Project Bento Feedback Thread

[Gaia Clary]

These are the available foot bones:



The feet bones have always been available and could be animated.
I have heard rumours that there is a speciality with the Toe bones,
maybe related to the appearance sliders and how the default Avatar's
heel height is defined. You may find out by testing a bit :matte-motes-evil-grin:

If those bones are not enough for your purpose then you always can reuse
other bones from the bento skeleton. But then you might need to put more
effort into the animation to compensate the bone hierarchy.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Henri Beauchamp wrote:

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Whirly Fizzle wrote:

Hmm there isn't a JIRA issue for that, unless it's a case of

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-37634

That bug is supposed to be fixed though.

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That bug seems to affect other bones than just the face bones, which is not the case here... Probably a different bug, entirely.

Oh, and resetting the skeletton doesn't fix the issue either (it's an animation issue, and no, reloading the animations for the affected avatar is not either a work around for it).

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How is it animated? What bones are they using? Did they use supported ways to do this? No offense to the creator, but if they just used some unsupported way to animate with, I'm not so sure LL should be fixing it. This is the risk a creator takes by using unsupported ways. This is exactly why I never ventured into the unsupported ways. Totally sucks for people who bought it, but the creator will likely want to redo the avatar rig anyways. The avatar will end up being many times better.

[kichaza]

I managed to edit the BVH exporter script for maya so that it only exports the rotation of the bones.

This is useful for making animations that work with any avatar, regardless of what bone positions the avatar uses. The current BVH exporter script exports the position of animated bones too, which leads to avatars that do not use the specific skeleton setup that was used during the animation breaking.

Maya BVH exporter script Rotation Only

It would be cool if it could be added to the wiki, since I imagine that animations intended to be used by all avatars (animating the fingers for example) made in the future with the existing BVH script could lead to avatars using custom bone positions not being able to use them, even though they should be.

The script still allows translation of the root bone (hip / mPelvis).

 

[Tornleaf]

I'm pretty curious about the bones used too. My old avatars use volume and attachment point bones and I haven't seen anything like in that pic, after the fix.

 

Grab this and play some of the rotation animations included to see which bones they're using: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Avatar-Testing-and-Visualization-Kit/9842033

[Henri Beauchamp]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

 

How is it animated? What bones are they using? Did they use supported ways to do this? No offense to the creator, but if they just used some unsupported way to animate with, I'm not so sure LL should be fixing it. This is the risk a creator takes by using unsupported ways. This is exactly why I never ventured into the unsupported ways. Totally sucks for people who bought it, but the creator will likely want to redo the avatar rig anyways. The avatar will end up being many times better.

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No idea how it is animated (you'll have to ask the creator). And don't count on me to enter an argument about what is "good practice" and "bad practice" when it comes to mesh creation (my knowledge in this field is close to zero).

However, as a programmer (and an old, experienced one, at that), I always strieved to provide compatibility between existing "contents"/assets/data/whatever used by one of my programs and newer versions of that program, and so LL (mostly) did so far.

Also, the creators have been using so far what the programs allowed them to do, and both the SL viewers and servers have been pretty lax, from the very start, with the meshes format/constraints, with very few (if at all) guidelines as to what was "legal" or not; so you can't blame now the said creators to have used all the possibilities that were offered to them...

At the minimum, LL's should investigate that issue and check whether it would break a lot of contents or not.

[Gaia Clary]

There have been a few changes in the Bento Skeleton over the past few months. If the broken character happens to be based on an outdated Skeleton definition, then this most probably explains the deformations.

Also: if a mesh is weighted to a bone that has a joint offset defined, then the exported skeleton must also contain all parent bones in the bone chain which have joint positions defined. This must be done regardless whether the affected bones are used in the mesh or not.

[Cathy Foil]

Yes if you only want to do rotation animations on your bones except for the Hip / mPelvis bone you can use an older version of Samantha Patterson's exporter.  The one you want is 1.5

http://circle.twu.net/progs/

1.6 is the same as the exporter on the Bento Testing page.

Since both exporters use the same names for many of the global procedures once you open 1.5 or 1.6 you have to close Maya completely and restart Maya to open the other.  See if you had 1.6 open in Maya and then you wanted to use 1.5 to do rotation only animations, even if you close 1.6 first and then open 1.5, 1.6 global procedures would still be loaded and active in Maya.  This means when you open 1.5 and then exported your BVH it would basically export out as a 1.6 BVH and not a 1.5.  So if you had 1.6 open you would have to close Maya completely and restart it and then open 1.5 so 1.5 global procedures are loaded.  Hope that makes sense.

