Project Bento Feedback Thread

[Timmy Foxclaw]

I have a lip ring - facial expressions that move the jaw or lower lip make my lip ring float in the air

Is this problem going to be solved with Bento? Surely there will be an attachment point now for the jaw that moves along with the jaw, right?

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

I would agree with not getting rid of the wing tip. I have yet to totally succeed making wings that fold. I have my rig set up like Teager suggested, but I think I still need to work on the weights. However, the setup is looking somewhat better. Without the extra bone, I think I would still be stuck with needing another mesh for the folded wings.

[Vir Linden]

For the last few weeks, we've been soliciting ideas and evaluating alternatives for updates to the Bento skeleton. We have gotten a lot of great suggestions from our testers, and are approaching the end of this process. A new Bento build with an updated and hopefully final skeleton will be coming soon.

Some description of the upcoming changes is below. If you want to learn more, please join us for the Bento User Group meeting tomorrow (https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bento_User_Group), or post to this thread.

What this means to you:

• The Bento project viewer will be updated. Like previous updates, this one should be automatically downloaded and applied.
• More bones that can be used for more things! I'll go into a bit more detail below about the changes that are coming.
• Some existing bones are going away or changing position. This means that some existing content that worked with previous versions of the bento viewer will need to be updated and re-uploaded. Previously uploaded content may no longer display as intended.
• The servers on Aditi will also be updated with the new skeleton, so the set of uploadable bones will change.

What's next after this:

• We will be freezing the skeleton soon. If the upcoming build has serious bugs that require additional modification, we may do that, but in general you should expect that the final set of bones will be set in this build or a near-future one.
• Once we have the final set of bones for the skeleton, we will work on finalizing changes to the sliders and possibly adding a few more attachment points.

So what's coming in the updated skeleton? The build currently going through QA and targeted for release as a project viewer includes the following changes:

• New spine joints! We were previously unable to add new joints between the joints of the original default avatar skeleton, because of a bug this triggered in rendering the default avatar. We believe this issue is now fixed, and the update will include 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.
• New face bone root. You may have noticed we did not add extra neck bones in the list of spine joints above; the intent is that this additional face bone root could be used as an extra neck bone if desired.
• New center face bones. There are three new face bones along the mid-line of the face, two on the lips and one on the forehead.
• New ear bones. The ears now have two joints each, allowing for floppy or otherwise more flexible ears.
• An additional pair of limbs. One of the most popular requests was for more bones attached to the pelvis and suitable for use as limbs or tails. We will be adding two limbs of 3 joints each, plus a new root bone that they are joined by. These are named "Hind" limbs, but using the root bone it should be possible to relocate the limbs for various possible uses - for example, as additional hind legs, or as an extra pair of arms.
• New wing "fan" bones. One additional bone for each wing is being added, and should now allow a simple fan as would be used in a bat-type wing.
• Removing two wing root bones. Originally the wings were connected to a chain of 3 root bones. This was intended as a workaround for the inability to animate positions. Animating positions is now enabled, so we only need one wing root bone.
• Various bone position changes.

[MoonHowler Snowpaw]

Wow, so many additions, sounds perfect for me, thank you!

[Vir Linden]

Timmy, Re: how to handle a lip ring:

We do have a new attachment point for the jaw, called, originally enough, Jaw. I'm not sure how well it will work for a lip ring, though. Something attached to the jaw will follow along when the mouth opens and closes, but will not track with facial animations where the lips are moving. Attachment points are pretty limited for following along with fine details of the avatar.

Once the set of bones is finalized (soon!) we can discuss possible updates to the attachment points.

[Teager]

I'm a bit confused at the decision to add 4 new bones to the spine, but have none of them in the neck. I thought the original intent behind the idea to add additional bones in the spine chain was primarily to offer more neck movement. I still believe that the facial root bone can do the trick for full avatar makers, but obviously having an extra bone in the avatar neck would be more ideal. Why have a 7 bone torso with a 1 bone neck? Was there some additional problem in the neck that did not exist in the torso?

[Vir Linden]

The Bento project viewer is now updated with the new skeleton, and back-end enforcement on most regions of Aditi is being updated to match. As before, you can upload any bones in the BentoExperimental1 region.

