Project Bento Feedback Thread

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

My issue with going with the mesh body route is that creators of the mesh bodies hand out the mesh developer kit out by a case by case basis. They can choose who gets the kits and I can imagine that they are swamped with requests for the kits. Regardless, this in turn limits how many people can create content for these mesh bodies. 

My other issue is that these bodies use additional layers of mesh to allow for tattoos and applier clothes (onion avatars), which is wasteful. I think we are going to decide to go the mesh body route instead of improving the old avatar, we need to do what somebody already suggested at one of the bento meetings. That would be allow for multiple layers on the mesh materials, like how it is for the standard avatar now where we have tattoo, underwear, and clothing layers without the cost of additional geometry.

[Snickers Snook]

Oh and I forgot, once you've save the outfit and then wear it the next time (clicking each HUD to applier or adjust something), you have to detach all the damn HUDs and appliers to get your screen real estate back and to minimize your script count. BLEH!

[Ikey Ilex]

I feel like project Bento is an interesting step forward, but it's missing some noteworthy things.

1: On the back of the Avatar's head, why not have a string of bones for a ponytail? You're already adding a tail to the (in my opinion) convoluted skeleton, why not have some control for something like hair or a hat?

2: Add a few bones to the front of the pelvis, in addition to the back. I don't think I need to say who this would benefit or why, but moving attachments on the pelvis has been attempted before using butt physics with... No real success. Adding jigglebone to the front of the skeleton would be nothing but beneficial.

[Jerbens Jarman]

all of the things you mentioned can already be done using the bones they are already adding if you use them creatively. (the antenna bones would do a good job with that

 

I would very much like to try the new skeleton, as I think a lot of the things I wish to do are possible by using the extra bones. I hope we hear more soon!

[Jerbens Jarman]

Actually, to move the topic away from "More bones MORE BONES", Let me ask a question about the set we currently have and how it could be used.

 

Let's say I have a bipedal avatar that has something like Talons (think a harpy) and I want them to be able to grip on their own. Could I take the extra legs from the knee to the feet, move them so they're right next to the main bones, then animate them as if they was part of the original set of legs? would that be doable or make things too complecated to even consider?

[dazhazit]

Erm... Being a borderline pervert. Can I second this. I have the skills at meshing rigging etc. and am looking at coming back to SL creation but am scratching my head over the subject of what 20% of people do in SL which involves animation of erm... how can I say this... Extra bits which at the moment comprise of a rather messy and convoluted system of swapping fitted attachments and textures AFAIK.
I'd like to bake the extra topology in mesh avatars and be able to do some interesting things with it. I've discovered I have a little skill at modelling them and wouldn't mind making some money doing so. I already have a workflow in mind.

Oh and why is the default avatar still Ruth? Ruth is what put me off SL creation in the first place. At least the example I've got has toes now (Thanks Gaia) but I tried recently to SubSurf for sculpting so as to create a normals and AO Map and ended up scraping down more than 50 pinch marks that looked like warts before I could even think about trying to put surface details on. Something has to be done about those triangles that defy logic and the laws of edge flow. A professionally created humanoid mesh in this decade is usually judged on it's quality by how few triangles it has. (Those I create myself have 0 triangles;-) Though I'm evaluating custom fuse content creation at the moment which has some sensibly placed triangles. It is possible to do). Another reason for me to take the mesh AV creation route rather than just do skins. I just can't stand staring at it despite Gaia Clarys' nice skin and T-shirt.
I know someone will throw around the words 'backwards compatibility issues' but if you are updating the viewer defaults then surely something can be done about an ancient base mesh that quite frankly was done by a drunk teenager who had no real knowledge of female anatomy. (Unless it was modelled on his girlfriend/wife in which case he has my deepest condolances). I haven't even actually started on how many things are wrong with this mesh. (Apart from the toes which someone seems to have thrown some quads at but the junctions should be poles not tris).
Anyway rant mode off as no one is going to do much about it soon if past SL history is anything to go by.

