Bento head rigging basics?

[egg66e]

I'm wondering how I would go about bento-rigging a blender mesh head? I've tried understanding it and looking up tutorials, but there seems to be virtually no information on it for beginners.

I have a little experience with blender, especially modelling - but i guess you could still consider me pretty new at everything it can do (like rigging/bone stuff). I want to have an animal head imported to Second Life & I would like it to blink. Maybe a little eyebrow action, too, I don't know.

I'm hesitant to really download the bento plugin(?) for blender(??) without knowing anything about what to do.

So, how do I do this from scratch? Do I just learn how to rig in blender/use bento and the rest sort of comes together? 👉👈

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, egg66e said:

I'm wondering how I would go about bento-rigging a blender mesh head? I've tried understanding it and looking up tutorials, but there seems to be virtually no information on it for beginners.

I have a little experience with blender, especially modelling - but i guess you could still consider me pretty new at everything it can do (like rigging/bone stuff). I want to have an animal head imported to Second Life & I would like it to blink. Maybe a little eyebrow action, too, I don't know.

I'm hesitant to really download the bento plugin(?) for blender(??) without knowing anything about what to do.

So, how do I do this from scratch? Do I just learn how to rig in blender/use bento and the rest sort of comes together? 👉👈

you might have better luck asking in the Mesh forum.  You can report your post and ask the mods to move it.

Mesh - Second Life Community

[egg66e]

14 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

you might have better luck asking in the Mesh forum.  You can report your post and ask the mods to move it.

Mesh - Second Life Community

will do, thank you!

[Nalates Urriah]

On 5/13/2021 at 7:21 PM, egg66e said:

I'm wondering how I would go about bento-rigging a blender mesh head? I've tried understanding it and looking up tutorials, but there seems to be virtually no information on it for beginners.

I have a little experience with blender, especially modelling - but i guess you could still consider me pretty new at everything it can do (like rigging/bone stuff). I want to have an animal head imported to Second Life & I would like it to blink. Maybe a little eyebrow action, too, I don't know.

I'm hesitant to really download the bento plugin(?) for blender(??) without knowing anything about what to do.

So, how do I do this from scratch? Do I just learn how to rig in blender/use bento and the rest sort of comes together? 👉👈

AvaStar and MayaStar both have tutorials on rigging with their Plugins. Both are on YouTube and AvaStar has some on Vimeo. AvaStar also has a set of tutorials behind a pay-wall.  I suggest MayaStar tutorials because rigging is rigging and you may pickup something.

In-world the Blender-AvaStar group can provide some help and point you to good tutorials.

Also, there are some SL gotchas few mention once they know about them. For instance the important one is limiting your weighting for any vertex to just 4 bones. When you go over 4 the SL system is unpredictable as to which four values it will use. But it WILL only use four. And it doesn't flash any warning if you use more than four. At least when I was messing up it didn't. That may have changed but I doubt it.

To get an idea of how others are rigging their heads you can use the Black Dragon viewer's Poser to move various bones and see the effect on the head.

[RitaCallisto]

21 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

AvaStar and MayaStar both have tutorials on rigging with their Plugins. Both are on YouTube and AvaStar has some on Vimeo. AvaStar also has a set of tutorials behind a pay-wall.  I suggest MayaStar tutorials because rigging is rigging and you may pickup something.

In-world the Blender-AvaStar group can provide some help and point you to good tutorials.

Also, there are some SL gotchas few mention once they know about them. For instance the important one is limiting your weighting for any vertex to just 4 bones. When you go over 4 the SL system is unpredictable as to which four values it will use. But it WILL only use four. And it doesn't flash any warning if you use more than four. At least when I was messing up it didn't. That may have changed but I doubt it.

To get an idea of how others are rigging their heads you can use the Black Dragon viewer's Poser to move various bones and see the effect on the head.

I'll direct her to your post!

(She's an off SL friend)