, with some constraints set up in some handy ways. I will have a video tomorrow about how it works.

[Etheria Parrott]

That's wonderful Medhue. How were you able to so quickly switch between moving bones on both sides at once rather than just left or right? Perhaps you could share how this is possible in your next video. It's so time consuming to move a bone then go below the window to copy and paste mirrored.

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Etheria Parrott wrote:

That's wonderful Medhue. How were you able to so quickly switch between moving bones on both sides at once rather than just left or right? Perhaps you could share how this is possible in your next video. It's so time consuming to move a bone then go below the window to copy and paste mirrored.

---

If you watch closely, you will see that whenever I'm moving both sides at the same time, I'm doing that with a bone on the right side of the face, or left side of the screen. All the bones on the right side of the face control the bones on the other side. All the bone on the left, can move independently tho too. So, with that combo, normal symmetrical animations are quick and easy, and distorted expressions are also quick and easy, as long as they are on the left. Distorting the right side isn't hard. It's just isn't as quick.

Really, I'm just using Blender constraints to do it all.