Project Bento Feedback Thread

[DS Diavolo]

That looks great! I'm not sure if I can follow the steps ... :matte-motes-crying:

Can someone tell me please if the rigs (the .dae files) for download on the bento Wiki page are outdated or not? They are from June 2016 and there have been some changes made since then. Thank you.

[Gaia Clary]

Check here:

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Bento-models/td-p/3093882

And no, i still have no permission to modify the wiki page

[DS Diavolo]

Thank you! (btw.: both angel files are blend files, the .dae file is missing)

[Gaia Clary]

ieek i fixed it. thanks for telling me !!!

[Whirly Fizzle]

Important message to Bento head creators from PrincessAii of + Aii ~ The Ugly and Beautiful +

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/SAVE-THE-EARS-Fox-Ears-aii/10862320

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These ears are important because they are a representation of what we are about to completely miss out on in SL. As of this time Bento heads are coming out quickly and of course they all have rigged ears. While this is great bc we can resize our human ears it disables any chance of us being able to use those bones for countless different kinds of inhuman ears using bento bones which give us far more and better animation options.

I made these ears to show you what will be totally impossible in a future of all bento heads, in hopes that while it is still early in the bento world, bento head creators might start including an extra head in their packs which include no ear rigging. That way we can all use the new bento ear bones to their full potential.

(If you don't understand what I'm talking about, then try on a bento head with these ears and look at your human ears.)

If you are a creator I encourage you to include non-ear rigged versions of your bento heads so that we don't totally kill our only chance for bento ears.

If you are a bento head user then I encourage you to push for non-ear rigged bento heads to be included in future packs!

SAVE THE EARS BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!!

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[Gael Streeter]

Hi Whirly,
this is not directly related to Bento.
Even before if the ears of the Mesh heads were attached to the head with no possibilty to hide them you had problems to put other ears...
With all the different ears available on the market, I think most of the head creators are already aware of that (or they will be rapidly facing all the customers requests).
For example, we, at GA.EG, offer from the start ears separated from our Mesh Heads and Bento Mesh Heads, in rigged and not rigged versions so our customers can do all what they want...

 

[Isandriel]

I hope multiple arms made out of mesh with an AO will be a thing soon. Is there already stuff like that out on the marketplace?

[KokaiNe666]

I learned to use 2 types of animation you want to create one animation and play it with a low priority, but - what is to be animation, TRANS or Rotation? and some bones in it should be involved, ALL?

[Medhue Simoni]

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KokaiNe666 wrote:

I learned to use 2 types of animation you want to create one animation and play it with a low priority, but - what is to be animation, TRANS or Rotation? and some bones in it should be involved, ALL?

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Hi KokaiNe666,

I'm somewhat confused by your questions, but I'll try to answer them generally. It's really up to the creator to decide how they want to do things. There is no right way. That said, in my Bento creations, I have many different animations playing, and controlling different parts of the avatar, all at the same time. Many of these are only animating specific parts, like just the eyelids for blinking. Some animations, like the werewolf roar in the video, need to take over all, or most of the bones to work properly.

[KokaiNe666]

I do a woman's head and want to use sliders and animations with translating for her.
My problem - how to return the skeleton to its original position after playing the animation with TRANS (face). This problem is especially noticeable if the user changes the slider and create your shape. I have read this topic and you say - use a background animation to return the bones back after TRANS animation. But what should be the "background" animation? What's inside?

Here's my blender, I do like to your video - 

[Medhue Simoni]

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KokaiNe666 wrote:

I do a woman's head and want to use sliders and animations with translating for her.

My problem - how to return the skeleton to its original position after playing the animation with TRANS (face). This problem is especially noticeable if the user changes the slider and create your shape. I have read this topic and you say - use a background animation to return the bones back after TRANS animation. But what should be the "background" animation? What's inside?

Here's my blender, I do like to your video -

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What you are trying to do is not really possible. You can use the default positions and have as many sliders work as possible, but you lose the ability to use bone translation and make better expressions. The only way to get the best of both worlds is to make your own slider system, using bone translation to get the same affect as the sliders, and then having your system save the bone locations, and playing those animations that accomplish this as underlying animations.

[KokaiNe666]

hmm .. I thought catwa like that did it ... -

No? 

[Medhue Simoni]

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KokaiNe666 wrote:

hmm .. I thought catwa like that did it ... -

No? 

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Look at the date on the video. Many were still testing things. If she has somehow accomplished this without using the method that I suggested, then kudos to her. Me, I don't see how it could work. As soon as any animation with bone translation is played on the face, except for some bones, it will change the location of the bones, and only detaching and reattaching the body shape, and then probably resetting skeleton could get you back to your original shape.

