Aquila Kytori

I really can't help you with weight painting. I just don't know enough about the subject especially when it comes to painting something as complex as the bento head.

It looks like you have the tip of mFaceCornerLeft much to far back. It should be at the corner of the mouth. The position the base much farther back inside the head :

Unfortunately mSkull is included in the Ruth avatar I have. Learning rigging/weight painting etc has been on my to-do list for a long time but never got around to it. This thread has definitely convinced me that I never want anything to do with SL avatar bones ever again ! 😀

My best guess, base of mFaceLipUpper bones: Best guess for mFaceLowerLip bones: And for the position of the mFaceLipCornerLeft and mFaceLipCornerRight I would position much farther back at the actual corners of the mouth :

With so many overlapping bones it is impossible to say. Select the bones you want to show and then use the keyboard shortcut Shft + H to hide all the other bones. To bring the hidden bones back into view use the keyboard shortcut keys AlT + H . We have already covered the position of the avatar Lip and Nose bones on page 3. 🙂

I was going to say that you are trying to run before you have learnt to walk. But I think its even worse than that, you are trying to write a book before you have learnt to read ! You seem to have even less knowledge of the subject than I do ! 🙂 My advice would be drop the dragon project for the moment and start learning some of the basics. Watch and recreate some of the tutorials that you can find on Youtube. Example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBYb1YmaOMY When you have a better understanding then move onto a simple SL Ruth avatar and learn how to rig that with the basic Ruth bones. When you have that working well inworld then you can open your Dragon project again. I read something in the SL Bento wiki page http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Skeleton_Guide Partial Skeletons Upload of rigged content no longer needs all the bones specified in the DAE file for convenience purposes. For rigged content, simply omitting unused/missing bones from the skinning data is now is allowed. Find out if that means what It looks like it means. That you don't need to rig your dragon to all those face bones ? If that is the case then forget all those complicated Bento face bones for your first dragon. The basic SL avatar only has 5 bones for the head: mNeck mHead mSkull mEyeLeft mEyeRight Think how much simpler it would be if for your first dragon you only had to bother with the 5 equivalent Bento bones ! When you have a first dragon operating well you will have enough knowledge to attempt working with the more of the Bento face bones. Quarrel has answered this as well : My guess would be: the mFaceJawShaper does what it says. It is used by one of the avatar sliders to change the shape of the jaw. ?

Position of those bones on SL avatar : JawShaper bone is right in the middle of the head : My guess for the cheek bones :

Look carefully at the following screenshots and especially take note of the position of the bases of the 3 eye bones at the center of the eyeball sphere. If the bases of your 3 bones at at the center of the eyeball sphere than all is good. .blend with EyeLeft Bones positioned : https://pasteall.org/blend/4ea3b759fa1f4ba1b491187389703dd4

Perhaps because it was compressed? here is the uncompressed version : https://pasteall.org/blend/9ab62eeb88614879bf690e2ac632179e

Very hard to make out the names of the bones ....... when taking screenshots of the eye and positions of the eye it would help if we kept it always to the same eye, the one we were referring to earlier, thats to say the Left eye. Quarrel has mention a couple of times the importance of having the base of the eye bone at the center of the eye ball sphere. it is not clear at all in the above image where that center point is. I post this image again below :

I still think your eye ball is to far inside the head and needs to be pulled forward some in the eye opening. The first image is the original eye opening in the dragons head. The next image is how I would position the eyeball : Next image is how you have positioned the eyeball relative to the eye opening edge loop : And the next the position of the eyeball relative to the eye opening in a actual dragon : If you think it would help, you can download my eye mesh from here : https://pasteall.org/blend/eb841bf2b3774ae6888d25d479a12b5b

I think I would drag the vertices (edges) marked red in the image below out a little to try to reduce the dark shading around the inner eye and the edge marked green drag it down in the Z axis a little. And then move the eyeball out just a little more. But its up to you. If you think its OK then leave it where it is.

Drag out the eyeball in the direction of the arrow in the image below so that it fills more of the eye opening : so that it looks more like this : and then do the "grabby things" I explained in in my earlier step 1 to 8 post. If it looks good to you then it probabaly is.

First image....That look OK to me. I would now select the eyeball and move it out a little, towards the viewer. Next: Remember what @Quarrel Kukulcan said about the position of the 3 bones. Find the center of the eyeball sphere and position the base of the 3 relevant bones at this point.

Add a UV Sphere : Approximate values in outlined in green.