[Gaia Clary]

Hi, Vir;

I have made some first quick tests with the new viewer and the new skeleton files. And i found one issue with the eyes. It looks like the mEye bones and the mFaceEyeAlt bones have an offset. See here on the default Shape (and default Avatar):



And here on the Bento Angel (which uses the default shape mesh and was uploaded without Joint Positions):



It looks like the Bento face mesh is popping out a bit and maybe this is related to the offset of the eye bones.

Here is what i see in Avastar:



Indeed there is a very small offset of 0.0005 between the mEyes and the mFaceAltEyes, but the offset is by far smaller in Avastar compared to what i see in Second Life.

One other remark: What about having only 2 Spine bones and add 2 extra neck bones instead ?

[Vir Linden]

Re: the spine joints, what I think we ideally would want to do is add one joint each between mPelvis->mTorso, mTorso->mChest, and one for the neck. The reason we're adding joints in pairs elsewhere in the spine is because we're using a kind of odd scheme where the two spine joints in their default positions cancel each other out, allowing us to leave the position of the original bones (mPelvis, mTorso, etc) unchanged. If we can avoid doing the same thing with the neck, that saves us two joints. So the intent isn't to slight the neck, it's more that we're overbuilding the rest of the spine.

Happy to discuss more at the user group meeting today.

[Vir Linden]

Re: alt eye issues: I think the parenting of the alt eyes may have changed from the original eyes. Maybe also an issue with the sliders? Either could cause some discrepancies potentially.

[Gaia Clary]

Hi, Vir;

I have been looking in more depth at the eye bones. And i finally found that all that is needed is to put the Alt eyes at the exact same locations as the Eye bones and use the same (6 digit) precision.

Below is an image with corrected avatar_skeleton using 6 digit precision on the alt eyes.



The parenting to different bones (mHead and mFaceRoot) seems to work with no problems. I also found no issue with the appearance sliders (the alt eye bones follow the appearance sliders as expected).

On the contrary: When you try the sliders with the current Bento Skeleton then you see how the distance between the eyes and alt eyes varies when you move the eye depth slider.

[Tornleaf]

Pretty pumped about this. I have a few projects waiting on this release, as reanimating skeletons, even with one bone off, is a giant pain the ass. Excited in particular about the extra hind limbs.

[Lyoto Steamweaver]

There doesn't happen to be any bento user group meeting logs? (Like for the old mesh beta)

[Whirly Fizzle]

There are no full meeting transcripts as far as I'm aware - much of the meetings are on voice.

However Inara Pey covers each of the Bento meetings: http://modemworld.me/?s=bento+user+group

[Kitsune Shan]

While the workaround works, I would rather see this bug fixed. I find pretty unnecessary to use custom joints offset or animations just to put the eyes in place.

[jaidynfox]

Y'all ready to play with this monstrousity?

http://i.imgur.com/aCWfnJ2.png

[Vistanimations]

Hello,

someone tried to work with the new skeleton in MotionBuilder?

I have problems with the rotation of the pivots

 

 

[Gaia Clary]

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Kitsune Shan wrote:

While the workaround works, I would rather see this bug fixed. I find pretty unnecessary to use custom joints offset or animations just to put the eyes in place.

---

This actually was not a workaround, but a proposal for how the bug can be easily fixed

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

---

Vir Linden wrote:

The Bento project viewer is now updated with the new skeleton, and back-end enforcement on most regions of Aditi is being updated to match. As before, you can upload any bones in the BentoExperimental1 region.

---

What is the use of character/avatar_skeleton_spine_joints.xml ?  I cannot find any reference to it in the bento-box viewer code neither in any of the character/*.xml files, and no occurrence either in the viewer binary ('strings do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin | grep spine_joints' doesn't show any occurrence in v5.0.0.311861) ?

 

There is also an issue with:

 

2016-03-07T19:43:40Z INFO: LLVOAvatar::loadSkeletonNode: attachment pt Alt Left Ear using mPelvis as default parent2016-03-07T19:43:40Z INFO: LLVOAvatar::loadSkeletonNode: attachment pt Alt Right Ear using mPelvis as default parent

 

 

Which is more explicitly logged, in my backport of bento-box to the Cool VL Viewer, as:

 

2016-03-07T19:14:33Z WARNING: LLVOAvatar::loadSkeletonNode: Avatar:  - No parent joint by name mFaceEarLeft found for attachment point Alt Left Ear, using pelvis as the default parent.2016-03-07T19:14:33Z WARNING: LLVOAvatar::loadSkeletonNode: Avatar:  - No parent joint by name mFaceEarRight found for attachment point Alt Right Ear, using pelvis as the default parent.

