Cathy Foil

Psistorm Ikura wrote: Hiya! I actually determined the cause of the joint offsets, and I'm sorry to say it was my fault all along! It turns out I majorly brainfarted and didn't assign any weights to lower/upper teeth, thus breaking the chain of weighted bones upon export. This explains why any weird offsets went away once I made sure the offset between jaw/teeth was the same as in the original skeleton. I just forgot to do some sanity checks it appears. As for the FBX files, I finally figured out why they come out looking different than the DAE files as well as what avastar provides. The FBX files aren't built based off the default shape, but have various sliders changed, most notably arm length, shoulders, neck thickness and head size, along with a few other minor tweaks. This explains the discrepancies I've been seeing between the FBX files and other skeletons. Hi Psistorm, The FBX files on the Bento Testing page are correct. Their bone positions and rotations are all based on the avatar_skeleton.xml file. One thing you need to be aware of is the default shape in SL, often referred to as Ruth, does not have slider values that are in the neutral position. When LL decided to make Ruth the default shape when a brand new shape is created in our inventories they didn't use neutral slider positions. Ruth's arms are longer, her head smaller and a handful of other sliders are not in their neutral positions. Actually it is impossible to make a completely neutral shape in SL using the Appearance Sliders because we can only input whole numbers while many of the truly neutral slider settings would require decimal values because how the avatar_lad.xml file is written and functions. The FBX file avatar provided on the Bento Testing page the bones are all in their neutral positions and rotations. The female FBX the mesh body has no morphs applied and the male FBX body has just the male head, upper body and lower body morphs applied but the skeleton's bone positions are all based as well on the avatar_skeleton.xml file just as the female FBX bones are. Hope that helps. Cathy

Kylie Remsen wrote: Hello, I'm curious why bento in its current state has not been configured to work with system body? I was quite dissapointed to find that I won't be able to use new facial and hand animations with the system body as it is. And yes i do prefer system body over mesh body for many personal reasons. I feel like a lot of system body users have been shoved aside for a long time now and i would just love some explinations. Thanks The reason the system avatar body mesh doesn't use the new bento Bones is because the max bones a system mesh body can be rigged to is 15 bones. See the system mesh body or default mesh body isn't regular rig mesh like the kind we upload using DAE files. The system body is made up of 5 or 6 separate meshes. Lower body, upper body, head, eyes, hair and skirt. Each of these can only be rigged to 15 bones max. It would take a major rewriting of the system avatar mesh code to allow it to be rigged to more than 15 bones per mesh. This is just something LL doesn't have the resources to do at this time. Cathy

In the past you had to have "Remove Unused Influences" turned off but with Bento you can now have that turned on. I see your avatar you are not using the hind legs or wings or tail. You do not need to Smooth Bind your mesh to them. If you want to use all the finger bones and face bones in your mesh you will need to make either the head separate or the hands separate meshes or you will be over the 110 bone limit. Pick just the bones you want to rig to before you do your smooth bind. You can see how many you have selected by clicking turning on your "Object Details" display and look at "Selected Objects:" readout. Turn it on here Display>Heads Up Display>Object Details. For the Bind Pose warnings you are getting you can try two things. 1. In the MayaStar menu go to Skin Weight Tools>Custom Bind Pose>Create Bind Pose and click Create Bind Pose. This might fix those warnings. I am assuming you are getting these errors when trying to Smooth Bind your mesh to the new Bento Skeleton in MayaStar. Or 2. you can delete all the mesh currently rigged to the skeleton and in the Outliner click Display>DAG Objects Only to turn off DAG Objects Only and now in the Outliner you can find and delete the bind pose. It will most likely be named bindPose1 or it could have some other number at the end. Now you should be able to Smooth Bind your mesh to the MayaStar skeleton if you weren't able to before. Hope that helps. Cathy PS I would also turn off "Allow Multiple Bind Poses". I am not sure how well it plays with MayaStar.