[Gael Streeter]

I am wondering if the appearance sliders attachment may not compromise the facial animations compatibility...

1. Will the bones moves requested by the facial animations applied above the appearance sliders changes ?

2. Will the bones moves requested by the facial animations replace completely the appearance sliders changes ?

Example : In SL I modify my mouth shape with the sliders. What is happening now if I play a Smile or a Open Mouth animation (designed on a "default" shape of the mouth, not my current one) ?

In both cases, I see problems...

In case 1, the animations may be deformed by the shape changes and may look very weird.

In case 2, the animations will loose all the shape specifications.

 

[Shnurui Troughton]

Eyes and glut need split up a little more, imo, especially if you want to keep the implementation of eye lid shapes. At the very least, inner and outer eyelid, with a soft deform zones for each?

[Gaia Clary]

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1. Will the bones moves requested by the facial animations applied above the appearance sliders changes ?

---

No. The Facial animation appearance sliders for the default Avatar

use Morph shapes for the expression changes on the default avatar.

And the default Avatar completely ignores the new Bento bones.

On the other side Meshes are not affected by Morph shapes.

Mesh based characters (and animations) only react on Bone changes.

So the morph based expressions are used by the default avatar

and the bone based expressions are used by meshes.

So they do not mix up.

---

2. Will the bones moves requested by the facial animations replace completely the appearance sliders changes ?

---

No. See above.

---

Example : In SL I modify my mouth shape with the sliders. What is happening now if I play a Smile or a Open Mouth animation (designed on a "default" shape of the mouth, not my current one) ?

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• On Default Avatars nothing changes. the animations play as before.
• On existing Mesh Avatars nothing changes because existing mesh avatars

  are not aware of the new Bones (have no weight maps for the new bones)

• New (future) creations may add weight maps for the new face bones.

  Depending on how the creator chooses to weight the new bones

  the facial expression sliders affect the face similar as the morph shapes

  do for the default avatar.

Most of you know for sure know much better than me how all of this works.

However i thought its a good idea to add...

A Bit of basics

The Second Life default Avatar uses 2 different animation systems for its shape,

that is it uses Morph shapes and skeletal animation in combination.

Currently (in Agni) most appearance sliders (~100) are connected to morphs

and only ~20 sliders are connected to the skeleton.

The connection between the skeleton (the bones) and the skin

(the character meshes and mesh attachments) is defined in the weight maps.

Weight maps are defined in the meshes. And within each mesh

there is at most one weight map for each bone.

Here is a video about this:

And here is the text version of it: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/lesson/sls-1/

For standard Avatars

Nothing will change at all. The sliders affect the Avatar just like always.

All changes on the new (Bento-) Bones due to appearance sliders

are not(!) propagated to the default Avatar Face or hands because

the default Avatar is not weighted to the new bones.

For Mesh Avatars

It is mostly up to the creator in which way a mesh reacts on the Bones.

It all depends on how the weight maps are setup and how the bone joints

are placed in the mesh (you can move the bone joints around as you like).

We currently are adding the new Bento bones to the avatar definition files,

so that we get many more Appearance sliders to work (about 30 of the

face appearance sliders are already set up, a few more will be added shortly)

Here is the related demo video again:

 

[Gael Streeter]

Thank you for your precisions Gaia.

Sorry, I did not mentioned it, but my questions were only about the future Bento mesh heads (mesh heads rigged on the Bento bones). I understood that the backward compatibility is ensured for the non Bento contents (past and future).

So, for the new Bento mesh heads, the Bento bones will be used by :
- either the facial shape sliders
- or the facial animations

And that is precisely my concern...
How will interact these two deformations together ?
Will the facial animations override the changes made in the shape with the facial sliders ?
Or will the facial animations be added to the changes made in the shape with the facial sliders ?

I will try to give an example...
I have a Bento mesh head with a close little mouth by default (with the default shape delivered with it).
I find this mouth too small, and I use the shape sliders (Lip Width etc.) to make it wider.
Now I play on it a Smile animation (using the Bento mouth bones) made and delivered by the creator of the Bento mesh head.
How will act this animation ?
Will the smile be exactly like the designer made it for the default shape : a smiling little mouth ?
Or will the smile effects be added to the shape changes : a smiling wide mouth (so perhaps over smiling) ?