And when looking at avatar_skeleton_spine_joints.xml mFaceEarLeft and mFaceEarRight joints do exist, unlike in avatar_lad.xml...

 

Missing code in the viewer ?... Or missing joints in avatar_lad.xml ?

[Vir Linden]

Henri, re: avatar_skeleton_spine_joints.xml:

Any extra avatar_skeleton or avatar_lad files are for use during development - I had added that one to make it easier to test with and without spine joints when trying to fix an associated rendering bug. We'll remove the extra files before release - in the meantime, they won't affect the behavior of the viewer unless they are copied in place of the standard files.

[Henri Beauchamp]

---

Vir Linden wrote:

Henri, re: avatar_skeleton_spine_joints.xml:

Any extra avatar_skeleton or avatar_lad files are for use during development - I had added that one to make it easier to test with and without spine joints when trying to fix an associated rendering bug. We'll remove the extra files before release - in the meantime, they won't affect the behavior of the viewer unless they are copied in place of the standard files.

---

OK, understood. There's however still the issue with the missing mFaceEarLeft and mFaceEarRight joints/bones which the Bento viewer is complaining about for "Alt Left/Right Ear"...

[Tyrian Slade]

I've had a chance to explore the new skeleton.  It seems much more versatile than the previous offering, but I do have one question:  Why offer "hind legs" if they're going to be done half way?  They have only three joints, and so they cannot stand in place of any real animal anatomy, which have four joints.  They also are attached to only one root bone when they really should have a flexible spine if they're going to be particulary useful. 

Aside from that, the "finger" in the wing is an improvement, and the double-boned ears could be fun. 

[Isagaaz Vlodovic]

 

Tyrian Slade wrote:

They have only three joints, and so they cannot stand in place of any real animal anatomy, which have four joints. 

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http://hippie.nu/~unicorn/tut/img/basics/animalanatomy/canine-skeleton.jpeg

Are you counting the toes as a joint?

[Unicorn Enchantment]

 Animal (land mammals, in this case) skeletons have considerably more range of motion than a human's. I've highlighted the joints that rotate on the hind end of the dog skeleton that you've linked, and on a horse's skeleton. A large part of the animal world walks on their toes, not on the flat of their feet. 

http://i.imgur.com/j5wM3jH.png Dog

http://i.imgur.com/BdhCsDE.png Horse

An animation of a cow skeleton walking

 

I've been quietly observing this thread for a few weeks now and I thought I'd give input on why bone translations and extra bones in legs and spines, etc are currently necessary for capturing realistic movement in animal avatars. Animals have  much more flexible skeletons (a cheetah's spine is INCREDIBLY flexible!) and the positions of their joints are very different. For example, a knee on a horse's hind end is the joint above the tibia.  Canids, equids, and felines though all move differently from each other, even though they all walk on their toes (a horse's hoof is counted as a toe, since it's a remnant from when horses HAD toes--about 30 million years ago.) So yes, the toes are a joint. Our toes are jointed, animals just have better control over them ;p

Not sure how good my explanation skills are but that's pretty much the gist of it. 

 

Edit - revised my diagrams

[Teager]

Actually, for animation purposes, that first joint you hilighted doesn't need a bone, since the whole limb chain can be moved with bone translation. The feet, however, do - the toes on the dog and the hooves on the horse. Most mammals would require 4 bones to animate, as Tyrian said above and I mentioned a page or two ago. To continue the dog example:



These two pictures illustrate very clearly why mammals require 4 bone limb chains; with only 3 bones, either the orange bone would be sacrificed and they would not be able to sit, or the green bone would be sacrificed and their feet would be constantly stuck at a 90 degree angle, clipping through the ground when moving or sticking straight up in the air when sitting or laying down.

Humans actually have 4 section limbs too - the fourth section is our toes. That's why, as discussed earlier in this thread, it looks very awkward that most sl animations currently do not animate any bend in the foot. Human toes don't stay perfectly in line with our feet. Neither do dog toes, cat toes, horse toes, or any other four legged mammal toes. It's simply more obvious with them since they walk on their toes, so the default position of their toes is rotated 90 degrees out from their "feet" - the blue bones above.