Bianca Erin wrote: I am a animation creator. Is there any specific program to create new bento''s animations? Cause the ones I have they are all for the normal animations.. "/ If you are using or prefer Blender then Avastar is your best bet. If you use Maya or prefer Maya then MayaStar has the ability to create and export Bento animations. If you use Maya and don't want to buy MayaStar you can use Samantha Patterson's open source Maya BVH exporter. You can get it on the Bento Testing page. LINK Hope that helps. Cathy

Yes if you only want to do rotation animations on your bones except for the Hip / mPelvis bone you can use an older version of Samantha Patterson's exporter. The one you want is 1.5 http://circle.twu.net/progs/ 1.6 is the same as the exporter on the Bento Testing page. Since both exporters use the same names for many of the global procedures once you open 1.5 or 1.6 you have to close Maya completely and restart Maya to open the other. See if you had 1.6 open in Maya and then you wanted to use 1.5 to do rotation only animations, even if you close 1.6 first and then open 1.5, 1.6 global procedures would still be loaded and active in Maya. This means when you open 1.5 and then exported your BVH it would basically export out as a 1.6 BVH and not a 1.5. So if you had 1.6 open you would have to close Maya completely and restart it and then open 1.5 so 1.5 global procedures are loaded. Hope that makes sense. It has been a while since I made any animations with 1.6. If I remember right as long as you just rotate a bone it should only export rotation and not translation for it or any of its children. Hope that helps. Cathy PS if you have MayaStar the exporter that comes with MayaStar is 1.5. I will be adding 1.6 to MayaStar and will have to do some testing to make sure you can do rotation animations only with 1.6. If it won't I will probably have both 1.5 and 1.6 in the next MayaStar update which will be coming out soon hopefully.

Hi! Animating with Maya for SL can be tricky. I have an hour and fifty minute video on how to animate with Maya or SL. Couple of quick suggestions. If you are using translation animations you need to be in Y up and you avatar's XYZ scales all need be 39.331947. Why 39.331947? Because BVH is in inches and gets converted to centimeters in the upload process. The avatar in Maya is tiny. It is 1/100 of the size it is in SL because it was originally created using Maya with the working units in Maya set to centimeters instead of meters which is the working unit for SL. To easily scale up the avatar create a locator. Parent the mPelvis bone to the locator then change the XYZ scales of the locator to be all 39.331947. Rename the mPelvis bone hip. If you decide you want the whole avatar to move or translate in 3D space to not move that avatar by moving the hip / mPelvis bone. Move or animate the whole avatar by animating the locator. The locator's name can be anything. Just making the avatar 100 times bigger in Maya doesn't work for translation animations because of the conversion that is done during upload of the BVH file as stated earlier trust me. Watch the video it should help a lot. Cathy

Hi Sea Set, I have had a number of mesh hand designers, who use Maya or my MayaStar, contact me with similar problem you are having. I spent all afternoon and evening working out all the bugs yesterday. It would take too long for me to type everything out so I made a video. It is almost an hour and fifty minutes long. I tend to go into a lot of detail and repeat things that are very important to remember. I know I could cut the time down quite a bit if I scripted it out but I just tend to wing it. I hope this helps. Cathy

Leviathan Flux wrote: Thanks Cathy, though I am actually sure the bones are all right as I can export with the skeleton with different weights on the model or the same weights on a different model. I am also not going over the bone limit as I am removing the legs, arms, hind limbs, wings, etc and just including the head bones and also trying them parented through the neck and chest to the pelvis, though that does not seem necessary. The probelm is a parsing error, not just no option to include skin weights. Typically, I woudl think parsing error would indicate a problem with the geometry, but seems to only occur when there is a combination of it being rigged and painting the skin weights as opposed to simply binding it to the skeleton and exporting before adjusting the weights. Hi Leviathan, Try this, export your weights out using a 3rd party plugin like Dora Skinweights. I say use a 3rd party plugin because Maya's build in weight exporter stinks. Then select your mesh in object mode and export it out as an OBJ. Don't export out as an FBX you want OBJ because OBJs don't have skeletons or weights. Now open a brand new file that just has the Bento Skeleton so you can start with a clean slate just in case there was some sort of corruption in the original file. Import your OBJ and do a quick Smooth Bind to the new skeleton don't adjust the weights. Now export the mesh out as a DAE and see if you can upload it to SL with the weights. If you can go back to Maya and import the weights you exported out earlier. Export the mesh as a DAE and see if you can now upload it to SL with weights. If this works that means there was something messed up with your original mesh. From time to time Maya creates garbage nodes for a mesh that makes it impossible to upload it to SL especially rigged mesh. By exporting it out as an OBJ it gets rid of these garbage nodes. By using a fresh new skeleton you are making sure that the garbage nodes are not in the skeleton itself. Deleting history or doing "Cleanup" or "Optimize Scene Size" doesn't always get rid of garbage nodes so the OBJ and new skeleton is a good way to go. Hope that helps. Cathy

