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Hello Vir,

Looking forward to see Blender file and basic Poser File as Demo contents as Bento skeleton like very first Simplebot.

I tried to convert them with some tools but not worked yet...

Thank you very much for considering it and pardon me my English, thank you!

 

May

 

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Vir, your proposed solution would fix my problem in an ideal way, but if we were to implement only one of these solution, Teager's - Hi Teager!- may be more flexible for everyone in the long run. 

Still, I think your proposal would solve most of the issues that content creators may have with bento bones scaling in unwanted ways, and it would be simpler than including many bento bone shapes with your creation.  Can anyone come up with a scenario in which it wouldn't work well?  It also seems to me that if we took Vir's idea of a checkbox for scale overrides, then added Teager's of bento bone scaling (on top of avatar scaling?), we'd end up with something that's easy for the end user, and maximally flexible for the creator. 

I have some other thoughts about implementation, but I think I'll save them for later in the discussion. 

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I'd like to report what I think is a bug.  I tried making some rudimentary wings.  I uploaded them with both the "Include skin weight" and "Include joint positions" boxes checked.  I wore a female shape.  I saw this at place the wings joined my body:  

I switched to a male shape.  I now see this: 



Note how my shoulders are detached from my body?  I thought that maybe this was just a difference between joint positions on the male and female shapes, so I decided to move the wing bones away from my body and see what happened. 

Female:
  

Male: 



Notice how the wings are about twice as far from my body on the male shape as they are on the female shape?  I don't believe this is intended behavior.  It will interfere with any non-sex specific attachments that change the position of the wing bones. 

For additional reference, here's a screenshot of the blender file. 



I'm copying this into a bug report, so it'll be registered there as well. 

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Before the final Bento skeleton is released, could you please correct the issue where the breast collision bones swing to the side at sizes smaller than 50? It still occurs with the current Bento project viewer:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-6069

This makes breast sizes much below 50 basically unusable with fitted mesh avatars and correcting it shouldn't break content because fitted mesh avatars and clothing are rigged to the bones so they'd pick up the change automatically.

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Before the final Bento skeleton is released, could you please correct the issue where the breast collision bones swing to the side at sizes smaller than 50? It still occurs with the current Bento project viewer:

This makes breast sizes much below 50 basically unusable with fitted mesh avatars and correcting it shouldn't break content because fitted mesh avatars and clothing are rigged to the bones so they'd pick up the change automatically.

Take note that the jira is closed. Can you give us screen shots of this behavior, as I've not seen it.

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Medhue Simoni wrote:


Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Before the final Bento skeleton is released, could you please correct the issue where the breast collision bones swing to the side at sizes smaller than 50? It still occurs with the current Bento project viewer:

This makes breast sizes much below 50 basically unusable with fitted mesh avatars and correcting it shouldn't break content because fitted mesh avatars and clothing are rigged to the bones so they'd pick up the change automatically.

Take note that the jira is closed. Can you give us screen shots of this behavior, as I've not seen it.

It was closed as a duplicate and I can't access JIRA it duplicated. It's difficult to see as a static image but it's clear when you're adjusting the breast sliders of any fitted mesh female avatar - when the slider goes below 50 both collision bones shift to the right instead of shifting symmetrically. It doesn't match the behavior of the sliders for the default avatar mesh.

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So I uploaded my head mesh to Agni to test it out. Normally it looks fine, I even uploaded an animation and tested it and it worked! But when I click to edit mesh the wireframe looks all weird where the vertices are weighted to the new bones, like in the picture here. Don't know if this is a bug or just because not everything is all on Agni yet? It does not happen on Aditi. I uploaded the exact same mesh, with include skin weights checked(all lod's were left alone in the uploader dialog).

Oh, and the wireframe only shows like that when it's attached to the avatar. If I just rezz the mesh to the ground it looks fine.

Using Viewer: Second Life 5.0.0.315657 (Second Life Project Bento)



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Sincerely Bento project for avatars human mesh, not only useless, but also harmful. As you say the vast majority of the avatars are human.