 

 

[Gaia Clary]

 

---

Gael Streeter wrote:

I have a Bento mesh head with a close little mouth by default (with the default shape delivered with it).

I find this mouth too small, and I use the shape sliders (Lip Width etc.) to make it wider.

Now I play on it a Smile animation (using the Bento mouth bones) made and delivered by the creator of the Bento mesh head.How will act this animation ?

Will the smile be exactly like the designer made it for the default shape : a smiling little mouth ?

Or will the smile effects be added to the shape changes : a smiling wide mouth (so perhaps over smiling) ?

---

Animations play on top of the appearance shape slider system.
So if you have set up a wide mouth via appearance sliders
and then you use a "smile" animation this smile will run
on top of your appearance. But...

We have to distinguish between 2 different animation type:

Rotational animations (use rotations only)

The first type of animation plays nicely on top of your mouth.
so it preserves your appearance and i believe that the animated smile
comes out more or less as expected. However if your mouth is really
wide and the animator has made an animation for a really small mouth
then you might see deviations of some kind (although i am not sure how
this actually affects the look, it might even work because wide mouth
also does wide smile :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:)

Transitional animations (use transitions and possibly rotations in combination)

The second type of animation moves the bones into a position that is
defined by the animation creator. But this will only be a relative move
based on where your bones are placed by the appearance slider.

so if the creator has decided to force a "small mouth animation"
then he/she will use only small transition changes (because the mouth is small).
Consequently your wide mouth will still smile, but the animation
will not scale proportional, so your wide mouth smile might become less apparent.

Of course if the animator created an animation for a wide mouth and you set up
your appearance to have a small mouth, then you may get an oversmile again.

 

[Gaia Clary]

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Snickers Snook wrote:

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Gaia Clary wrote:

So... in which way are mesh bodies "royal PITA" ? Maybe it makes more sense to improve that...

---

Well let's see. for my Maitreya mesh body, I have to wear:...

---

Indeed... I also have tried some of the mesh products and i must agree that the way how things are setup often appeals like being a  challenge for customers. I myself gave up on using complicated avatar setups like you describe (not that they are bad, i just was not patient enough to actually use them).

I also believe that some of the complications you describe are introduced because creators (and also users at times) try to do things which are just not well supported. It is frustrating :matte-motes-mad:

That's why i was asking what could be done to make the entire system better suited for the purpose. And how would a remake of the default Avatar help us with that?

About a renewal of the System Avatar

I honestly do not like the idea of defining an Avatar-2 at all. I would be much more happy if we can modernise the SL Character animation system to better support any sort of user creations.

And from what i have seen so far the bento project is a huge step toward making things easier. At least if you use the new system in a good way and learn what can be done and what should be avoided...

About the HUDs

I do not know much about how the HUDs work and if this can be made easier for all (character creators, scripters and users). Maybe some scripters could propose improvements on the scripting side to allow easier user interfaces at least. I believe that would help a lot...

About a Community driven alternative

Here is the most interesting part... Many have told me it would be nice to have an open source mesh character for the comunity. But after a couple of years with Mesh i still see nothing open sourced and widely used. Why that? (Maybe i am just not aware of it...)

I believe the answer is simple: There is nobody who would reward those who provide this open sourced and freely usable product in a comfortable way. I admit i have somewhat given up on it, however i invite everybody (again) to help us push the Ava Meshes forward from idea towards implementation, see http://blog.machinimatrix.org/the-ava-meshes/

But we got enough advise by now. Time of talking seems to be over. Now its time of doing :matte-motes-nerdy:

[Code Violet]

Gaia, thanks for the very insightful info, as always!

Perhaps this is a good time to ask while people are thinking about facial expressions. I wonder what you and others think about BUG-11569, the JIRA for the llSetAnimationOverride() concept that would allow custom animations to play in place of legacy anims. Mesh heads would use this in script to set up overrides for legacy facial anims, no HUD is involved.

