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Project Bento Feedback Thread


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Candi Clawtooth wrote:

Oh yea one more thing............'once the skeleton is posted'  ?   I dont get it.

"Bones" are invisible parts of the default avatar which can be moved by animations and which mesh can be "rigged" to, enabling that mesh to follow those animations. The SL avatar always had a certain number of bones; the "Bento" project added additional bones. These bones are coded into the viewers.

The default avatar shape won't react to the new bones to keep it from behaving unexpectedly with older content, but new worn mesh, including mesh avatars, can be rigged to the new bones. Older mesh won't change because it wasn't rigged to these bones, but mesh makers are already starting to use these new bones.

The note about "once the skeleton is posted" was from a year ago when the project was just started - the new skeleton is now part of the latest release of most viewers, including the Linden Lab viewer and Firestorm. Older viewers will show mesh rigged to the new bones oddly.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This craptastic Bento update has more flaws than a hillbillys teeth. Program disconnects nearly immediately while in teleport. Avatars still look the same before this useless update. Seriously lab, fix the things that actually matter and stop improving stuff for this soon-to-die new grid system that you're all so busy working mindlessly on. Kill that project and get back to the things that matter, like the community that pays your salary. :/

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Hi~  you seem upset!

 

First off, disconnecting from teleports is nothing to do with Bento~ that's just the servers being finicky, or your internet connection being bad.  I'm sure it'll settle out in no time.

As for "things looking exactly the same as they did before", that is precisely the point.  If the Lindens did their job correctly, all existing content should look exactly the same!!  This is an affirmation that things are in fact, working correctly!  New content however, will look different ~ and you may enjoy it sometime soon.

I hope this makes you less-upset!  Have a happy new year!

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Of course I'm upset, and you know what? I'm not the only one who's aggravated at what the lab is doing. Creating a new grid where land is cheaper yet buying L$ is more expensive? Making it "mesh only"? I bet you didn't even know that there's only a really small group of people that actually "maintain" the current grid and they sure as hell aren't doing a very good job at it, and as someone of many who pays their salary through buying L$, they should be listening to us, the on-again/off-again paying end-users.

 

As for network issues, I have long raised a ticket about that only to get my documentation ignored about their ISP (XO Communications) having high latency (ping times), and "assured" that it's something on my end, when I know it's not (ignoring a network administrator? way to go!).

 

And for the sake that things look the same whether "bento" or mesh? Why bother wasting the time? Oh wait, said soon-to-die new grid that's going to be doomed to fail shortly after it goes live.

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Vlad Malifozik wrote:

 

As for network issues, I have long raised a ticket about that only to get my documentation ignored about their ISP (XO Communications) having high latency (ping times), and "assured" that it's something on my end, when I know it's not (ignoring a network administrator? way to go!).


As a network administrator I'm sure you can tell us how a change to the avatar skeleton which is hardwired into the viewer code locally (i.e. Project Bento) can cause teleport failures, particularly as we aren't hearing the same problem from anyone else.

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Maybe because you're actually not around the community who actually does complain about the pointless changes that they are making? I talk to people all the time IN WORLD that can't stand the changes and go back to a pre-bento based viewer, and they too complain of increased lag, decreased performance, teleport issues/disconnects, and guess what? even the littleist change that the lab does has a massive impact on their decade+ old servers/hardware, especially when they have 30,000+ avatars logged in at any one time.

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I have no idea where you are hanging out in world, but I'm seeing exactly the opposite.

I'm on the Firestorm support team so I hear screams from unhappy people very quickly.

Imo, Bento has been the most popular feature LL has released for years - probably ever.  Everyone is going crazy for it - it has surpassed even the hysteria when Emerald viewer released the bouncy boobs  lol.

There is no known issue with getting disconnected more frequently when teleporting on Bento viewers. I know you don't agree but you need to be looking at your end or to your ISP for the cause of that problem.

There have also been a lot of reports of improved performance on Bento viewers, especially around lots of other avatars.  There have been quite a few performance optimizations made in the Bento viewer which really do seem to have given a nice boost  to FPS for most people.

