Teager

I think it looks like Terminator Conan

Yes exactly! Then it's free game

My friend and I each managed to get one after about an hour and a half of occasionally refreshing the page. So there's still hope! I'm not sure if I'm brave enough to play the shuffle game to try for a different lot, though

I'm adding my +1 to the desire for more textures and parts! I would love to have, for example, the roof texture, so I could add on architectural features like an overhanging porch and dormers! I also agree with the desire for more rez zones! And I'd like to request as well more community areas. The wiki made the claim that every home would be a convenient distance from a community gathering place, but I was unable to find one near my home, unless you're counting the roundabouts as community zones. I'd love to see more social gathering areas like pools, large gazebos, parks with benches, etc! Also, I'm assuming an option to pay for a LI increase is not feasible with the current setup, but just in case it is... that is something I would be interested in! I was able to do more than I thought I would with my 350 LI, but another 50% to double, that could be the difference between "cute side house" and "main home" for me.

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Project-Bento-Live-on-the-Grid/ba-p/3084426?utm_source=FeaturedBento&utm_medium=Story&utm_term=Social_CM So.... celebration this Thursday instead of meeting?

It's likely that this avatar rigged its face to either attachment bones, volume bones, or both, since I know this is a technique Dreamcrawler has used for other avatars. I've seen plenty of avatars with both attachment rigging and volume rigging that all seem to be fixed after the bug fix implemented for the jira Whirly linked on the previous page. If your bento viewer is ~2 months outdated, you would be seeing deforms like the ones you linked. The other option could be the deform animation in the avatar simply failing to play, perhaps for being on a sim with scripts disabled, or some similar problem.

I think you've missed my point... The problem with your suggestion is that most people use far more gestures that are NOT specific to any one outfit or avatar than gestures that are. Things like welcome back gestures, club/DJ gestures, favorite random noises for smiley faces, etc. These gestures are not typically stored in an outfit or clothing folder. So if all active gestures are added to an outfit, then that outfit is removed and those gestures are all deactivated, the user would have to manually search through their gestures folder to find and reactivate each gesture. I don't know about you, but I probably have at least 100 gestures in my gestures folder, and I suspect that's on the low end compared to other users. Searching through each of those one at a time to try to remember what they do and which ones I was using seems extremely inconvenient. What you may want to consider instead, if you're concerned about people using your wolf talk gestures on another avatar that they're not meant to fit, is setting up empy gestures for /voicelevel1, /voicelevel2, and /voicelevel3 which do not play an animation themselves, but instead chat on a private channel "1", "2", or "3" to your AO to indicate that it should play a speech animation in your AO. That way, if the gesture is played with any other avatar worn, it will do nothing (or, worst case, will play a talk gesture appropriate to that avatar). If you need help setting up a script like this one, you could talk to Tapple Gao, who has one premade and open source.

But if saving your outfit saves all currently activated gestures to your outfit, then it will save ALL of your gestures, whether they're specific to that outfit or not. If you remove an outfit and wear a folder instead of another outfit, you'll have no active gestures. What might be more useful is just making it more apparent that gestures can be added to an outfit, by adding gestures to the "Add More" button at the bottom of the outfit editor. I'm presently on Firestorm, not LL viewer, but I see... 

After updating with avastar alpha 10, I also appear to have a working model now. And for extra good news, it appears that my lower jaw is positioned and scaled correctly now, so the jaw trouble I mentioned at last week's meeting may well have been just another result of the avastar facial bone deform. Double yay! Side note - I can see that you made the rig update function set the scale of the rig to 1.00. It may be useful when you write your official documentation on this to ask the user to check that all meshes are also set to 1.00 scale before updating. Last week, I scaled my entire avatar down to 0.968 and used blender's ctrl+A to apply scale, and did not notice that the scale wasn't applied. Therefore when I use the new update rig feature, which sets the scale of the rig back to 1.00, my meshes come out of alignment with my rig. When I adjust the scale back to 1.00 beore using the update rig feature, everything works perfectly.

After sending my file to Gaia, she's working on some additional changes to support the crazy things I'm asking Avastar to do. Thank you again, Gaia - looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

I'm not having the same success. I'm still seeing largely the same deforms with alpha 8 that I saw with alpha 6. Could you walk me through your process? Perhaps I'm doing something wrong.

Yes, there is a jaw joint bone you can use to animate the jaw. It's parent to the lower teeth, tongue, and lips, so you can fully animate facial expressions in a way that makes sense, and it's tied into the shape slider system as well.

I've now tried the fix proposed by Gaia and Matrice five times, and gotten five different results. Clearly this thing does not get along with a more nonstandard skeleton. I think I too will be waiting for a more definitive fix.

@Whirly - yes I believe it does @Vir - I can send you a copy of my centaur avatar which uses volumes on the hind legs. You can wear it and compare behavior on a bento viewer vs a non bento viewer

I've only recently been noticing trouble with existing avatars that were animating volume bones as eyelids, tails, or back legs of centaurs. Those bones don't seem to want to animate out of position any more; they appear to reset after each animation. This may be related to the issue you're having.