[KokaiNe666]

I just saw on one of the videos on YouTube as Catwa plays the animation, similar to the trans and the shape to change job and then after 2-3 seconds - bam - and to restore the original shape of the face ... (Well, Well, if you say with authority that I have to use only the rotation and slider together ... But it's sad, because the Trans more quality animation.

[Klytyna]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

If she has somehow accomplished this without using the method that I suggested, then kudos to her. Me, I don't see how it could work. As soon as any animation with bone translation is played on the face, except for some bones, it will change the location of the bones, and only detaching and reattaching the body shape, and then probably resetting skeleton could get you back to your original shape.

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Ok, "totaly zeroed" poses don't really work, but...

After you have played "rotate/translate bones - facial expression number x" pose, then the pose is stopped, you then play a "almost reset rotate/translate bones - face neutral" pose, dont move the bone back to zero degrees rotation zero translation, move it back to 0.001 degrees rot 0.001 m trans.

 

In stead of your head pose selector alternating between unposed and pose, it alternates between expression posed and almost neutral posed.

[KokaiNe666]

Сould you tell us why in this case it's your animation on your video? - 

(I have poor English, so I ask you to answer written form, perhaps on the video you say it, but I can not figure out unfortunately.)

[Medhue Simoni]

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Klytyna wrote:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

If she has somehow accomplished this without using the method that I suggested, then kudos to her. Me, I don't see how it could work. As soon as any animation with bone translation is played on the face, except for some bones, it will change the location of the bones, and only detaching and reattaching the body shape, and then probably resetting skeleton could get you back to your original shape.

---

Ok, "totaly zeroed" poses don't really work, but...

After you have played "rotate/translate bones - facial expression number x" pose, then the pose is stopped, you then play a "almost reset rotate/translate bones - face neutral" pose, dont move the bone back to zero degrees rotation zero translation, move it back to 0.001 degrees rot 0.001 m trans.

 

In stead of your head pose selector alternating between unposed and pose, it alternates between expression posed and almost neutral posed.

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This is not about posing and not having a pose. This is about whether you can play an expression with translation and get the face to go back to body shape that the user wanted. For instance, if the user wants a very wide mouth, using the mouth width slider, and you play an translation animation moving those lip bones, the mouth can't go back to the body shape it had originally, as the slider had used translation to make the mouth wider. Now, if you are saying that somehow, playing as translation animation with 0.001 translation fixes this, which is strange because translation has 3 axis, then I've never heard of it. Rotation is irrelevant.

[Medhue Simoni]

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KokaiNe666 wrote:

Сould you tell us why in this case it's your animation on your video? - 

 

 

(I have poor English, so I ask you to answer written form, perhaps on the video you say it, but I can not figure out unfortunately.)

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You should always have some animation playing in the background for every Bento bone you are using. If you do not, then when you do decide to play an animation with that bone, it will snap into place, instead of blending from the background animation to the currently overriding face animation. It just makes things smoother, and the face is the last place where you want bones snapping into place.

[KokaiNe666]

OK. Thank you. Can I do one looped frame animation fixed bones put there as a background animation?

[Medhue Simoni]

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KokaiNe666 wrote:

OK. Thank you. Can I do one looped frame animation fixed bones put there as a background animation?

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Yes, but I generally try to have some small movements in the background animation.

[Klytyna]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

This is not about posing and not having a pose. This is about whether you can play an expression with translation and get the face to go back to body shape that the user wanted. For instance, if the user wants a very wide mouth, using the mouth width slider, and you play an translation animation moving those lip bones, the mouth can't go back to the body shape it had originally, as the slider had used translation to make the mouth wider. Now, if you are saying that somehow, playing as translation animation with 0.001 translation fixes this, which is strange because translation has 3 axis, then I've never heard of it. Rotation is irrelevant.

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In the original thread, the person you were replying to, was asking aboiut undoing expressions that 'translated bones' he specifically mentioned the tongue, the implication being that having 'deformed' the skeletal rig with a custom expression anumation, the only way to undeform the rig would be a 'reset skeleton and animations' ,  to which the obvious anser is build your own 'undeform animation' into the head scripts to almost undeform the expression deforms.

 

As to your commenty about 3 axis values, forgive me for assuming somebody who's sig-banner proclaims they make and sell animations would understand a simple easy to type suggestion without demanding that I type two 3 axis vectors in full...

 

Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!

[KokaiNe666]

Yes, I meant it. But unfortunately, I have not received a response. Or Simoni says that this is not possible, although it is strange

[DreamCrawler Martin]

Hello bento creators!

I recently started updating one of my avatars (a werewolf) to bento since it got broken with the update (who was supposed not to mess with any previously working avatar. but oh well).

So got it rigged with bento skeleton and the model is working well on SL.Time to build the animations: Right now I am building complete expressions: Smiles, frowns, growls, etc etc. They move the whole face. And here comes the issue/strange bug.