I don't know if you have updated your system since you filed BUG-263 on the JIRA, but the system you were using at that time is borderline minimum requirements & performance will be very poor on that system, Bento or no Bento.

Best thing you can do is file a support ticket with LL support at https://support.secondlife.com/create-case/ or reopen your old case (if it wasn't that long ago) to get some help troubleshooting the problem.

 

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Ahum hello! 

I'm an older mesh developer and trying to wrap my head around the bento rig. I'm expierencing issues when even just trying to export/import the base mesh that comes with the skeleton, the arms go all goofy.

I'm using Blender and the bento compatible Firestorm.

I would super appreciate if someone would help me get going with this, I'd even be willing to pay a good amount of L for some knowledge.

Thank you so much!

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I'm not talking about an ao. I'm saying that some products animate the default avatar with internal animations that are expressions like express_afraid express_cry and sometimes even your avatar's fingers. I made my own bento avatar. usually mesh or prim avs can't react to the internal expressions, which is why I'm asking if there is a way that I can make my bento avatar play a face pose I made for it,whenever those internal animations play. Like if there is a way to tell when they are playing so I can start/stop my bento animation?

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I'd like to bring up another issue I came across, something which does need addressing in an official form.

The .fbx files provided on the official forums have certifiable flaws in them, most notably the issues seem to be stemming from mFaceTeethUpper and mFaceTeethLower, which appear to have some anomalous rotation applied to them, or they do not correctly respond to having offsets applied to them. My tests have been inconclusive other than the fact that they do not behave as expected, and as such create a lot of problems when trying to, say, construct an anthropomorphic head.

The worse thing is that these errors do not present in the import preview, thus necessitating an upload each time to verify the correctness of the rig.

 

Edit:

I found a further bit of confusing information. The project bento skeleton guide found here - http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Skeleton_Guide - claims that the tongue and lip bones are parented to the jaw, when in actuality they are parented not to mFaceJaw, but instead to mFaceTeethLower.

 

This bit of information is confusing, but leads me to believe that creating a joint offset for BOTH mFaceJaw as well as mFaceTeethUpper/Lower is what may be creating the strange jaw behavior I am currently seeing. I would very much appreciate some official insight on what is supposed to be going on here.

Further edit:

By some more experimenting - and having SL display the skeleton for me - it does indeed appear to be the case that SL does not take kindly to trying to offset mFaceTeethUpper and mFaceTeethLower. I will attempt to see whether leaving these at their original location has any sort of positive effect.

 

Final edit & solution:

After a solid day worth of research and experimenting, I've come to the following solution:

Do NOT, not EVER offset mFaceTeethLower OR mFaceTeethUpper right now. It is perfectly fine to have these bones receive offsets via moving their parent bones, such as mFaceJaw. But do NOT move these bones on their own, it will inevitably lead to very strange issues.

As soon as I re-aligned mFaceJaw and mFaceTeethLower to their original positions, then moved ONLY mFaceJaw to its intended location - seeing as mFaceTeethLower is unrigged in my mesh - the problems disappeared. Likewise the upper lip deformation disappeared by moving mFaceTeethUpper back to its original position and its child bones to their intended offset positions.

This leads me to believe that there is some bug calculating offsets from mFaceTeethUpper/Lower, which may be connected to the statement in the wiki, falsely stating that the lower lip and tongue bones are parented to mFaceJaw, which they very obviously aren't.

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  • Lindens

Hi Psistorm,

Do you mean the fbx files listed on the Bento Testing page? I believe those are converted from the Mayastar reference models contributed by Cathy Foil - perhaps she can comment on the specifics of those.

It may be our documentation on the teeth/jaw area is out of date. This was an area where the joint hierarchy was modified fairly late in development based on testing by content creators. I'll take a look at it.

Regarding the issues with joint offsets, I would suggest filing a bug report and including test models and images showing the problem. This would give us the best information for diagnosing what might be going on there.

 

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Hiya!