Hey Gaia, I'm a bit confused about your tutorial here. This is a tutorial for working with shape sliders with joint positions - which is awesome, by the way - but I feel like you're implying that not following this exact workflow is what is causing all of the facial deforms we're seeing, regardless of whether we are working with the shape sliders or not. Is that accurate? I know that I and Tornleaf for sure are not touching the shape sliders inside avastar. I'm also confused on how our deforms could be an avastar issue, when I am able to export my avatar through avastar, import it back into blender, and see my mesh and bones lining up perfectly with the file I just exported. This seems to imply to me that the issue is in second life, not in avastar. 

Matrice Laville wrote: To get the teeth working correct you must weight the upper teeth to the mFaceTeethUpper bone and the lower teeth to the mFaceTeethLower Bone. Take care that each vertex of the teeth mesh is weighted only to its correcponding tooth bone. As soon as you add weight for other bones to the teeth mesh, the result becomes unpredictable. This would not solve my overall problem of my lips being crumpled inside my teeth. When I play an animation to put my facial bones in their correct starting positions, I can clearly see the lips moving outward to pass up the teeth, which were already in the correct place. Here is a gif of my mesh (with the teeth weighted only to the teeth bones, and no other weights, as you suggest) shown first with only the joint positions as they appear after the mesh is worn, then with an animation played to put all bones in their correct starting locations. Clearly there is a problem here. This is not an issue of shape - no combination of shape sliders fixes this issue. This may or may not be an issue with avastar exports - no one can yet say for sure. But it is clear that there is still a problem, and I, Mahadma, and Medhue - the only people in the bento group currently working on rigged faces with custom joint offsets - have all experienced it and reported it. Matrice Laville wrote: For the Collad export options: If you disable "Only weighted Bones" AND "Only Deform Bones" then all 368 Bones of the Rig get exported. You better enable at least one of the 2 options when you intend to import to Second Life. For testing purposes, this is absolutely not an issue. In fact, in light of the problems I am having and still trying to understand, this is ideal.

After tinkering with the new avastar for a bit, I have seen definite improvement but I'm still experiencing issues with my lips collapsing. My nostrils also appear somewhat deformed from front view. So it's possible the issue I was having before wasn't wholly contained in avastar. If anyone else is able to upload meshes with custom facial joint offsets with no issues, let me know - I'd like to compare files. It's entirely possible that with all of these new avastar settings, and so many features reportedly not working, I'm just using the wrong set of options.   EDIT: Previously, I had no weight on my teeth bones, which I had simply weighted to face root. With that setup, I was exporting without the "export only weighted bones" option. For safety's sake, I tried adding weight to the teeth and exporting again, to allow me to try "export only weighted bones", to see if perhaps that was the option causing problems. I expected to see my mesh either exactly the same or improved... but the opposite happened. The deform got worse. After I added weight on the teeth, both with and without the "export only weighted bones" option which appears to make no real difference, all of my exports with weights on the teeth appear more deformed than my exports without weights on the teeth. Could this

Wonderful news! Thanks for letting me know

I believe that may be a problem in avastar. I get the same result when I use the "update rig" button 

I don't think you're doing anything particularly wrong, but there are others experiencing issues with facial mesh deform right now, as seen here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-37546? Feel free to add to the jira, and/or come to the meeting this thursday to share your experiences with us As for how to make a deform animation, you just need to export an animation of all bones in their default rest position, using the "apply armature scale" and "use translations" options. I find priority 1 or 0 is fine for a deform animation.

New jira filed in relation to problems with joint offsets with the new facial bones: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-37546

Small update to avastar - I noticed the alt eye bones are still parented to head, whereas in world they're now parented to face root (yay!)

Confusing is right! I never would have guessed that I'd need to disable "export with joints" in order to successfully export my joints. Definitely looking forward to the future avastar with shape sliders all fixed and that export option a little more clearly defined. Thanks for the help - the joint offsets are working as expected now

Since I updated to the most recent bento viewer and avastar 2.0.13, I'm experiencing a consistent inability to upload my mesh with custom joints applied. Since the last time I uploaded, I have changed from the next-to-last bento viewer to the most recent bento viewer (with facial bone changes), from blender 2.76 to 2.77, and from avastar 2.0.10 to 2.0.13. Theoretically the change could be in any of those, or user error. And to get the easiest question out of the way, yes, I am selecting weights and joints in the mesh uploader  This is how my joints should look, as seen in blender prior to export.  This is how they appear in second life, when exported with the options on the left. You can see that the skeleton is still in its default human shape - this persists through relogs and reset skeleton. The mesh just doesn't appear to have any joint offsets.  I wasn't sure what exactly "sanity check" was checking for, so I tried without that as well. Same result. I tried a few other different combinations of these new export options too, including "only bone weights" and "only deform bones" with various combinations of the other options, but saw generally the same thing.  This is what the first mesh looks like when I import the .dae back into blender. Everything appears fine; bones seem to be where I want them to be. Has anyone else encountered this error who can either tell me what I've done wrong or lend more data for a jira?