A) FACE
Linden has entered the slide to the deformation of the face, and instead each animation of the face depends on the morphology of the face = is not appropriate any changes to the face by the costumers, even minimal, otherwise it will create the animation of the face of the "MONSTERS" . Also two IDENTICAL faces, but with a different construction of the mesh (vertices and edge positioned differently in space) will not move in the same way. Furthermore, since the assignment of the totally arbitrary weights, the same head mesh with assignment of different weights will move otherwise.
it follows:
1) who does Animations, will not make animations for mesh faces if not for a specific face and not the other.
2) users that would be deluding themselves to reproduce your face avatar of SL will be disappointed
3) no sane creator of mind you can afford the luxury of bringing discredit on a head mesh market that will not satisfy any of its customers expectations, but, rather, let them down with faciali animations that do not work, just move a slide.
This and much more (I can not make a treaty).

B) ELBOW
They inserted tails, wings, legs .... but the elbows and knees of human avatars that implode when they bend, we want to do something? some miserable little bone for this problem you could use it.

C) HANDS
Not being tied to a backward compatibility for the animation of the hands is absurd not to have created a correct rig and a standard mesh of the hand on which those who make animations, could be based to create animations. The position of the hand of the avatar of the base has fingers very Lg between them and not existing the metacarpal bones, when you go to rotate the fingers to push them up against each other remains a space between them. "No problem, you edit the skeleton", true, the fact remains that each one will have his skeleton and there is no universality to get decent animations.

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There's another JIRA related to it here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/FITMESH-4 but it was resolved a few years ago.

 

I will say that I never noticed the issue had been fixed and testing with the Bento viewer, it appears that if it WAS fixed, it has since regressed. 



This was just taken with the current Bento release and as far as I know, the behaviour can also be reproduced on the current official release.

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How is a completely optional addition to the system armature 'harmful'? No existing content will be broken. 

To attempt to address your points further (sorry if I misconstrue what you're trying to say - there appears to be some sort of language barrier here):

A: Content creators can and will produce new mesh heads. Yes, custom animations may be necessary and yes, it's possible they will not transfer from head to head even within a single brand. But that doesn't mean it isn't possible to create that content. 

B: It is my guess that implementing additional bones within the existing armature would be less feasible, particularly when it comes to preserving existing content. Wings, Hind bones, Tail, additional face bones - all of these are less of a problem because they are additions which don't interfere with the existing bone chains.

C: This was covered in a previous user group meeting. The suggestion is to make use of bone offsets.

As an aside, relating to points A & C, not all Bento applications are going to require joint offset *animations* and it's entirely possible to play animations which only include rotational data and have them affect your joint-offset mesh. 

As far as restricting the skeleton to any one universal proportion, we already have that (the system avatar) and we already have no standard when it comes to 'decent' animations because SL doesn't offer inverse kinematics for anything other than the lower limbs and we instead must depend upon rotations and guesses at sizing to do what we can. You can't lay that at the feet of Bento; if anything, Bento gives us some real options when it comes to more efficient limb replacement products... among many many other things. I would rather deal with learning how to make these things work than not have any options at all.

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Forgive me if this has already been posted (it's a 69 page thread!) but I have been experimenting today, and it appears that if I change the position of any of the bones in the face, and upload with joint positions checked, some of the facial sliders stop working altogether. I moved the eyelid bones to make a better arc for a blink animation. Some sliders still work (nose sliders) some stop responding (eye sliders, chin sliders). The same mesh uploaded without joint positions moves with the sliders properly.

 

 

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  • Lindens

Thanks for pointing that one out! It looks like an issue that's been there a while (not specific to Bento), but this would be a good time to fix it since we're working on those parts of the system anyway.

We have a fix for this, should be in the next project viewer update.

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  • Lindens

Hi Siddean,

Right, there is a potential for joint offsets to affect the behavior of sliders. Generally the order of precedence for joint operations is:

  • Initial bone locations
  • Effects from sliders
  • Effects from joint position offsets (defined in mesh attachments)
  • Animations

Where later things in the list will override earlier things. If you define a joint position for a bone in an attached mesh, then that will override any effects on position from the sliders. Note that you can define joint positions for some bones but not others - even if you check "joint positions" on import, any bones that are still in the default position (as defined by the skeleton) will not have a joint position applied for them and will still respond to sliders.

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I've noticed it happening even if I don't move any of the bones and upload with joint positions checked. And it's affecting sliders for bones that weren't changed ie: if I change the eyelid bones, I can't change several of the chin sliders. I just need to know if this is expected behaviour before I proceed :)

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  • Lindens

Hi folks,

As noted in the user group page (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bento_User_Group), there is no user group meeting today. Wanted to give you a brief summary of where we are on Bento development.