I actually determined the cause of the joint offsets, and I'm sorry to say it was my fault all along! It turns out I majorly brainfarted and didn't assign any weights to lower/upper teeth, thus breaking the chain of weighted bones upon export. This explains why any weird offsets went away once I made sure the offset between jaw/teeth was the same as in the original skeleton. I just forgot to do some sanity checks it appears.

As for the FBX files, I finally figured out why they come out looking different than the DAE files as well as what avastar provides. The FBX files aren't built based off the default shape, but have various sliders changed, most notably arm length, shoulders, neck thickness and head size, along with a few other minor tweaks. This explains the discrepancies I've been seeing between the FBX files and other skeletons.

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Psistorm Ikura wrote:

Hiya!

I actually determined the cause of the joint offsets, and I'm sorry to say it was my fault all along! It turns out I majorly brainfarted and didn't assign any weights to lower/upper teeth, thus breaking the chain of weighted bones upon export. This explains why any weird offsets went away once I made sure the offset between jaw/teeth was the same as in the original skeleton. I just forgot to do some sanity checks it appears.

As for the FBX files, I finally figured out why they come out looking different than the DAE files as well as what avastar provides. The FBX files aren't built based off the default shape, but have various sliders changed, most notably arm length, shoulders, neck thickness and head size, along with a few other minor tweaks. This explains the discrepancies I've been seeing between the FBX files and other skeletons.

Hi Psistorm,

The FBX files on the Bento Testing page are correct.  Their bone positions and rotations are all based on the avatar_skeleton.xml file.

One thing you need to be aware of is the default shape in SL, often referred to as Ruth, does not have slider values that are in the neutral position.  When LL decided to make Ruth the default shape when a brand new shape is created in our inventories they didn't use neutral slider positions.  Ruth's arms are longer, her head smaller and a handful of other sliders are not in their neutral positions. Actually it is impossible to make a completely neutral shape in SL using the Appearance Sliders because we can only input whole numbers while many of the truly neutral slider settings would require decimal values because how the avatar_lad.xml file is written and functions.

The FBX file avatar provided on the Bento Testing page the bones are all in their neutral positions and rotations.  The female FBX the mesh body has no morphs applied and the male FBX body has just the male head, upper body and lower body morphs applied but the skeleton's bone positions are all based as well on the avatar_skeleton.xml file just as the female FBX bones are.

Hope that helps. :)

Cathy

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Vir Linden wrote:

I like the idea of having a way to override a wider range of animations. Currently I think the llSetAnimationOverride hook only applies to animations that are part of the server-mediated locomotion process, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to extend using that mechanism.

If you could point me at sample content that uses the existing facial animations it would be helpful - either send me copies or provide pointers to marketplace listings. Thanks!

Hi Vir and community,

 

Now that bento is live, I've been getting an increasing number of questions about bento heads, because the legacy expressions don't work with them, breaking the old functionality.

Obviously furniture designers can't support bento heads without either the SL community establishing a universal protocol for triggering facial expressions in bento heads or LL adding https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-11569

 

I wonder if Vir has given any more thought to the llSetAnimationOverride proposal in that JIRA? Or if the bento head community has started to develop any standard?

 

To me, it seems like the llSetAnimationOverride idea presented in the JIRA would set the stage for further development through community standards, so I think the JIRA would be the best way forward.

 

Here are my previous posts on this thread:

 

https://community.secondlife.com/secondlife/board/message?board.id=buildingandtexturing&message.id=14382#M14382

 

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Building-and-Texturing-Forum/Project-Bento-Feedback-Thread/m-p/3002538#M14460

 

And some limited discussion on the topic can be found on the AVsitter website at:

 

https://avsitter.com/qa/549/establishing-bento-protocols

Thanks

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This is still on my project list ~ but during the course of Bento, something much more pressing finally stole the majority of my build-time, namely the inability for my native software suite to produce SL related animations / skeletons.   That project is finally nearing "Live" status.  I'm still VERY interested in establishing this sort of thing.  But I  haven't the mesh head and saleable content I was hoping to have at this time myself.  So, I'm lagged a bit behind on that regard.

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