Project Bento Feedback Thread

[Anne Cloud]

Has anyone else tried pairing Bento mesh attachments with Experience Keys yet? 

I am having trouble seeing my alt's Bento attachments (they don't show up) and my alt can't see my Bento attachments if they are Experience Enabled. 

 

ETA: I also notice that having Experience Keys attach the bento mesh to my avatar changes my hover height.

[Krystal Silverweb]

Could this have something to do with the LOD's or physics mesh not showing up as being rigged? Does anyone else have this happen? I just want to make sure I'm not doing something wrong, but again it didn't show up like this on Aditi...

 

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Krystal Silverweb wrote:

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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[Tornleaf]

Nah it happens to me. Though I haven't paid it much mind, the edit highlight has always been kinda' wonky for me, either hard to pin or jumping around.



[Catwa Clip]

Hi,

There is an annoying issue that i dont have any explaination for. the system lashes popping infront of our mesh heads ruining our mesh alpha lashes and alpha makeup. image https://www.flickr.com/photos/53013200@N04/21881263580/in/dateposted-public/

now that i don't rig my current heads to the eyes bones, I tell my costumers to put their eyes depth on zero value so the system lashes hides inside the mesh head and we get rid of those system lashes. Knowing that we are already wearing alpha mask for the system lashes. sometimes they hide completely, and sometime they come back just like the snap shot and u can see them animated and blinking.

Now the Q is, what would be my bento solution for this issue? i will have to rig the eyes perfectly so i can not ask them to put eyes depth to zero anymore. what about the annoying system lashes? are they going to show up suddenly or did you guys already found a solution for this issue?

Thanks <3

[Anne Cloud]

Shouldn't putting an alpha layer on the head remove the appearance of the eyelashes entirely? Since you make full mesh heads, is there a particular reason why you might not be using one?

[Teager]

Vir, after spending more time with it I figured out what caused the issue I brought up last week, with the horse's mane not animating. Opened a Jira here and sent you a folder with relevant files -

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-20004

 

 

I have not been able to repro the issue I saw 2 weeks ago where my tail and face animations, which had just been working fine in world, wouldn't play even when I stopped all animations and tried to play the tail and face animations straight out of inventory. That may have been a one time thing.

 

 

I haven't made a lot of progress on the other issue I brought up last week, with my leg length and torso length changing. I'm guessing it has to do with my animations containing translations, and possibly to do with the location of mHead and mSkull determining avatar height. This isn't something I've encountered in the past when animating four-legged avatars with translations, but I've never had a moving bone separating mHead and mSkull before either.

On a four legged avatar, changes to the length of the sl legs (the horse's back legs) and the torso mean the sl arms (the horse's front legs) are moving up and down from where they should be. These are taken while I'm wearing the same shape and haven't added or removed mesh.



 

 

[Etheria Parrott]

I wonder if that's what went wrong with my koala bear head which will be part of an avatar. Here are pictures from a new model and bento skeleton.



Here it is in blender showing the face bones scaled and locations moved. This now makes it possible to reach the bones for animation while also fitting a head that needs to be a fair bit bigger than a human



.

 

[Gaia Clary]

I suspect there is something wrong with the mapping of the armature scale to the exported joint positions. Try the "apply armature scale" option from the advanced export options before you export. If that does not help try Blender's

Object -> Apply -> Scale

BTW: when we are silent this is more likely an indication of heavy activities in the backyard rather than leisure time on the terrace

[Etheria Parrott]

I knew you were busy. I've applied scale and use translations both in the export of the model and the skeleton but I had forgotten this for the animation I made so your reply helped a lot. There is some improvement when playing the animation but the eyes are on huge long stalks and the head is squashed in. I'll experiment some more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Gaia Clary]

Yes, indeed there is something odd happening with the eyes. You could try to rig to the mFaceEyeAlt bones instead of the mEye bones. This could possibly help. However we need to look at what happens to the mEye bones in more detail, thanks for checkiong this :smileyhappy:

oh.. Does the same issue also happen with older versions of the tool ? Version 2.0-9 of the tool has no joint position editor. I know the joint editor has a few bugs in 2.0-11 but that should not result in issues as you see.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Etheria Parrott wrote:

I knew you were busy.

