Project Bento Feedback Thread

[MoonHowler Snowpaw]

I think Feynt Mistral is talking about really scaled bodies, not with a shape edit, but by joint positions. When you resize the whole avatar with its armature and upload it with joint positions it will not fit anymore its normal animations if they include bone positions. If your avatar was normally big and you made it smaller, you will get stick person, because the animations will return the bones to the places where they were in a bigger avatar. And if your avi was small and you have resized it bigger, it will look like a blob, the bone positions will return the skeleton to a small size where mesh body will be worn like oversized clothes. If you use bone positions and need some sizes of the same avatar you will need to export animations for each size separately applying armature scale. Or just use rotations for making animations universal and not function like a trasher deformer. This is the problem which Feynt Mistral means, as i understand.

[Kitsune Shan]

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. 

[Kitsune Shan]

You are totally misunderstanding the project. 

This won't work with old default avatar heads nor having more attachments points would help either.

This project is about having new extra bones but those new bones like the ones on head for facial animations won't work with default expressions (nor should it in any case anyway). I'm sure that users will be able to not just mimic but do even better facial animations than the default ones (which isn't that hard seeing their bad quality) so you shouldn't worry about having good mesh heads once bento it's fully implemented. 

[Polymath Snuggler]

To a certain extent ~ I can see where this line of "animation re-use" thinking comes from.  Current morph target based expressions can be integrated into AO's and customers have that expectation.  I'm not entirely sure which crowd LL is trying to cater to here~ But, that really requires a meeting for us to truely understand the motive / intent.  I suspect that meeting will occur after Jan. 3, 2016, as LL is on vacation until then.

It is worth noting that ~ for a humanoid head a translation based algorithm will actually produce a more "reuseable" animation than a rotation based heirarchy for an average sized head.  As bone rotations have to have their location set so far back away from the actual point of movement that the designer is trying to emulate a translation on that it somewhat eliminates any hope of reusablility, as the joint locations will be different for every single project.

[Feynt Mistral]

It's not just facial animations though.  Say you have an animation that moves bones that aren't in the face, like moving the arms back as someone mentioned a half dozen pages back to get a horse with two bones in its neck.  Only this isn't a one time offset, it's something you change constantly for whatever reason in the default avatar's skeleton (hide avatar arms, translate arm bones for wings on back, start flapping.  Yes, we have new bones to do that, work with me here).  Works great for normal human sizes.  But when you get to the really small or really big sized avatars, the translations don't make sense anymore.  On a tiny avatar the bones would probably cross past the midpoint axis if they were supposed to move inward.  On a giant one the bones would barely move at all.  What's 0.3m movement when your shoulders are 8m across?

 

Now say this was a common animation; the flapping arms I mentioned, or a dance, or a walk, something that involves translation in the bones and not just rotation.  This doesn't work for anyone who's got a non-standard avatar.  Granted, feral furries have come to terms with this ages ago (human animations on a non-human skeleton arrangement, d'uh), but the rest of the SL community that doesn't understand technobabble and wouldn't care to know what it all means, outside of "my animation doesn't work."

 

Yes, it's a fringe case.  Most animations outside of the face will feature rotations and not translations.  But for those less than 20% cases, it's kind of a big deal.

 

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Now, scaling and rotation, those both multiply together properly.  If you scaled a body up (or down) 10 times, translations applied to that 10 times scale would work.  Offsets in the model file however don't relate a scale though.  So if you moved your bones out to their appropriate positions in a large scale model, you would also encounter this "0.3m movement on an 8m wide shoulder" issue.  Offsets are translations after all.  If there was a way to import scale though rather than bone absolute positions at export, that would resolve a lot of the issues for facial animations via translation as well.  You still run into the case where applying multiple animations that have translations wouldn't work, but that's an even more fringe case (maybe less than 2%) and I don't think enough people would care at that point.

[Kitsune Shan]

Lets be realistic on the subject. SL have to be adapted to certain standards but you cant "break" those standards to make something viable when to start its totally wrong. Changing how animations should work just so people that does an AO using bones translations can still use their AOs its really pointless. If they choose to use bones translations for parts that shouldnt use, its something that should rely on their side and responsability. I dont think that SL should accomodate to wrong workarounds. There is no point on using bones translations asides of facial bones unless you are making a special AO for a special avatar. In that case, the animations dont need to carry over to different avatars nor it should anyway. So we are discussing here why animations have to be compatible with everything when in the real world they never are. When you work on game characters and develop animations, you can retarged and adapt them inside of your 3D software. You can reuse them adapting them and they work perfectly. But thats it, they are being adapted again. Unless you use certain kind of locomotions and inverse kinematics in SL, you cant really expect animations to work on every scenario and I dont think that LL is aiming at that. Again, it doesnt matter how animations scales properly, you wont be able to use facial expressions on different heads unless they were done to work on pair with them. Every mesh head will require different joints offset, different degrees of movement. There is no way that these animations will work in the same way on a different head. Its really something trivial, it could work just by coincidence or if bones offset as well as mesh head itself doesnt changes that much but in most case thats not the case.