While bento facial expressions can't be made to suit all avatars, I thought this may be a solution to a lot of the issues by providing a bridge for any products that use legacy anims. With this in place, I think legacy anim "triggers" could then continue to be used in future products, working with ALL mesh heads that support such overrides, as well as working with legacy avatars.

[Code Violet]

Basically, mesh head designers would create replacements for all the legacy facial anims, add them to their heads, and set them as overrides which would be automatically applied in place of the legacy ones. And creators could therefore continue to apply legacy animations in their scripts, HUDs and furniture, which would work on all avatars that supported it.

[dazhazit]

Your AVA meshes project is of interest to me. I gave up trying to create anything useful for SL about 4 years ago as I was put off by Ruth (Obviously) and the lack of animation support but didn't give up on character creation and have an embarrassing array of attempts at human topology on my hard disk to prove it :-) So I guess I may have learnt a thing or three about edge flow and weight painting and might throw in with this.

But you're right, it's unpaid and the major grunt work will actually be setting up the morphs which I always manage to destroy when I change a bit of topology I don't like. If a solution similar to the way it's done in Adobe Fuse CC can be found things would go a lot better.

I myself need to afford to repair the leak that leaves a puddle in the passenger side footwell of my ancient Renault and maybe eat. So I'll see how I go with making something special.

I've seen a workflow from Manuel Bastioni Labs into Avastar which is open source character creation for blender but there are issues with UV compatibility, high polygon counts and hard to get along with customisation UI. Plus of course everyone has their own opinion about what a default ethnic face looks like and I see very little difference between Asian and Northwest European in it. Not that I'm belittling it as he's obviously put in a lot of work for little comeback and I applaud him for doing something I've played around with doing for a number of years but never actually got around to.

[Gaia Clary]

 

---

dazhazit wrote:

I've seen a workflow from Manuel Bastioni Labs into Avastar which is open source character creation for blender but there are issues with UV compatibility, high polygon counts and hard to get along with customisation UI.

---

I believe that the Manuel Bastioni tool is an interesting candidate for making mesh characters. In fact the newest version of Avastar contains a converter from Bastioni to SL which also adds automatic weightmaps for the face ( not soo perfect yet, but useful )

Manuel told me that he will take care of the polygon count. So i believe we will eventually see low poly mesh versions in the future.

Regarding the UV mappping from Bastioni characters to the SL UV mapping we might come up with something useful too. But first things first, now its Bento time :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

 

[dazhazit]

Thanks for the promising info Gaia.

"Manuel told me that he will take care of the polygon count. So i believe we will eventually see low poly mesh versions in the future."

Yes agreed it's still relatively new and a work in progress and being an Otaku kind of like his anime base meshes which may come in useful to me soon. But maybe you can bend his ear a little as you have a little more influence. I looked at adding some extra topology to the base meshes for my own perverted purposes but was kind of daunted by the list of json files used to hold the linear displacements needing to be recompiled which in fact shows a major limitation on morphs/shape keys in general in that they can only be used on a matching mesh in which the order of vertices are the same. Though I haven;t tried his clothing proxies yet and it could be possible to actually have a complete AV on the proxy.

There are scripts out there that can interpolate but only if the receiving mesh is a close match in shape and position. The other thing of course is that they are linear displacements meaning that for instance using the hand fist shape key will have the fingers quite happily squishing up as the vertexes go in a straight line through each other until reaching their destination. A fat belly and buttocks should curve downwards as the mass increases which needs two sliders at the moment.

So I may be repeating something someone has said previously as I haven't read the whole thread and come in late. I'm a loud mouthed pillock anyway. It is said that more bones isn't the answer but maybe for the AVA meshes and even Bento for initial shaping at least a whole lot more helper bones can be used instead which can be auto rigged to an arbitrary shape and simply curve driven. The weights discarded after baking the shape obviously because of the 4 weight limit per vertex.