There should be a Bento project viewer update coming in the next few days. Changes to look for in this update are:

  • Fix for a case where some meshes, when rendered with hardware skinning on some machines, would display a spike shooting across the region.
  • Fix for a longstanding issue where some sliders caused the right breast volume to move in the wrong direction.
  • Fix for the avatar height glitch on blink (this could manifest under other circumstances too). Generally we're trying to be smarter about when to update the avatar body size. Note that animating any of the joint positions used for height calculations can still trigger updates to body size, but you should see fewer such changes with this fix.
  • Fix for wing positioning issues when avatar shape switches from female to male.

Some topics from last week's meeting:

  • Raising the animation size limit. This is definitely happening at some point, but schedule is still to be determined; has some dependencies on other projects.
  • Discussion of making it easier for mesh hands to be animated consistently with system avatar (morph based) animations. Nothing new on this one so far.
  • Teager reported some issues with feet positioning and intermittent animation issues with her horse model. I've done a bit of testing with a copy of the model but am having a hard time seeing the same issues. It would help to have more specifics on exactly what to watch for (for example, when should we expect that a particular animation is playing). 
  • Aki - wyvern jumping up and down when it blinks. This should be fixed in the next project viewer update.
  • llSetAnimationOverride() - can it be applied to expressions? Needs more investigation, may be beyond the scope of the initial Bento release.
  • Report of some kind of issue with materials editing. I doubt this is specific to Bento, but we would need a bug report with specific steps to reproduce the problem.
  • Nalates, you mentioned an issue with clipping and sent a couple of snapshots. Unfortunately they're low res enough that I'm having a hard time seeing the issue. May be a known issue with bounding box calculations.

Sorry if I missed anyone, and feel free to raise other questions in this thread. Otherwise, will see you next week.

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  • Lindens

No, that's not expected. My suspicion is that the model you're starting with may already have some position changes for the bones, so you're getting offsets applied even where you didn't make any intentional changes.

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  • Lindens

Another area where we've had some discussion recently is the desire to override slider behavior. Depending on what kind of avatar or accessory you are making, the sliders based on mostly-human shapes with bones in the default locations may or may not make sense. We can partially override sliders by using joint positions - any bone that has a position defined by an attached mesh will not have its position altered by sliders. However, this is only a partial solution, because sliders can also affect joint scales, and there is currently no way to prevent those effects. So a proposed solution is to allow a mesh to include "joint scales" along with "joint positions" - whenever a scale was defined, it would override the scale effects from sliders. This would make it easier to model avatars that are not shaped enough like a default human for the human-oriented sliders to work well, and would also make it easier to repurpose some bones for other things.

We've done some proof-of-concept testing to show that it is feasible to do scale overrides in the viewer. The main open question is how these would be implemented in the imported collada files. There would need to be a way for tools like Blender and Maya to add the appropriate scale information when the model is being created, as well as support for this mechanism in any add-ons based on those tools. We'll continue looking into this, and in the meantime please let us know if you have any ideas on the best way to add this sort of support to collada files.

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  • Lindens

Aki, I'm not sure if it's currently documented anywhere. Hopefully we can add it at some point. The list (source code in LLAvatarAppearance::computeBodySize()) is:

  • mSkull
  • mHead
  • mNeck
  • mChest
  • mTorso
  • mHipLeft
  • mKneeLeft
  • mAnkleLeft
  • mFootLeft

Changes to position or scale can affect the calculation, although it doesn't get recomputed extremely often - mostly changes to attachments or appearance updates (triggered by outfit/slider changes) would trigger an update. I don't think that just animating those joints is going to cause a lot of problems in normal practice, but it is something to be aware of.

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Vir Linden wrote:

  • Nalates, you mentioned an issue with clipping and sent a couple of snapshots. Unfortunately they're low res enough that I'm having a hard time seeing the issue. May be a known issue with bounding box calculations.

 

I believe Nalates was seeing this bug: BUG-10991 - [bento] Mesh rigged to the new joints either partly disappears, collapses or melts when viewing that avatar as an imposter

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Rumegusc Altamura wrote:

Sincerely Bento project for avatars human mesh, not only useless, but also harmful. As you say the vast majority of the avatars are human.