I've applied scale and use translations both in the export of the model and the skeleton but I had forgotten this for the animation I made so your reply helped a lot. There is some improvement when playing the animation but the eyes are on huge long stalks and the head is squashed in. I'll experiment some more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I've seen this exact same thing, and the reason for it was that the eyes never had an animation setting the eyes in place. Luckily, my run animation contains eye animation, and running would put the eyes where they should be.

All that said, I would think the default positions we set up our meshes in, should set the eyes. I also have this happen with facial bones, as I don't have any facial animation in my stand animations. It would be nice if just our default bone positions would set everything for us.

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

I am still having issues with the hover height flickering when using alpha based blinking. I am using the Second Life 5.0.0.316366 Second Life Project Bento viewer. I tried weighing the mesh to another bone besides mHead. I tried using the mSkull, mFaceRoot, and mFaceEyeLidUpperRight bones. I still got the flickering. The eyelid mesh is a separate mesh linked other pieces of the head and the blink script works by alternating which faces are transparent and which face is not. 

The blinking still works if the mesh is attached separately from the head and does not use joint positions. For my own personal avatar, I do not mind using the extra attachment point. However, it looks like I am stuck redesigning the eyelid for the verison I might sell. Again, I had tried using rotating attachment points a while back and could not get decent results. I do not know if using translations will produce any better results.

[Catwa Clip]

Yes i already wrote that we use alpha mask for full head including lashes. they just show up sometimes and dissapear sometimes without any reason.

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

I am having an additional issue with some distortion in the jaw of my dragon head when worn. It appears that the base of the jaw is distorted and does not align with the upper mouth. However, the distal part of the jaw looks okay. I can't seem to tell what is causing the issue, a bug with Avastar or Second Life or just a mistake on my part.



I tried detaching all other attachments and resetting the skeleton. I even tried relogged after detaching all attachments before wearing the mesh again. In Blender, I looked at the mesh both in pose and rest mode to see if I could see the distortion there, but I did not. I also checked my weights to see if I made any mistakes. There were none. I even imported the shape from Avastar into Second Life via Firestorm to make sure my shape inworld was extact. The distortion still persisted when I relogged in the Bento viewer.

I am using Avastar 2.0.10. The jaw area is rigged to mFaceJaw. I have edited the positon of mFaceJaw. There are also no sliders attached. Under the import options, I have selected "Include mPelvis" in the import options. I am uploading the mesh to Second Life with Joint Positions.

[Etheria Parrott]

That's done the trick Medhue. I've never needed to do this in the past, pre-bento for my critters but I'm very happy to know the workaround. Thank you for the tip.

[Anne Cloud]

I use a full body alpha for pretty much every avatar I make and never run in to this problem, nor have any of my customers. I've also never seen the behaviour you describe with any other avatars, so I have to wonder whether there is some other factor involving your product or your viewing experience? 

I think at the heart of it, you probably need to figure out why it does this for your products in the first place. Aside from some baking issues I noticed popping up recently with the Bento viewer from last week, nothing comes to mind that would cause your problem. You shouldn't have to work around that issue. 

[Gaia Clary]

It is possible that the joint offset for the Jaw bone or its child bones is not exported correctly. Have you tried with an earlier version of Avastar ?

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

I tried Avastar 2.0.9 and it appears that the distortion does not occur. It's a little bit of a bummer that the joint positions are buggy in 2.0.10 because that verison allows for partial joint positions. Hopefully, that will be fixed eventually, as I might need them in the future. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Tornleaf]

Not sure if this is any help, but my mesh imported with joint positions was super distorted when I deleted (what I thought was) all unnecessary vGroups, or at least groups that weren't being used, like the finger joints, hindlegs, spine, etc. With some trial and error I was able to fix all distortions by making sure at least most (?) vGroups were included in the joint position mesh, even if they weren't being used, though I removed the finger vGroups because of the upload vGroup limit.

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

Since I had deleted all unweighed vertex groups, I tried adding those groups back with the exception of the finger vertex groups. Unfortanately, I still got the same distortion in the head mesh. It's actually quite a subtle distortion, rather than a major one.