Remember there is a bone limit. I think the max number of bones a single mesh can be rigged to is 110. Also check to see what bones are in your skin cluster for the mesh. I know you are using MayaStar so select your mesh in Maya in object mode. Then click on the MayaStar menu in Maya and then click "For Earlier Versions of Maya" and then click "SkinCluster Bone Names". Next open the Script Editor and in the top history window you should see a long list of bone names. Each name will be on its own line. Go through the list and make sure all the names are correct or that something isn't there that should be. I hope that helps. Cathy

Hi Vistanimations, Second Life works in an unusual way as far as the skeleton goes at least for Maya users. I can not speak for Blender users but I suspect the same is true. The FBX files you are probably using were made with Maya. The joint orientations are all X straight forward and back, Y straight left and right and Z straight up and down. This is why the finger joints are rotating unnaturally. For animation you just have to re orientate the joints so each joint points to the next child in the joint chain. Why are the FBX files joints setup the way they are in the files? In SL for some odd reason if mesh isn't rigged to a skeleton with the joint orientations of X straight forward and back, Y straight left and right and Z straight up and down the mesh will become distorted once uploaded and worn. It is very bizarre. I don't know if this is a situation that has always existed or was overlooked when Mesh was added to SL. The FBX files are setup for people to rig mesh to them. Not to animate with. If you want to animate with them like I said just re orientate the joint orientation. Hope that helps. Cathy

Leviathan Flux wrote: I am having all kinds of issues with the latest skeleton update. I am using the same skin weights as previous versions. As far as I know, there have not been any changes to the bones for the body. On the left is an earlier version that I can still wear and looks fine. On the right is what happens if I upload the same model with the same skin weights and everything else the same. I also had this issue with the previous skeleton, that with the same weights, the shoulders are scaling out significantly larger. I have gone through everything over and over to make sure I was not missing something that was different. I am using Maya. I removed bones I was not using like the extra spine bones, hind legs, wings, etc. I also removed unused influences. I am using the Fitted bones as well. Is anyone else experiencing anything like this? Whatever I am doing, I can't find anything that is different on my end from when the model was working properly.  Hi Leviathan, What year of Maya are you using and how are you exporting your DAE? Do you export out as an FBX and then use Autodesk's FBX converter? Are you using Open Collada or Mayas fbxmaya.mll plugin?

Vir is hoping we can get Bento into the Release Candidate sometime in August. Once Bento is in the Release Candidate viewer 3rd party viewers like Firestorm and Singularity will be allowed to put it in their viewers so Bento will be much more widely accessible very soon. At least that is my understanding. It may take several more months for the final bugs to be worked out in the Release Candidate before it becomes the main viewer for LL.

One of the great things that have been implemented because of Bento is we now have the ability to make animations with rotations and translations of all the bones in the skeleton. Before only the mPelvis bone could rotate and translate. All the other bones could only rotate. Because of this basically we do now have the ability to make custom skeletons. You can use any bone anywhere in combination with other bones even if those bones are not connected to each other. Medhue made a video showing how he used face bones that were not connected to each other to animate the trunk of his elephant. The end result was as if he created a new chain of bones from existing bones. Basically the work flow is like this. Create your custom skeleton. Then take the default skeleton and snap them one by one to the bones in the custom skeleton. Then constrain the default skeleton to the custom skeleton and animate the custom skeleton. The default skeleton bones go along for the ride and you export out the default skeleton's animation. This does mean you have to make all the animations like walk, sit, run, fly and so on. If you were going to be making a custom skeleton you be making these animations anyway. So with translation animations you can use the tip of the ears as hip bones. Two forehead bones for the knees and a finger bones for the feet. They don't have to be connected. You are only limited to the total number of bones that are in the default skeleton. It is a bit more complicated than being able to upload custom skeletons directly but there was never enough time or man hours available to be able to write major code changes to SL to allow custom skeletons in the Bento's budget. We did discuss custom skeletons early on in Bento. As far as increasing the capacity of simultaneous attachments I think that would make lag worse. Too many attachments with large textures and scripts is a big problem already causing too much lag. You got good ideas overall. Just that they aren't going to happen with Bento but maybe in the future they will.