I succesfully made an snarl expression and a few others. Also got the tail animated, hands moving properly etc etc. So the rig is properly done, and the BVH's are exporting as they should.

Then i got into an smile expression. 350 frames. The bug/issue/strange behaviour is:

 

• Eyebrows, ears, eyelids move as they are supposed to.
• Jaw, lips, tongue: Moves MUCH slower as it should. In fact, it does not even finish the 20% of the whole movement by the end of the animation. These are the tests I have done:
• Exporting the whole 0 to 350 frames of the animation: I get the slowest result. Everything moves well except of jaw, tongue and lips.
• Exporting just 0 to 250: that part of the animation goes sightly faster.
• Exporting 0 to 150: The short piece of animation moves faster, most likely as it should.

Is anybody else finding this issue?

[Cathy Foil]

Hi DreamCrawler,
What program are you using to create your animations Blender or Maya?

I am assuming you are making your animations to 30 frames per second.  If you are using Blender you can set the playback speed to a lower setting like 15 frames per second or 7 frames per second in the export options.  Then you can animate your smile instead of using 350 frames use like 35 frames.

See the BVH file is optimized by LL upload process.  The more frames your animation is made with the more likely crucial keyframes will be rounded off or lost all together.  Or should I say the rotation and translation data in those keyframes will be changed in the optimization process.

By using fewer frames in your animation the chances are way less likely that the optimization process will mess up your keyframes because there will be a much bigger change in rotation or translation values from frame to frame.

Think of it this way you have a staircase that goes up 10 feet or 120 inches.  If you use 350 individual steps the change in height from step to step would be 0.34 inches for each step.  The optimization process deletes frames where the change from one frame to the next is below a certain amount.  So if 0.34 inches was below that amount that step or steps would be deleted.  In this case all the steps would be deleted except for the very first step and the very last.

If however your staircase was made with 35 steps then each step would be 3.4 inches tall.  Since now the change per step is greater than the minimum value change no optimization will occur and no steps deleted.

If you are using Maya to animate with you will have to open up your BVH file in a word processor like Notepad and manually change the playback speed.  30 frames per second is Frame Time: 0.033333  = 30 FPS.  Frame Time: 0.066666 = 15 FPS

So you could make your smile instead of using 350 frames with 175 frames and then Blender export it with 15 FPS or with Maya edit the BVH file to Frame Time: 0.066666

I am no animation expert but I been doing some experiments and this is what I been able to gather.

If you are using Blender you could just export out as an .anim file.  These types of files bypass the optimization process.
However just like it is good to be an efficient modeler for mesh animating with as few frames as possible will also help decrease your files size and lag and should load faster for your customers.

Medhue knows much much more about animating than I ever will.  Perhaps he will weigh in on this topic.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

[Medhue Simoni]

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DreamCrawler Martin wrote:

Hello bento creators!

I recently started updating one of my avatars (a werewolf) to bento since it got broken with the update (who was supposed not to mess with any previously working avatar. but oh well).

So got it rigged with bento skeleton and the model is working well on SL.Time to build the animations: Right now I am building complete expressions: Smiles, frowns, growls, etc etc. They move the whole face. And here comes the issue/strange bug.

I succesfully made an snarl expression and a few others. Also got the tail animated, hands moving properly etc etc. So the rig is properly done, and the BVH's are exporting as they should.

Then i got into an smile expression. 350 frames. The bug/issue/strange behaviour is:

 

• Eyebrows, ears, eyelids move as they are supposed to.
• Jaw, lips, tongue: Moves MUCH slower as it should. In fact, it does not even finish the 20% of the whole movement by the end of the animation. These are the tests I have done:
• Exporting the whole 0 to 350 frames of the animation: I get the slowest result. Everything moves well except of jaw, tongue and lips.
• Exporting just 0 to 250: that part of the animation goes sightly faster.
• Exporting 0 to 150: The short piece of animation moves faster, most likely as it should.

Is anybody else finding this issue?

---

Looks to me like Cathy has covered the issue well.

As far as how many frames and FPS you should use, all I can say is how I do it and why. I usually make expressions using about 20-30 frames, at around 10-15 FPS. So, the animation ends up looping after about 2 seconds. I make them 2 seconds long with some slight movement so that they have enough time to blend into each other nicely. I keep them short with a lower FPS so that they are smaller actual files and they will load quicker. A facial expression really doesn't need a high frame rate, as the movement is generally not that fast. A blink can be very quick, but you really only need a half dozen frame or so to see the animation well. Generally speaking, I like to only use a high enough frame rate to see the movment well. IMHO, the only animations in SL that actually need a frame rate of 30 or above are animations like running, dancing, and maybe strike animations for combat. Just my thoughts.