The example of different avatars size was given. I dont see why an AO developed for a little pixie avatar should work on a huge orc avatar. It wasnt made with that purpose, they are custom avatars which requires custom animations and if translations were used its because it was needed for certain actions that only the avatar for which were made will use.

As mentioned before, if you make just a general AO and you shouldnt use translations but you do, is no one else fault but yours. Not because someone may not know something it doesnt meant that should be implemented. I myself have bough certain things in SL, clothing, that for no reasson uses joints offset and broke my avatar making them totally useless. These pieces didnt require that, but surely the creator didnt know. Should have LL remove that option because someone doesnt know how to do use of it? Surely not...

If necessary, when uploading animations a checkbox for adding translation could be added to prevent those less aknowledge to upload something that could break certain things. But still, if someone makes something "wrong" and mess an AO, its on their side to fix and reupload it. Adding enough documentation surely will also help people to understand everything and how new things works.

BTW if someone remember when OH are inworld and at which time, woul be glad if tell me. I would like to be on the next meeting.

[Feynt Mistral]

Oh I totally agree.  Animations for different characters should not be general.  But they are, effectively, at the moment.  A dance works the same on every avatar in SL at the moment because it's all rotations (even if it looks wonky for a horse to suddenly stand upright and do a waltz).  And that's what LL wants to preserve.  The reality is they shouldn't, but nobody wants to catch flak for making animations potentially break when you start stacking translations in them.  So that's my option 2 from an earlier post:  We tell the community at large that translations in animations won't work with all avatars, and tell them we want to go this way so that facial animations will look better when they're made for a given avatar.  The rotation vs. translation examples supplied earlier are good for showing the difference to the community at large, because let's face it, not a lot of people out there are techies and/or modelers.

 

So the short of it is, make cool **bleep** that makes use of translations.  Hopefully we can get LL to put up some sort of announcement for those gathered here to express the choice of supporting translations in favour of universal animation support.

[Brayla Ravenhurst]

Why are there no toes?

[Polymath Snuggler]

I can answer that for you easily.

Bones cause lag, and not a little, a lot.

More bones, more lag.

As you might surmise where I'm going with this ~ adding bones for toes, which are appendages that express nothing, and are rarely if ever seen, and almost never are required to move much, if at all. ( as they're usually inside shoes ) is ill advised.

[Raz Welles]

tl;dir:

Bone space translations scale. Translation animations don't work across existing identical macro/micro avatars because they use workarounds that aren't actually scaling.

 

reasoning:

Micros/Macros in SL are workarounds for lack of access to scaling. SL doesn't let you scale an avatar to have its shoulders span 2 meters across, so by using a larger mesh, and offsetting the shoulder bones so that they span 2 meters across gets the same visual effect. This illusion breaks when you try to translate those joint offsets.

 



 

In the bone space scale, any translations done will work fine, because the coordinate space changed to accommodate the new size. Note the grid has scaled in bone space, keeping positions the same. Translations done here will make sense at any scale because the grid relation is maintained.

In the joint offset scale, you're just stretching the guy out, like some medieval torture chamber. Because the coordinate space hasn't changed, translation animations done on the stretched out skeleton will need to be likewise exaggerated. Note in joint offset scaling, grid has not changed, and avatar's shoulders are now roughly twice as far apart according to the grid. Animations done like this will expect a stretched avatar, as they currently do in SL.

 

[Mysterics]

Not sure if you want this kind of thing in this thread. but please do not remove the ability to rig to attatchment points or animate joint positions. I feel this is simply removing one problem and replacing it with another one.

 

 

[Medhue Simoni]

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.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

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

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HOLY...  That rig is some mindblowing work. If we could do that in SL I'd be happy and sad. Happy because it was available and sad because I'd be totally unable to compete

[Medhue Simoni]

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Da5id Weatherwax wrote:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

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

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HOLY...  That rig is some mindblowing work. If we could do that in SL I'd be happy and sad. Happy because it was available and sad because I'd be totally unable to compete

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I would not worry too much. If we can use translation, someone, likely an existly Blender addon or Maya plugin creator, will make a similar face rig. In Blender, it's just a matter of adding more IK bones and Drivers. I don't have alot of experience setting up these rigs, but I might play around with it all, if no body else does. If I created something decent, I'd sell it for a few bucks.

[Teager]

What a great rig! I particularly love the wrinkles in the skin. Unfortunately I think we'd need integrated slider support to get something quite that realistic, but we could absolutely achieve the rig itself, for some quick and snazzy facial animation.

 

 

- Obligitory statement that I am still for bone translation and believe that trying to bandaid the issue with a spider rig is the wrong way to go -

[Feynt Mistral]

That sad face totally looked like Mike Rowe.  >3

 

Excellent rig though.  I'd love to have that in SL.