Hey Medhue, I just has an idea that might make it easier or quicker for you to convert your original animations using the old Bento skeleton to the new one. What if you open your animation in Blender and then import the new Bento skeleton and constrain it to the original Bento skeleton? Once constrained you should then be able to export out the animation of the new skeleton. Hopefully you only need to constrain the new skeleton to the old one once to be able to export out all your animations you made. Hope that helps. Cathy

You hit the nail right on the head. That is pretty much the same exact system we discussed a few times during a few Bento meetings. Mind you the meetings were not completely about this topic. More like 4 or 5 minutes of two or three meetings. The different layers of textures the LL system default avatar wears are already all baked down to one texture that is then applied to the default avatar already including the alpha layers. So to make custom avatar mesh work some code needs to be added to take that baked texture or flattened texture and automatically apply it to the custom avatar mesh be it a mesh body or body part or even mesh clothes. We also need a way in the mesh upload window to designate that the mesh being upload is a mesh that is to be automatically textured with the baked texture your avatar is currently wearing. In the beginning only mesh that had the same UV layout as the LL default avatar mesh would work. After the initial release of the system a follow up project might happen that could project that flatten image onto any UV layout allowing for custom UV layouts. The only remaining hurdle is how to hide your LL default avatar mesh. Currently we hide the mesh by wearing an alpha that covers the entire body but that means the flatten or baked texture is completely invisible. Most likely LL could add a button in the viewer so it is not rendered or what I like better is a new Alpha Layer that is not baked to the texture that is applied to the custom avatar mesh but is used solely to hide the default avatar mesh only. What this second new Alpha Layer would allow is a way to hide the default avatar completely or even just partially. So say you like a particular custom mesh body but hate the head and you prefer your LL default avatar head. On the original Alpha Layer you could hide the custom avatar head and on the new Alpha Layer you could hide all the body except the LL default avatar head. Another great advantage to such a system is for mesh clothes. If you make a pair of say mesh pants with the UV layout of the LL default system avatar mesh your pants now can be textured with all the different pant textures that the system avatar can wear. Same goes for tops, skirts and dresses. It could really revitalize the texture industry in SL. The current state of the mesh clothing for texture makers is they either have to pair up with a mesh maker or learn to make mesh themselves if they want to be on the cutting edge of fashion. With this system they can continue to make great textures using the LL default avatar UV pattern and breath new life into their business. It also means mesh creators don't have to make textures for their mesh, a task many mesh creators don't particularly enjoy doing, or are good at. So by using the LL default avatar UV pattern and allowing the customer to wear other textures made by other people the mesh clothes becomes way more versatile. If I was a texture artist I would watch what mesh clothes is selling the best on the Marketplace that is using the new system. Then quickly make an awesome texture for it and put it up on the Marketplace. This would really boost the sales of the original mesh because now there texture options for it. A so so piece of mesh can be made to look awesome with a great texture on it. In my mind it is a WIN, WIN, WIN !!! Mesh designers sell more. Texture designers sell more. The customer gets more variety and versatility out of their purchases and it is a much easier system to use. Just right mouse click on the mesh item or system clothes, tattoo or skin in your inventory and simply wear it. Oh I almost for got. It will cut down on lag due to not needing onion skinned avatars or massive scripts for appliers and huds.