A) FACE

Linden has entered the slide to the deformation of the face, and instead each animation of the face depends on the morphology of the face = is not appropriate any changes to the face by the costumers, even minimal, otherwise it will create the animation of the face of the "MONSTERS" . Also two IDENTICAL faces, but with a different construction of the mesh (vertices and edge positioned differently in space) will not move in the same way. Furthermore, since the assignment of the totally arbitrary weights, the same head mesh with assignment of different weights will move otherwise.

it follows:

1) who does Animations, will not make animations for mesh faces if not for a specific face and not the other.

2) users that would be deluding themselves to reproduce your face avatar of SL will be disappointed

3) no sane creator of mind you can afford the luxury of bringing discredit on a head mesh market that will not satisfy any of its customers expectations, but, rather, let them down with faciali animations that do not work, just move a slide.

This and much more (I can not make a treaty).

B) ELBOW

They inserted tails, wings, legs .... but the elbows and knees of human avatars that implode when they bend, we want to do something? some miserable little bone for this problem you could use it.

C) HANDS

Not being tied to a backward compatibility for the animation of the hands is absurd not to have created a correct rig and a standard mesh of the hand on which those who make animations, could be based to create animations. The position of the hand of the avatar of the base has fingers very Lg between them and not existing the metacarpal bones, when you go to rotate the fingers to push them up against each other remains a space between them. "No problem, you edit the skeleton", true, the fact remains that each one will have his skeleton and there is no universality to get decent animations.

Hi Rumegusc,

I will try and answer your questions as best I can it was hard for me to follow what you had written.  Could be because I just woke up.

A) FACE

Any custom mesh head created that has vertices and edges in different places other than LL's default avatar will have to have custom weights just like all custom mesh clothes do now.  No one is forcing custom head makers to use the new face bones.  If they do not want to use the bones they do not have to

 

1) If someone wants to make facial expressions for multiple mesh heads using the bones they need to animate the bones with rotation only.  Those who want to make custom mesh heads to work with these types of animations need to leave the face bones in their default positions and do a good job weighting their head's face.  Mesh head creators who make their own animations for their own heads will be able to take advantage of custom bone positions and animations using translations and rotations.

 

2) Yes it has to be made clear to the customer that a custom mesh head even though it is rigged to the new face bones will not behave exactly like the LL default avatar does when you change the Appearance Editor slider settings just like Fitted Mesh or custom mesh bodies now do not.

 

3)Again no one if being forced to make mesh heads that use the new facial bones.  Making facial expressions using just rotations should work pretty well no matter what Appearance Sliders settings.  Will some facial expressions work better with some Appearance Slider settings than others? Yes.  Making mesh heads using all the new face bones will be harder than making a mesh head just rigged to the mNeck and mHead bones but to those creators who do and can do it well the rewards will be great.

 

B) ELBOW

There was limit to how many bones could be added.  Yes an extra bone at the elbow, knee, and hip could make it easier to avoid deformations.  If you really want extra bones in these locations you can.  You just have to make your own animations using translations but this means you have to make all your own animations.  One for walking, running, flying, sitting and so forth.  If you are making a custom avatar body you can minimize such deformations without resorting to this by doing very good weighting.

C) HANDS

LL could not rig the default avatar hands to the new finger bones.  I asked them to at a Bento meeting and found out that the default avatar mesh uses different code to attach the default avatar mesh to the skeleton than mesh uploaded using DAE files do.  The default avatar mesh can only be rigged to a maximum of 15 bones.  This meant the default avatar could not be rigged to the new hand bones or face bones.  (Note: The default avatar is made up of 3 separate meshes head, upper body and lower body / legs. So the default avatar body is rigged to almost all of the original bones of the avatar skeleton.)

As for more bones for the hands, again there was a limit to the number of bones that could be added to the skeleton. Those of us who were in the Bento group really pushed for at least 3 joints per finger.  Yes perhaps more bones than 3 per finger would make for better deformations but again there was a bone limit.  Again hand animations that just use rotations of the bones will work well over a large variation of custom hand mesh.

I am sorry if I misunderstood what you wrote and answered your questions wrong.  I think I understand your concerns.  Yes with more bones things could be better but there was a limit to how many could be added.  Yes more bones means any mesh rigged to them making universal animations will be much more difficult though making animations with just rotations will work well for a large variety of them.

Remember if you don't want to use the new bones you don't have to.  If you are a mesh head or body maker you can still make them in the same exact way you made them before the new bones were added.  Nothing has been taken away.  Those content creators who do use the new bones and do it well will most likely do very well in the marketplace.

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