Bento hands and poses in objects

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Some of the things I make need poses or animations. Simple ones usually, like a custom sit pose for a rideable toy. They often involve some sort of hand positioning for handlebars and such.
Now I'm looking for advice on how the new Bento hands affect this sort of thing.

I don't have Bento hands and other than testing how my stuff would work with them, don't have any reason or interest in fussing with them. I haven't seen enough examples what other people are doing to get a sense of things.

What's the best approach to this sort of pose work right now? Is it a matter of choosing to create for Bento-hands or system avatar compatibility?

[Chic Aeon]

This could be simple or complex. Mostly I opt for the simple answer and one that will work for most avatars -- if you are selling especially. While Bento hands are great fun, not everyone has them or will have them in the foreseeable future.  So making your poses for the default legacy avatar is a good thing. Actually I most always do this, uploading on Opensim and testing there (I as Chic don't venture over to the beta grid any longer do to some MAJOR inventory issues a few months ago). 

The advantage of making your animations for the legacy avatars is simple -- it is more difficult to do as there aren't any nice smoothly effects of mesh bodies. So if the poses and animations work with the legacy avatars, they typically look wondrous on mesh ones :D.

Since Bento hands come with AOs where the people can adjust as needed, I suspect that they can change their Bento hands to an appropriate hand pose to go with the rest of your animation. 

If you  make your poses only for Bento enabled hands then you will be limiting your market -- unless you test carefully making sure it works for Bento, static mesh and legacy hands equally well --- and I am thinking that will probably be tricky.

 

Good luck.

 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

OK, so it's not an issue then. I know I have to create for regular hands, omitting that was never a possibility. I wouldn't even be able to use them myself.

Have probably seen too many posts and group discussions from certain types who get disdainful about classic avs. Hopefully that won't extend to non-Bento hands the way it has to standard feet and bodies.

Thanks for the reassurance.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

When creating bento animations the upload window still allows you to set hand poses and facial expressions for the legacy avatar, so you can support bento and non-bento avatars with a single animation.  Simply make your bento compatible animation and set the legacy hand pose in the upload window to what you would normally set it to for a non-bento animation, when you trigger the animation then avatars with bento hands will use the hand pose you set up when you made the animation while legacy avatars will use the hand pose you chose during upload.

[Medhue Simoni]

On ‎5‎/‎14‎/‎2017 at 8:48 AM, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

What's the best approach to this sort of pose work right now? Is it a matter of choosing to create for Bento-hands or system avatar compatibility?

You can have both in 1 animation. I have some videos on bento hands. I'm not sure I explain exactly how to have both bento finger animation and system avatar hand poses, but maybe I'll do a video on that this week. There are some 4 videos I've done on bento hands just this year on my YouTube channel.

 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Thanks Fluffy and Medhue. It sounds rather straight forward actually, though it will mean moving up from Qavimator to Blender for animations. I see you're using Avastar, Medhue. Can this be done with Blender alone?

What priority would you recommend? I hope to make some that are sit poses for objects but also a few that are partial over-rides, like a single hand/arm pose to carry a lamp.

[Medhue Simoni]

If you are going to make many animations, then you want Avastar. Blender allow could, but you don't get the .anim export option, which is crucial. Priority 4 is what I ususally use for sit. With .anim files, we can use up to 6 priorities too.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

One thing I will suggest is when you make an animation for a bento part be sure to NOT adjust any other bento parts or zero them out. I have a few great talking mouth animations for my bento head, and everytime they run, my tail zeros out into a straight line. Even running the animations without a script (this isn't a script turning off my animations, it is the bento head animation having values for the entire skeleton and not just the part it's animating).

 

[Clover Jinx]

Yeah there are some bento tails that cause hands to splay out for a similar reason.