It has been a while since I made any animations with 1.6.  If I remember right as long as you just rotate a bone it should only export rotation and not translation for it or any of its children.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

PS if you have MayaStar the exporter that comes with MayaStar is 1.5.  I will be adding 1.6 to MayaStar and will have to do some testing to make sure you can do rotation animations only with 1.6.  If it won't I will probably have both 1.5 and 1.6 in the next MayaStar update which will be coming out soon hopefully.

[Henri Beauchamp]

 

Gaia Clary wrote:

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There have been a few changes in the Bento Skeleton over the past few months. If the broken character happens to be based on an outdated Skeleton definition, then this most probably explains the deformations.

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That mesh is not based on a Bento skeleton, but on the SL avatar v1.0 one, so the changes in question are unrelated, as long as the Bento skeleton is kept compatible with the avatar v1.0 skeleton...

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Also: if a mesh is weighted to a bone that has a joint offset defined, then the exported skeleton must also contain all parent bones in the bone chain which have joint positions defined. This must be done regardless whether the affected bones are used in the mesh or not.

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This is all Chinese to me ! :smileylol:

 

[Teager]

It's likely that this avatar rigged its face to either attachment bones, volume bones, or both, since I know this is a technique Dreamcrawler has used for other avatars. I've seen plenty of avatars with both attachment rigging and volume rigging that all seem to be fixed after the bug fix implemented for the jira Whirly linked on the previous page. If your bento viewer is ~2 months outdated, you would be seeing deforms like the ones you linked. The other option could be the deform animation in the avatar simply failing to play, perhaps for being on a sim with scripts disabled, or some similar problem.

[Whirly Fizzle]

I think this is a "new" bug - or rather a bug that hasn't been reported on JIRA yet.

That avatar doesn't behave like those from https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-37634 did & as far as I can tell, that bug is fixed on all the repro avies I have for it.

As soon as that repro avatar is worn it looks deformed to everyone on a Bento viewer, even without playing any of the animations.

Reset skeleton doesn't fix it. Nothing seems to fix it.

The avatar looks fine on non-Bento viewers.

I'm going to file a JIRA issue shortly.

[Whirly Fizzle]

Ok JIRA issue filed for the broken werewolf avatar.

BUG-40672 - [bENTO] Werewolf avatar is deformed on Bento viewers only

[Gaia Clary]

non weighted bones are

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Henri Beauchamp wrote:

Gaia Clary wrote:

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Also: if a mesh is weighted to a bone that has a joint offset defined, then the exported skeleton must also contain all parent bones in the bone chain which have joint positions defined. This must be done regardless whether the affected bones are used in the mesh or not.

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This is all Chinese to me ! :smileylol:

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Here is a small article about Joint Offsets that is mean to be a translation from chinese to something more understandable. But as already stated elsewhere this article does not directly apply to your current issue. Feel free to visit that page, or just ignore it

http://avastar.online/fragment/joint-positions/

[daFlesh]

hey Gaia  thanks for your reply , well yes I am already aware of that bones. 

though the problem w with that toe bones was; it  was pretty limited to get a high heel pose as desired

but as I know bento skeleton's bones have the ability that can be moved , I mean translations 

I think with this option, it will be possible to get desired results in feet pose.

 

 

[Medhue Simoni]

I'm perplexed by the images. What would cause 1 eye to be out of place? Then 1 ear stretched up? Really, I'm stumped.

[Henri Beauchamp]

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Teager wrote:

It's likely that this avatar rigged its face to either attachment bones, volume bones, or both, since I know this is a technique Dreamcrawler has used for other avatars. I've seen plenty of avatars with both attachment rigging and volume rigging that all seem to be fixed after the bug fix implemented for the jira Whirly linked on the previous page. If your bento viewer is ~2 months outdated, you would be seeing deforms like the ones you linked. The other option could be the deform animation in the avatar simply failing to play, perhaps for being on a sim with scripts disabled, or some similar problem.

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I'm following closely (checking the git daily) all the changes to LL's bento-box RC viewer, and none of the changes that went into it fixed that issue. Plus, I also tested the latest RC bento viewer binary (v5.0.0.320160) and got the exact same results with it.

As for the anim failing to play, no, it's not the issue at hand either (I've seen this in different sims, and none had the scripts disabled).