Hmmmmmmmm ! well almost ..... You have missed out the most important part, The Eyeball ! Start by adding the eyeball then you need to get the eye opening vertices to fit the shape of the eye ball so that there is no (or little) gap. Example using the existing eye-opening edge ring of 7 vertices : 1: Select and the eye and the geometry inside of the eye opening: 2: Delete selected geometry. Next select the eye opening edge loop and move cursor to selected ( Shft + S > Cursor to Selected) : 3: Add a sphere. Scale and reposition as needed : 4: With only the eyeball selected hit the P key and choose the Selected option to separate the eyeball into a separate object. Object mode select only the head mesh then tab into Edit mode. 5: Next is Snap the vertices of the eye-opening edge ring to the surface of the eyeball....... Enable the Snapping tool and X-ray view. Then looking straight onto the eye select one of the vertices of the eye opening edge ring and hit the G key and validate with the LMB. The vertex will now be snapped to the surface of the eyeball. Repeat for the other vertices. 6: Disable the Snap tool and the X-ray option the mesh will look something like the screenshot below, with the eyeball poking through in places : 7: To fix the poke through select the eye opening edge loop and drag it out a little until there is no poke through. Enable the X-ray again. Next extrude this edge ring and drag it in some and scale down so that the new edge ring is inside the eyeball : 8: You can now join the eyeball object to the head mesh object again .... In object mode first select the eyeball object then select the dragon mesh and hit the Ctrl + J And with extra edge loop(s) that will probably help with animating deforms, closing the eyes or blinking : Thats just my way of doing it but if you find the snapping a bit awkward you can do steps 4 to 8 simply by manually tweaking the vertices into position. After all it is only 7 vertices that need to be positioned. Anyways my point was, start by adding the eyeball.

It's not the extra loop cut that is so important but a few extra vertices around the actual eye opening to help it fit the curve of the eyeball.

You will probably need to redo the eye opening, (add geometry) to "fit" the "perfect sphere" of the eyeball. Without changing to much the surrounding geometry of the head it will look something like in the screenshots below : It may help to convert this part of the mesh to quads before doing this. Edit mode > select mesh > Face menu > Tris to Quads.

Suggested positions of EyeLeft bones : and viewed from inside of head:

First save your .blend file The process is to select, then copy and paste into a new .blend file : In Edit mode select as much of the geometry around one of the eyes as you can. Use the key board shortcut Shft + D to make a copy of the selected geometry. With the geometry still selected hit the P key to open the Separate menu and choose the option Selection. This will separate it into a new object. In Object mode select only this new object then use Ctrl + C to copy it to "clipboard". Next is to paste it into a new .blend file, File > New > General > ( Don't save ) and a new .blend will open. Delete the default cube. Paste in the Eye geometry with Ctrl + V . The bones will be included with the mesh object. Save this new .blend and upload to https://pasteall.org/blend/

I work in quality control and many years ago, a part of the course was learning the basics of how electronic weighing scales work. When Googling your MEM device it mentioned about its uses and reminded me of the strain gauges used in scales. At the time we learnt that these gauges were equivalent to a set of variable resistors which was called a Wheatstone bridge, just like in your image. Where I work now we have scales in the labs that can weigh to a precision of 0.001g and in production scales that can weigh anything from 5g to many thousand kilograms. Perhaps the lab ones use MEMs

NO. The "aligning" of 2D image to the 3D mesh is done in Blender before exporting. The process is called UV mapping. The X Y Z (3D) coordinates of the mesh object are mapped to a 2D, U V ) space. To get the the 3D object to lay out flat we have to add seams. There are so many tutorials covering UV unwrapping / mapping so no need for me to try explain further. Example tutorial can be found here :

You could make a copy of the relevant part of the head and paste it into a new .blend file.(See image below). The bones should automatically be included in the file. Then upload it to this Blender file sharing page so that we can take a look ourselves. https://pasteall.org/blend/

@VirtualKitten The only time I have tried rigging was about 5 years ago when I followed a YouTube tutorial on how to rig a robot dog. So you know more about his than I do But I would like to make an observation about how you have your dragons nose bones orientated . You appear to have those bones positioned almost horizontally across the front (surface) of the nose of the dragon? In the human head, these nose bones, like the lip bones, are orientated with the base of each bone inside the head and only the tip of the bone at the surface of the mesh. See screenshots below : Side view : And the tips of the bones protruding through the surface of the mesh : Perhaps we could ask @FinnfinnLost to comment on the orientation of your dragons nose bones? See the screenshots in my previous post

Position of Bones for the left Eye : Side View of Left eye bones : And how the tips of the bones are positioned relative to the surface of the mesh :