[Snickers Snook]

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Gaia Clary wrote:

---

 

About a renewal of the System Avatar

I honestly do not like the idea of defining an Avatar-2 at all. I would be much more happy if we can modernise the SL Character animation system to better support

any

sort of user creations.

OK, here's my frustration as a clothing designer. I look at how the triangles are formed, spaced and sized. There simply isn't enough "detail" to make system clothing look right. But system clothing is what MOST wear. I'd love to do lace that actually looks like lace and not a blurry approximation of lace. I'd love that I could accurately compensate for places where the triangles are huge and places where they are small. I'd like the standard avatar to have, god forbid, nipples (male & female).

I spend almost ZERO time worrying about facial expressions and super-accurate animations in SL. I just want my avatar to LOOK good, look as realistic as possible and wear clothing that is as realistic as possible. I'd love for all this accuracy and detail to be STANDARDIZED in the mesh we are all given as a base. I really could give a fig about most of what the new bento bones do since it seems to me from all the back and forth, the majority of the work is going to benefit maybe 10% of the core SL audience. I know maybe 5 people on a friends list of 80+ who spend even a small amount of time as non-human avatars. And they're pretty happy being mesh rabbits or cats that don't have a lot going on or need or want a lot going on.

I think it would be nice to wear a skin that was 2x the resolution or 4x the resolution it is now.

So on to your comment about making HUDs and mesh systems easier. It's not going to happen unless Linden Lab standardizes something! There are now about 20 popular mesh bodies often with 3 - 5 variants. Only a few are compatible with each other in how things get applied to them and NONE of them share HUDs unless they can use the partially standarized Omega HUD relay system. There are maybe 10 "head" makers. I mean jeez, you buy a separate "head" and animations for those. Heck the whole thing started with Slink Feet & Hands and Lolas Tangos boobs. Now it's a complete and unrecoverable mess.

Does anyone seriously think about NEW people coming into Second Life any more? Or have all the creators & devs gone into "we don't care" mode? I'd hate to be a newbie in SL now because I wouldn't have a CLUE what was going on. (Why does she look so much better than me? Oh because she just spent $20,000L on a HUD-driven mesh body, HUD-driven head, full skin set, HUD-applied makeups, HUD-driven nails, HUD driven hair, HUD-driven mesh clothing and HUD-driven shoes that will take you a YEAR to figure out.) And how many scripts exist in all this stuff that are probably just making SL slower and slower. But thank god fewer people are in SL now because it might be really really laggy.

Sorry for the rant but the more I think about this, the more annoyed I get with the whole direction of Second Life development or lack thereof.

 

[dazhazit]

"Nipple area. Try to slider or deform your way out of THIS mess"
*Snigger*

Thank you for saying what I've been trying to.

For a recent skin project on Freelancer.com for SL I tried making a decent AO lighting map for just those areas. They said naked on the brief so I wanted to do something special with fully procedural skin generation :-) I had the great idea of SubDivision Surface and sculpting on her junk but had to take the poly count up to 7Million just to put in the barest approximation of femininity as there is just not the topology to subdivide. However the end result was fuzzy because of lack of resolution on the UV map which is also pinched around the groin where the lindens tried to square up the legs without isolating that area of the map as a separate island. So I can understand your bikini woes. I walked away from the project anyway as I had too many misgivings about it and use my procedural texturing for myself ;-) Having a long term illness doesn't help.

I guess the reason that this will not change is "Technical Debt" which in the programming industry refers to something that has had so much effort put into it previously and become so complex a situation that changing it is no longer considered a viable option. Or to use a quote from Murphys second law of dynamics "If it works don't bugger about with it" mentality. Which let's face it is pretty much the entire history of Linden Labs who are just happy to make money from a 'Tried and Trusted' Platform.

I think the Lindens are currently concentrating on their new flagship 'Sansara' (SL2 maybe but I think it will be a great dissapointment considering the hype) so the amount of resources assigned to the current SL is less than it could be and most of the effort towards changing anything at all is coming from dissatisfied users of which I'm actually only a newly returned one and pissed off already.