[Henri Beauchamp]

 

Gaia Clary wrote:

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Since Bento it is possible to only import partial skeletons. Especially you can decide to only export the weighted bones of your character (because unweighted bones are not used for deforming your mesh). So, when you import this horse with the Bento Viewer, then the mChest bone is not imported. But...

During importing your character all "missing" bones are taken from the original skeleton. (the SL Importer has no way to find out where the mChest bone has meant to be placed)This is results in a skeleton where no joint position is defined for the mChest:

.../...

I am not sure if i translated chinese to japonese or if i was more succesfull this time.

But i hope it helped a bit.

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Many thanks for your (heroic !) effort, but the case you are exposing is not corresponding to the issue: the mesh in question was uploaded by his creator long ago (before Bento even existed); it is *not* using any of the Bento bones/animation features, and renders just fine in non-Bento viewers. The compatibility problem is with the Bento viewer code itself, obviously.

[Henri Beauchamp]

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Whirly Fizzle wrote:

Ok JIRA issue filed for the broken werewolf avatar.

BUG-40672 - [bENTO] Werewolf avatar is deformed on Bento viewers only

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Glad you could repro the issue.

[Gaia Clary]

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Henri Beauchamp wrote:

 

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Many thanks for your (heroic !) effort, but the case you are exposing is not corresponding to the issue

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Yes, thats right. i mentioned in the first line of my post that this is not an explanation to your issue, but just an attempt to translate chinese to something else. Actually it may be better to move this post somewhere else into our own documentation site

[Bond Harrington]

I'm not sure if this is related, but when I export from Blender to BVH, the axis are all messed up. It took me a hour to get a simple blink animation done, when I realized that BVH is reading X for Y and Y for Z, I believe. I can't swap it over during conversion using the Export BVH - Rotation tool, it seems like I have to reanimate everything by hand before exporting. It was easy enough for a blink, but anything involving more bones because troublesome.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Bond Harrington wrote:

I'm not sure if this is related, but when I export from Blender to BVH, the axis are all messed up. It took me a hour to get a simple blink animation done, when I realized that BVH is reading X for Y and Y for Z, I believe. I can't swap it over during conversion using the Export BVH - Rotation tool, it seems like I have to reanimate everything by hand before exporting. It was easy enough for a blink, but anything involving more bones because troublesome.

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I'm assuming that you are using Blender's regular BVH exports, which is not set up for SL skeletons. Personally, I've never used it for SL. If you use Avastar's BVH exporter, then everything should be fine. My guess is that the inherent Blender BVH export is using World vs Local, or vice versa, which is causing the issue. Of course, that's just my guess.

[Gaia Clary]

Maybe the problem here is the orientation of the character. Is the character looking towards positive X ? And have you applied rotation before exporting the BVH?

@medhue:

As far as i know the Blender BVH exporter should work. There was one hickup for a long time that was related to an incompatibility with the exported root bone name. I think that the Bento viewer has fixed something in this area, so maybe Blender's BVH export now works out of the box? I have not tested it though.

Regarding Avastar: We have added translation exporting to BVH a couple of days ago. This will become available shortly with our next update. For .anim we are already good to go since a while.

[kichaza]

Quick question, did Bento increase the maximum number of bone influences per vertex or is it still locked at 4?

[Medhue Simoni]

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kichaza wrote:

Quick question, did Bento increase the maximum number of bone influences per vertex or is it still locked at 4?

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It's still 4.

[Bond Harrington]

My character is facing positive on the X axis, but the Bento avatar base and skeleton, as I have downloaded it from the Bento page on the SL wiki is set to 90 degrees on the Z axis. Would this be causing the issue?

I haven't tried Avastar yet. I need to buy it at some point, but usually have more pressing concerns since I started a new job. Maybe next paycheck.

[Gaia Clary]

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Bond Harrington wrote:

My character is facing positive on the X axis, but the Bento avatar base and skeleton, as I have downloaded it from the Bento page on the SL wiki is set to 90 degrees on the Z axis.

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Do you have a link to the Collada file that you downloaded? I checked the file:

https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/sl-sample-content/raw/tip/models/collada/female_2016_08_05.dae.zip

The Armature in this file has the correct orientation, so it should work for animations. The mesh objects in that file indeed have rotations of 90 degrees, but this should not matter for your case.

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Bond Harrington wrote:

Would this be causing the issue?

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If your armature has a rotation in Object mode, then yes. You would fix it as follows:

• Select the armature in Object Mode
• in the footer menu of the 3DView: Object -> Apply -> Rotation
• Do your animation
• export to BVH