MicheloudIgnatio wrote: Now that project Bento is about to be finalised, are LLs going to take over a new project regarding the compatibility between all those mesh bodies and heads and their clothing and their appliers? If yes, when? I been involved in the Bento group since residents were invited to join group under the NDA. As far as I know LL hasn't mentioned any new project with those goals in mind. A number of times over the last year some ideas were kicked around about how some code could be written to eliminate the need for appliers, alpha huds and onion skinned avatars. It has huge potential to reduce lag and make custom mesh avatars and mesh heads easier to use. If you are talking about some sort of system to make mesh clothing compatible between different mesh bodies which have different shapes and weighting I doubt such a system would be possible. Theoretically if all mesh clothes were made to fit the LL default avatar and mesh body creators submitted a Morph that changed their mesh body shape into the shape of the LL default avatar a wrap deformer could reshape the clothes to fit the custom mesh body shape. But then you have the second problem that each custom mesh body has its own unique weights. So while the clothes may fit while the avatar is standing still as soon as it moves the clothes may not move in the same way or change shape in the same way when the Appearance Editor sliders are changed if the mesh clothes and mesh avatar are both using Fitted Mesh. Theoretically you could automatically replace the weights of the mesh clothing by copying the weights from the custom avatar mesh. This would only really work for mesh shirts and pants. Mesh skirts and dresses the vertex between the legs copying weights don't work well at all. Also theoretically you could have mesh clothing that are not rigged at all and use a wrap deformer to move the clothes with the avatar mesh. Again this really only works with shirts and pants. It is also super intensive processing and would slow your computer down to a crawl. I know I tried it in Maya. Movement become super jerky and down to about 2 or 3 frames per second and I have a good computer. I hope the ideas put forth that would eliminate the need for appliers and onion skinned avatar gets adopted into a project and I get an invitation to join the group but nothing official has been said or implied that it might.

Hi Kayla, The reason for the delay for the past few weeks are that we are hard at work doing our best to make the new face bones work well with the sliders and for animators. Once released we won't be able to make any more changes to them since it will break content so we are doing our best to try and find the best possible balance between animation and customization with the Appearance Sliders. We been mainly doing two things to achieve the best balance possible over the last couple weeks. One moving some of the bones, mainly the lip bones, so that they are positioned so that rotation animations will work as well as they can on a human mesh head seeing that rotation animations work well for almost all slider settings. The second thing we been working on is the Avatar Lad code or avatar_lad.xml file. This file controls how the Appearance Editor sliders work. Matrice, Vir and I have gone through the code switching as many of the new Bento bones to use scaling instead of translations or what in the LAD is called "offset". This gives us great benefit because scales do not interfere with animations using translations. It also has the benefit that non human avatars will be more affected by Appearance Sliders so they will enjoy customization more like the human avatars have. We are just ironing out the last few glitches and hopefully Bento will be finalized and put in the Release Candidate Viewer in the next few days. I say there has been a minimum improvement of 30% to Bento in the last two weeks or so and I believe the slight extra wait will have been worth it.

Awesome video Medhue! Matrice, Vir and I have been working hard with some great changes to the Bento Skeleton and Slider code along with some awesome suggestions from Mel and you and everyone from the last Bento meeting. We moved some of the bones, mainly lip bones so that rotation animations will work even better. I am sure there will still be a need for translation animations to get the absolute best facial expressions and I love your solution of combinations of translations and rotations. The Sliders we been working hard to get to work as much as possible with scaling so that custom bone positions and animations that use translations will work as good as possible. I think Matrice has out did himself and probably put 2 or 3 times as many hours into these new improvements as I have. Keep the awesome videos coming! LL is really pushing us to make these the last changes to the skeleton and sliders. I can't say I blame them. I am ready for Bento to be finalized and completely adopted by SL. I think with these last improvements Bento is really going to make a huge difference in SL and can honestly say Vir, Matrice and myself have been following the feedback thread here and doing our best to implement or fix issues brought up here. And I am sure Oz and a few other Lindens have been following the feedback here as well. Keep up the awesome work Medhue!