[Feynt Mistral]

Right, like I said, if you can export scale somehow then the first translation applied will work just fine.  It's when multiple translations come into play that things bork.  It's a minor issue to me though.  I think animations targeted at a specific rig are the natural way to go, and if you're doing animations for your own rig, you know what not to mix together to cause these issues.  The average person who knows nothing beyond "I click the button and I start to dance" won't know or care how someone else's animations don't work with your avatar.  They just care that they don't, and someone is to blame.  So we need to explain this to people before anything animation format wise is made concrete in a way that doesn't satisfy.

[Dresden]

I kinda hate asking this, because I'm rather averse to requiring someone take the time to try to explain how animations work to someone who knows practically nothing about creating them, but I have an idea.

Lets say your trying to create an animation that works for a wide range of avatars using translation, but don't want people to be angry when it doesn't work for theirs.  Would it be possible to create a demo which would animate the translations correctly for the area which it's meant to effect, but would distort a different area of the avatar, thereby making unusable?

Though there will always be some people who don't try the demo and are pissed, I'd think that such a thing would alleviate the problem for most.

...Dres

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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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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I'm pretty sure I posted that video a long time ago

Too bad their homepage is non responsive and their social media seems to have stopped well over a year ago as well.

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.

Or maybe fortunately... we do not want "creepy", do we? (I think I posted this one before too...not sure)

[Fiona Branagh]

As some people have noted, having extra bones in the neck or legs would be extremely useful for non-human avatars. Currently, the necks are not very fluid for long necked creatures such as dragons, and trying to attach prim objects along a long neck fails pretty badly because they don't turn enough with the curving action (they stick out straight due to too few bones to follow.)

I completely understand why the new skeleton doesn't have those (at least, I suspect I do: no new bones interspersed in the main skeleton, only add-on bones, so old animations and avatars still work.)

Would it be possible to add a sort of second neck series of bones, or a 'crest line' of bones, so we could optionally weight to those while leaving the main rig intact? I'm not sure if that would technically work as I haven't tried to build a rig with those options, but it would be great if we could find a solution at this stage.

 

[Fiona Branagh]

I know this has been beaten to death on this topic, and for good reason, but I figured I'd toss in my 2 cents also.

Second Life CANNOT expect people to get too excited about tools that are inexplicably subpar to the most basic functionality of the rest of the 3D community. I get it when we were building with prims - it was a complete system designed with an obvious reason (so everyone could build.) I'm talking about something that doesn't seem to make sense in its restriction - if we have regular rigging and animation processes, why is the rigging not allowed to translate in animation?

I'm kinda excited about Bento because it solves a few problems and I'm already committed to making stuff in SL. If I weren't, and I were looking for fun things to do with my 3D skills, I would take one look at SL and Bento and scratch my head about why this was 'new' and why people would want to sandbag themselves so much with broken animations and expressions.

I'm not trying to be an ungrateful, whiny customer here, I'm just explaining how this is going to be seen as proof that SL is behind the times, past its prime, for people who can't hack it with real platforms, etc.

And I REALLY don't want that for Second Life. It deserves a much better reputation than that.

 

 

[Feynt Mistral]

Actually another thought came to mind.  FaceRig makes you do animations for its various facial positions when you want to make a new avatar.  It's basically asking for morph targets to blend between, the same as the SL avatar for various states.  Rather than adding more bones, couldn't you just tell us the animation names we'd need to specify to get blending to work as it does with the default avatar?  I mean I assume there's a "avatarSkinny" and "avatarFat" animation a piece to differentiate between those two states on the body thickness slider, right?  Any words on that, LL?

[Coby Foden]

Why not add only one common bone for all five toes in each leg? That's only two additional bones in all. Then we could naturally tip-toe, for example.

[Teager]

There actually is a toe bone already, but very few mesh makers seem to rig to it - I suppose because the default avatar isn't rigged to it. If mesh body makers would start taking advantage of that toe bone, animators would be able to animate a bend in the ball of the foot.

[Teager]

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Fiona Branagh wrote:

As some people have noted, having extra bones in the neck or legs would be extremely useful for non-human avatars. Currently, the necks are not very fluid for long necked creatures such as dragons, and trying to attach prim objects along a long neck fails pretty badly because they don't turn enough with the curving action (they stick out straight due to too few bones to follow.)

 

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I made this suggestion earlier in the thread, but I'll suggest it again in case it was overlooked - 

 

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.

 

mSkull currently serves no purpose for standard human avatars - volume HEAD takes the heavy lifting there. Nonhuman avatars typically use mSkull to animate a moving jaw, but that is no longer necessary since we now have jaw bones.

 

Parenting the facial bones to mSkull will not in any way damage existing animations or compatability between avatars, because no one animates the mSkull bone, which previously served no purpose. mSkull will follow all rotations and translations that mHead makes, and therefore the facial bones will too.

 

This offers a solution to a very specific-case problem with minimal work to LL and with no negative consequences to the avatars that don't need it. Let's do that, yes?