It's actually quite trivial to change the meshes in the viewer source code and the texture maps come from a UUID on an asset server and shouldn't care what resolution they have as long as they stick to a power of 2 in size as OpenGL doesn't really like anything other than a square bitmap. The project brief above was for 2K maps and as I said fuzzy where it counts.

[Gael Streeter]

Thank you very much Gaia for all these information.

Indeed, I thought there would be behaviour differences between animations using rotations and animations using translations.

In this forum, we rapidly sense that it would be impossible to design facial animations compatible with all the different mesh heads (because of the differences in the weights and shapes of them).

But I am now worried about the difficulty to design animations playing nicely with all the different face shapes possible for the same mesh head...

For example, what will happen to a blink animation if you change your eye opening with the sliders ?

I definitely need to do some experiments...

[Gaia Clary]

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Snickers Snook wrote:

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Gaia Clary wrote:

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OK, here's my frustration as a clothing designer. I look at how the triangles are formed, spaced and sized. There simply isn't enough "detail" to make system clothing look right. But system clothing is what MOST wear. ...

Sorry for the rant but the more I think about this, the more annoyed I get with the whole direction of Second Life development or lack thereof.

 

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For me the key question here is: Is Secondlife character all about humanoids or about arbitrary character creation?

 

• If it is all about human characters, then IMHO the best improvement will be to create an awesome and flexible human mesh character with appearance slider system similar to MakeHuman or ManuelLab. This surely would be the Avatar-2 project.
• But if it is all about creation of creatures of any kind, then we clearly can not favor the humanoids by providing a solution for those alone. Instead of this we have to think about how to support any sort of characters. This is what Project Bento is about.

So... Project Bento also opens up the option to create awesome humanoids outside of Secondlife and integrate them seamless into the system (see what we do in

). But it also allows to add non humans in the same way. So its open to all ideas and not focusing on one pattern alone.

I also believe that Project Bento is just one step towards a better system. There should be a couple more of improvements going to happen like improving the scripting features to make things easier (or doable), support for NCP's also comes to mind, Improving physics (keep quadruped feet on ground...) etc, etc...

One more thought about avatar-2: There is an entire fashion industry operating on the base of the current system Avatar. So why (why, why,...) doesn't the fashion creator community sit together and invent (or at least sponsor) the next generation Avatar, make it open and free to use for every attachment designer? Woudn't this fit best? Instead of letting LindenLab provide something on their own, just let the community provide something that fits best for them? And think about what additional features of the Secondlife system would make such a project become even better...

[Snickers Snook]

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Gaia Clary wrote:

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Avatar. So why (why, why,...) doesn't the fashion creator community sit together and invent (or at least sponsor) the next generation Avatar, make it open and free to use for every attachment designer? Woudn't this fit best? Instead of letting LindenLab provide something on their own, just let the community provide something that fits best for them? And think about what additional features of the Secondlife system would make such a project become even better...

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Simply creating yet another mesh overlay with some intergrated HUD & slider system seems kind of like throwing the body and interrior of a Lamboghini onto a Yaris. Why?

People thought "The Mesh Project" was headed in that direction but they decided to completely commercialize it and the whole idea splintered off into 20 different directions. Why oh why you ask? The same reason there are multiple standards for mesh feet, mesh boobs, mesh butts, mesh heads, mesh this, mesh that. The fashion community is not a community in the least. There are thousands of designers just scraping along making things becuase they love to. The big "design" houses have shown no interest in standardization probably because they hope THEIR mesh avatar becomes "the" standard.

There are so many benefits for Linden Lab and Second Life if LL does Avatar 2.0. But we'll just end up with all that extra Load, scripts and crap because of SQUIRRELS!

[Gaia Clary]

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Snickers Snook wrote:

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Gaia Clary wrote:

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Avatar. So why (why, why,...) doesn't the fashion creator community sit together and invent (or at least sponsor) the next generation Avatar...

---

Simply creating yet another mesh overlay with some intergrated HUD & slider system seems kind of like throwing the body and interrior of a Lamboghini onto a Yaris. Why?