[Siddean Munro]

Hello again (Vir et al). Given that changing the bone positions makes the appearance sliders non-functional, I am trying to work with the default bone positions. However I am running up against an issue that I think needs to be addressed.

I am requesting that the pivot point of the bone mFaceJaw be moved please. The bone as it is is in the wrong place for correct jaw movement on a human head. The lower mandible on the human skull pivots much higher than where this bone pivots.

Example:





[edit] Re my previous posts, I have just attached this head to a completely new, fresh avastar skeleton, made fresh in Blender 2.77a, uploaded it with joint positions selected, and the jaw and eyes are not responding to the sliders - I have not moved any of the bones, only uploaded with joint positions checked. This may be an avastar problem, it's like those bones don't match what is in SL.

[Gaia Clary]

[EDIT] I am very sorry for the bad layout here. I will move this text to our own documentation site this afternoon.

About the anatomical wrong location of the jaw pivot point:

I am impressed that it took 6 months before it got detected.
But i like that request for change. However... in theory you could "fix"
this by using bone translation in your mouth animation with all its
downsides :matte-motes-dont-cry:

About the joint position issue:

Indeed there is an issue with the Jaw Bone in Avastar.
For some reason this bone's location gets calculated in the wrong way.
This also could be the reason for Medhue's issues with the lower lips.
I believe that the problem started with Avastar-2.0-10 where we added
initial support for partial joint positions (the joint positions editor).

I hope this can be solved soon :matte-motes-dont-cry:

In the meantime maybe you can check in the Joint position editor
if there are any joints listed. If it is an Avastar issue, then i expect
that you see list entries for the Jaw and the eyes there:

 

• Ensure your Rig is in Edit mode
• In the Avastar Rigging panel ensure that the Config
  Subsection is displayed (see top of the image)
• Check if there are entries in the list of
  modified joints (bottom of image)

If this is so, then you have 2 options:

Export without joint offsets

Note: This option is just for testing. You should not use it "in general":

 

• Open the Advanced section of the Avastar Collada exporter
• In the Bone Filters subsection disable "Export with joints"



Now import your mesh and see if the jaw and eyes move correctly again.

Delete the entries in the joint position editor

Note: This is the more recommended way to fix this issue.
However we are working on it so that Avastar does not
precalculate joint offsets where there should be none of them.

 

• Ensure your Rig is in Edit mode
• In the Avastar Rigging panel ensure that the Config Subsection
  is displayed (see top of the image)
• Enable the "All" option
• then "Remove Joint Edits".



Now export as always and see if the imported mesh behaves as expected.

[Gael Streeter]

I made an animation using Bento bones translations and I am very surprised to see that when I stop the animation, the bones stay at the last place given by the animation and do not come back to where they were before the animation was played...

Why is it so ? Did I miss something ? So how do we reset these bones positions ?

I tried the Reset Skeleton feature. It works well. But this resets ALL the bones and not only those I would like.

This can not be used when wearing several objects moving different Bento bones and want to reset only a part.

So how to reset just a part of the skeleton ?

[Gael Streeter]

Regarding the anatomical wrong location of the jaw pivot point, I am not sure something should/can be changed because in fact this bone moves a lot according to the shape...

Here is for example the position of the JawFace with the shape I made :

"



 

Regarding the the joint position issue, where is the "Joint position editor" ? I use Avastar 2.0.10 and do not see these features....

 

[Gael Streeter]

I do not understand why the mFaceTeethLower is not parented to the mFaceJaw but to the mFaceRoot.

Is there is a reason for this ? Because in a "normal" skeleton the lower teeth move with the jaw and are not independent...

This is very problematic because as the mFaceTeethLower has not the same position/rotation/size as the mFaceRoot by default, it can not rotate in absolute correspondence with the mFaceRoot without any translation.

To sum up : Because the mFaceTeethLower is not parented to the mFaceJaw, it is not possible today to use rotations only to move these two bones together (as a normal jaw do) !

Request : Could you please parent the mFaceTeethLower to the mFaceJaw in the avatar skeleton ?