Is there anything special about Bento shapes?

[Myra Wildmist]

I've noticed some vendors are selling shapes as bento shapes. Is there anything special about them that distinguishes them from other shapes?

 

I'm curious because I made my own shape and I'm wondering if there's something I should do to update it.

 

Thank you

[Ariel Vuissent]

When I look at the bento shapes on the marketplace, it looks like most of them are designed to work with Catwa's bento-compatible mesh head. My guess, then, is that the only thing special about these shapes is that they're designed with what the designer thinks looks attractive with that head - just like if you buy a "Maitreya shape," there's nothing different about it except that the creator designed it to work well with the Maitreya mesh body. If you don't wear the mesh body, it might not look as good as it does with the body. If you don't wear a Catwa mesh head with those shapes, you might not like the shape of the face without it. 

If you buy a Catwa bento-compatible head, you may have to adjust your shape to look attractive with it. Otherwise, I think you're fine.

[Medhue Simoni]

Basically, every Bento Head, body, or avatar is designed by individual creators, which all do things, or weight their meshes in different ways. Initially, every Bento product is created to specifically fit the DEFAULT SL body shape. Customizing these heads/avatars with the body shape takes some care to use the right adjustments within the body shape sliders to get nice results. The people selling these body shapes obvious think they have the right combinations of sliders to create an attractive head/avatar.

What is BENTO? Well, Bento is a brand new skeleton developed by LL, with the help of many of us avatar creators. This new skeleton is revolutionary, as it allows mesh head/avatar creators to create avatars that can be customized with the body shape sliders in SL, as well as create unique products like heads, wings, tails, fingers, and crazy avatars that use bones to animate them. This is a vast improvement in also the total data sent to our viewers, because of the bones vs using many meshes to look like they are animated. The total lag produced by using all these meshes to fake animation will be greatly reduced.

[Myra Wildmist]

Thank you, Ariel.

That makes sense. I probably will need to update my head settings once I start wearing a bento head. Thank you