Cathy Foil wrote: What would be awesome is to have a library of facial expressions animations and your web cam aimed at your face. A program reads your facial expression and then plays in SL the animation associated with that expression. This would be much easier than a Face Rig type system. This way there wouldn't be a disconnect between what you are saying or typing and what your avatar's face showing. Medhue Simoni wrote: That would be awesome, but that would require the rig to be set up completely for bone translation, not rotation. I probably am not explaining my self well enough. The program that is setup to use your web cam watches your face for expression and when it recognizes an expression say like when you smile it recognizes that you are smiling and sends a signal to the viewer you are logged in with to play a pre-recorded smile animation. So it wouldn't matter how big your smile was in real life it simply play the animation named "Smile". I mean you could have several variations animations for smiling. Mouth closed, toothy smile with mouth closed, open mouth smile. The program could recognize the different types of smiles the camera picks up. You could do the same thing for blinking or winking or raised eyebrows. Depending on how good the program was at detecting small facial expressions and how many pre-made animations are made and uploaded to SL you could probably mimic a real time face rig pretty good. If someone was really motivated an individual could create their own animations to more closely match their own facial expressions and replace the standard animations kinda like can do now for lip sync.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Cathy Foil wrote: If you want a head that is most expressive with animations then you are free to use custom bone positions and animations that uses both rotations and translations. If you use custom bone positions for your head then pretty much only the head's creator can make animations for it using translations and rotations. Rotation only animations made by other people other than the mesh head creator have a good chance that they will not work well. It also means that fewer Appearance Slider will work giving your customer less ability to customize the shape of their face. Those making and selling animations will want to clearly label their animations as "Rotations Only", "Rotations and Translations" or "Translations Only". Rotations Only animations will be the most compatible with the most meshes. Rotations and Translations will be less compatible with the fewest bones animated with translations being more compatible and more bone animated with translations being less compatible. Translation Only means the least compatible animations. Hey Cathy, You should know I'm going to chime in about your post, lol. After doing some testing, I've pretty much confirmed what I've argued before about rotation vs translation. If a head creator uses the default positions to rig their head with, animations with translations will work just as well as, and most times better, than rotation animations. I really don't think people who are not animators understand just how ugly rotation animations are on a face. An animation with translation, even if it is off a little or even quite a bit, that still looks many times better than a rotation only expression. Again tho, if you have a unique body shape for the face, some sliders will be disabled. I was wearing a mesh head at the Bento meeting on Thurs. With all this arguing over what does what, I decided to make my own head and start testing it. Some things are definitely true, and some theories are completely false. I'll be making a video later about it all, with a suggested solutions that I've come up with. OH I have no doubt that the best animations are animations that both translate the bone and rotate the bones. Animations that just use translations are probably not quite as good but way better than animations that are just made with rotations only. What I am saying is rotation only animations for the face were surprisingly good to me. The more subtle the expression the less noticeable the limitations of animating only with rotations are. Personally I think I am going to prefer an AO where my avatar repeats randomly a set of fixed subtle facial expression that play over and over again over an AO which makes my avatar face express intense or exaggerated facial expressions over and over again. I have had the same sort of experience chatting with people whose AO makes their avatar walk around and rock back and fourth. It makes their avtar's body language give me the impression that they are annoyed or impatient. While I know it is just an AO and not reflective of the true mental state of the person I am chatting with it still sends mixed signals to me and I end up leaving the conversation and not wishing to chat with the person next time I see them. I can definitely see this happening with AOs which while the animations may be wonderful with great very expressive facial animations showing a lot of emotions using animations with translations and rotations there will be this same disconnect between what the person I am chatting with is conveying in their typing or voice and what their avatar's face is expressing. I think more subtle facial expressions will have way less of a disconnect but at the same time still giving the impression of the avatar being more alive than what we have had up until now. What would be awesome is to have a library of facial expressions animations and your web cam aimed at your face. A program reads your facial expression and then plays in SL the animation associated with that expression. This would be much easier than a Face Rig type system. This way there wouldn't be a disconnect between what you are saying or typing and what your avatar's face showing. --||-