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Now i am a bit frustrated about this conversation. In essence you insist on the idea that getting an improved Avatar from linden lab will make things work better (for you). While i believe that improving the customisation of Mesh based characters is the way to go (for me).

I also clearly see how mesh creators can make our live complicated with Huds and stuff. But this is again an issue about improving customizability and not an argument to let LindenLab do the work. The question is basically:

Why do we need Huds? Can we replace them by something better? What would that be? (Scripters of the world... tell us  please :matte-motes-nerdy: )

[edit] I do not say that all that needs to be done is using the existing system in a better way. Maybe some small changes in LSL (additional functions for example) could make avatar customization huds work easier, better... i just do not know much about this, so i can only guess here.

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Snickers Snook wrote:

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The fashion community is not a community in the least. There are thousands of designers just scraping along making things becuase they love to. The big "design" houses have shown no interest in standardization probably because they hope THEIR mesh avatar becomes "the" standard.

---

Well yes. But also diversity is the base of evolution. So either keep patient to see who wins or step in and help to evolve.

[dazhazit]

"Now i am a bit frustrated about this conversation"

Frustrated yes this is an emotive subject that has been going on since I started SL at least. Everybody has their opinions and this subject is getting out of hand verging on messy flame war.

I personally am mildly High Functioning Autistic and can't leave alone things that just look wrong to me. Such as the default base female AV which I've openly described elsewhere as a cold act of topological terrorism and the original designer needs waterboarding.

That's all I'm concerned with and I'm not going to go into details or argue about it but what I want changed affects both animation and texturing. From the perspective of an Organic Soft Body modeller. Looking at the edge flow on Ruth is actually quite stressful. She is so profoundly wrong yet people seem to love her, say she's not so bad etc. and I fully understand that she has to be generically shaped to a certain degree.

However I personally want to batter that misshapen head and the shoulder blades half way down her chest with a solid titanium vertex mallet. It appears somebody already has with what laughably passes for the hands. (Oh you mean they're not shoulder blades. Well the're certainly not where I've seen the clavicles on most girls I've been with:-). Pure texture clothing designers desperately need something better to design for without having to choose a particular custom mesh AV path and be stuck with it. That means a better default AV standard and UV mapping. Period.

I've been out of SL for a while and am both dissapointed and discouraged that the situation hasn't changed in those years. Quite frankly the same things that put me off creation for it in the past. The problem is mainly that there are those who are established and sometimes quite snobbish, happily sitting where they are making money and those who are fresh, want to forge ahead and do something special and getting frustrated with the former who don't want to evolve in case it upsets their gravy train. I'm not talking about you here Gaia as despite being established you actually appear to be one of the latter and have some weight behind what you say.

There's a lot that could be done with SL but it's not going to happen. The Lindens I'm afraid to say are the former. There will be no official mesh update. Animatable bones on non AVs is not going to happen. A more flexible open ended bone system is not going to happen because of the way they store them as numerically limited enumerated entities and I'm surprised to see that they've even gone as far as allowing a limited number to be added. LSL will remain a programming abomination for sometime to come. PBR?, Layered textures? I won't even go there.

Second Life is stuck in the 1990s because of "Technical Debt", sloth and lack of investment in the future which is why it's being abandoned by its' users who've seen the sort of quality game engines are capable of.

I came back looking for something fresh to move into to maybe make some profit and am questioning why now.

I could put my money where my loud mouth is and actually do something about this but quite frankly would not make any money out of it and would be fighting too much Hysteresis.

I'm close to not going to bother with this anymore unless something spectacular happens at the Linden end. Maybe one of the Lindens will pick up on this and actually show me how they're going to improve things with their new Flagship they're developing but I have a very strong feeling it's going to dissapoint me.

[Teager]

This is all an extremely pointless argument to be having on this thread. Project Bento is about expanding the skeleton of the sl avatar, not about changing the mesh of the default avatar. What you're requesting would require a totally new project, and should therefore be suggested via Jira.