RipleyVonD wrote: Will we have the option to disable certain appearance sliders? The ones in the head specifically. You can disable the translation affect on a face bone by any Slider by moving any bone associated with that slider to a custom position and uploading your mesh with "Include Joint Positions". Now if a slider has scaling on it the scaling will not be disabled. The Jaw Angle slider is a good example. Currently the mFaceJaw moves way up and down when adjusting that slider. If you wanted to disable that and have the mFaceJaw bone set so it stays in the same place disabling that slider you just slightly move the mFaceJaw bone to a new location. Rig you mesh to it and upload your DAE with "Include Joint Positions". Mel, Matrice, Vir and myself have been discussing ways and options to fix the Jaw Angle slider so the mFaceJaw bone doesn't have to move up and down. Hope that helps. Cathy

It has been available for a few days and I should have announced it here sooner some new files for Maya users. In the Bento Testing Wiki page there are now a BVH exporter for Maya that can export out translations animations as well as rotations of all the bones and a test animation skeleton rig for Maya users. Project Bento Testing Page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Testing

Here is my advice to Human Head Creators. You are going to have to choose between a head being more compatible with the Appearance Editor sliders or a head who has bigger range of facial expression. Just like with Fitted Mesh we are asking the new face bones to do two jobs at once. Change the avatars appearance and animate facial expression. Having more of one means less of the other. If you want a head that is most compatible with the Appearance Sliders do not move the bones from their default bone positions and only make animations for the head that use rotations only. This will give your customers the ability to customize the way their face looks the most. It also means that the head can use just about any facial animation that uses rotations only and look good. If you use an animation with translations though the face will change shape while the animation is playing. The more bones that animate using translations the more the face will change shape. This could be pretty cool if you want an animation to make your avatar temporarily transform into the Incredible Hulk. If an animation uses fewer bones that translate then the temporary change in the shape of the avatars face is less noticeable. Such as an animation that only translates the lip bones for kissing. If you want a head that is most expressive with animations then you are free to use custom bone positions and animations that uses both rotations and translations. If you use custom bone positions for your head then pretty much only the head's creator can make animations for it using translations and rotations. Rotation only animations made by other people other than the mesh head creator have a good chance that they will not work well. It also means that fewer Appearance Slider will work giving your customer less ability to customize the shape of their face. Those making and selling animations will want to clearly label their animations as "Rotations Only", "Rotations and Translations" or "Translations Only". Rotations Only animations will be the most compatible with the most meshes. Rotations and Translations will be less compatible with the fewest bones animated with translations being more compatible and more bone animated with translations being less compatible. Translation Only means the least compatible animations. There is nothing stopping mesh head creators from taking the same mesh head and offering their customers two versions. One rigged to the face bones in their default positions and one rigged to bones in custom position. They can even use the same weights. Just label them clearly and advise your customers that one is more compatible with the Appearance sliders than the other and that one be used with animations that are rotation only and the other with animations only made by or approved by the mesh head creator. I have played around with making facial expression using just rotations. I was quite surprise just how well it worked and got quite a lot of good expressions. I could be wrong but my gut feeling says these type of facial expressions will more than satisfy the average buyer. I have also played around with animation with translations and the possibilities for human and non human avatars are limitless and I wouldn't want to give it up for the world. As a head designer you will have to decide which way to go and how far. Do you want a head that looks great and moves great but isn't very compatible with the Appearance Sliders or do you want a head that can look great but whose facial expression will be more limited but is more compatible with the Appearance Sliders and other animations made by other people.

Matrice, Wouldn't the simplest solution be to add a new child bone to the mFaceBone and have it translate up and down instead of the mFaceJaw bone? This way the mFaceJaw bone can stay in one place. I know adding a new bone at this point will be next to impossible but there has been quite a bit of passion and good arguments for needing to improve the jaw by several people. Perhaps we can find a bone to repurpose of sacrifice one of the new attachment points seeing as they apparently cause as much lag as bones we rig to do.

I appreciate your enthusiasm and passion Mel I really do. I am trying my best to take that into account and not be insulted. I been actively involved with Bento for over a year now. If you were to add up all the hours I spent working on Bento, for no pay mind you, it probably add up to several months worth of working full time 40 hours a week. Matrice has probably worked several more months of working full time on Bento than I have. Amazingly he is more up for making changes than I am. While I am not as enthusiastic about making more changes I have already stated that I am not against them.