Cathy Foil

I did move the Jaw Angle slider to the extremes and yes with the mFaceJaw bone rotated to the amount you show in your photos. This is how I did it. I logged into Aditi and wore Matrice's mesh head. I then played an animation that just rotated the mFaceJaw bone to open and close on a loop. Yes when the Jaw Angle slider was set to the extremes it opened a bit funny like you see in your photos. In RL if someone had a jaw similar to one of the extreem Jaw Angle settings their mouths would also open a bit funny so I myself am not too concerned with how the mouth opens when set to the extremes in SL. I am more concerned with how does the mouth look like when the animation running closes the mouth. In my experiments it closes very nicely so when the mouth closed it looked perfectly normal for a closed mouth no matter what the Jaw Angle slider was set at. The truth is we are asking the new face bones to do two jobs. It is a balancing act between using the Appearance Sliders to work with the new face bones, something all the major mesh body creators who were in the Bento project before it was announced wanted, and animating the face. It is very hard to find a good balance. So far what I am seeing is Matrice did an awesome job and got a huge number of Appearance Sliders to work well with the new face bones. From what I been able to see so far animating the mFaceJaw bone using just rotations works much better than I would have anticipated even at the extreme settings if one uses weights that are very similar to Matrice's head weights. I am not saying I be against changes to the mFaceJaw or the Appearance Sliders. Matrice is brilliant and I know he is following this conversation and if anyone can find a solution that can address your concerns and still make the Appearance Editor sliders work it is Matrice. At this point we are fairly late in the game and I know we can't add anymore bones. I have no idea how much Matrice will be allowed to make changes at this point to the sliders. I wish you had been invited to be apart of the Bento group from the beginning I think your ideas and insights are good and would have had a good impact. The good news is that if you don't like how the Jaw Angle slider works you can disable it by moving your mFaceJaw to a custom bone location. Animations that just use rotation on the mFaceJaw will work just fine.

Hi Mel, I have a bit more time today so I can explain thing a bit better and go into more detail. Matrice of Avastar did about 98% of the work of tying in the new face bones with the Appearance Sliders. The Appearance Sliders are controlled by the avatar_lad.xml file. In order to make very fine and tricky adjustments to the code in the avatar_lad.xml Matrice and Gaia rigged a mesh head to the face bones. In order to get the best deformations each vertex of the face was weighted to 4 bones. They did an awesome job weighting the face. For better or worse this weighting is the optimal weighting for all future mesh heads to optimally work with the Appearance Sliders because the Appearance Sliders were fined tuned to work with Matrice's head weights. I understand your logic and reasoning about the jaw bone moving up and down so much but with Matrice's head weights the jaw bone moving up and down does not have as dramatic effect as you would think it would and his head's mouth opens and closes quite well with the same animation even with the appearance sliders set to extremes. If changes are made at this point so that the mFaceJaw doesn't move up and down so much it could mean a few things. A number of Appearance sliders wouldn't really work anymore or some major changes would be have to be made to both the avatar_lad.xml file and the weighting of the Matrice's head. I know Vir and Matrice are following this discussion quite closely and are taking everything that is being brought up seriously and weighing the pros and cons to any proposed changes. You are being listened to. I am going to do an experiment. I am going to create my own custom mesh head and copy Matrice's head weights to it and see how well they work on a head that has different topology. In theory it should work quite well or at least be a really really good starting point. Once I get the new bones connected to the Appearance Sliders in MayaStar I would then be able to fine tune the weighting of my custom mesh head.

Hi Mel, I took a good look at the Jaw bone and how it moves when you move certain Appearance Sliders. When I played an animation that just animated the mFaceJaw bone using rotation only the mouth animated just fine even when the Appearance Slider for Jaw Angle was set to the extremes. I did the same with the other Chin sliders. They all worked rather well even when combining extreme settings for a number of them at one time. Now if you want to animate the mFaceJaw with translations then there is a problem. The animation will override the mFaceJaw position and cause issues. One solution for custom head mesh creator who don't want the mFaceJaw affected by the sliders is to move the mFaceJaw bone to a custom position away from the default bone position. Then upload your mesh head with "Include Joint positions" selected. Sorry I like to go more in detail but I have to go in RL. Hope that helped. Cathy

Rumegusc Altamura wrote: Sincerely Bento project for avatars human mesh, not only useless, but also harmful. As you say the vast majority of the avatars are human. A) FACE Linden has entered the slide to the deformation of the face, and instead each animation of the face depends on the morphology of the face = is not appropriate any changes to the face by the costumers, even minimal, otherwise it will create the animation of the face of the "MONSTERS" . Also two IDENTICAL faces, but with a different construction of the mesh (vertices and edge positioned differently in space) will not move in the same way. Furthermore, since the assignment of the totally arbitrary weights, the same head mesh with assignment of different weights will move otherwise. it follows: 1) who does Animations, will not make animations for mesh faces if not for a specific face and not the other. 2) users that would be deluding themselves to reproduce your face avatar of SL will be disappointed 3) no sane creator of mind you can afford the luxury of bringing discredit on a head mesh market that will not satisfy any of its customers expectations, but, rather, let them down with faciali animations that do not work, just move a slide. This and much more (I can not make a treaty). B) ELBOW They inserted tails, wings, legs .... but the elbows and knees of human avatars that implode when they bend, we want to do something? some miserable little bone for this problem you could use it. C) HANDS Not being tied to a backward compatibility for the animation of the hands is absurd not to have created a correct rig and a standard mesh of the hand on which those who make animations, could be based to create animations. The position of the hand of the avatar of the base has fingers very Lg between them and not existing the metacarpal bones, when you go to rotate the fingers to push them up against each other remains a space between them. "No problem, you edit the skeleton", true, the fact remains that each one will have his skeleton and there is no universality to get decent animations. Hi Rumegusc, I will try and answer your questions as best I can it was hard for me to follow what you had written. Could be because I just woke up. A) FACE Any custom mesh head created that has vertices and edges in different places other than LL's default avatar will have to have custom weights just like all custom mesh clothes do now. No one is forcing custom head makers to use the new face bones. If they do not want to use the bones they do not have to 1) If someone wants to make facial expressions for multiple mesh heads using the bones they need to animate the bones with rotation only. Those who want to make custom mesh heads to work with these types of animations need to leave the face bones in their default positions and do a good job weighting their head's face. Mesh head creators who make their own animations for their own heads will be able to take advantage of custom bone positions and animations using translations and rotations. 2) Yes it has to be made clear to the customer that a custom mesh head even though it is rigged to the new face bones will not behave exactly like the LL default avatar does when you change the Appearance Editor slider settings just like Fitted Mesh or custom mesh bodies now do not. 3)Again no one if being forced to make mesh heads that use the new facial bones. Making facial expressions using just rotations should work pretty well no matter what Appearance Sliders settings. Will some facial expressions work better with some Appearance Slider settings than others? Yes. Making mesh heads using all the new face bones will be harder than making a mesh head just rigged to the mNeck and mHead bones but to those creators who do and can do it well the rewards will be great. B) ELBOW There was limit to how many bones could be added. Yes an extra bone at the elbow, knee, and hip could make it easier to avoid deformations. If you really want extra bones in these locations you can. You just have to make your own animations using translations but this means you have to make all your own animations. One for walking, running, flying, sitting and so forth. If you are making a custom avatar body you can minimize such deformations without resorting to this by doing very good weighting. C) HANDS LL could not rig the default avatar hands to the new finger bones. I asked them to at a Bento meeting and found out that the default avatar mesh uses different code to attach the default avatar mesh to the skeleton than mesh uploaded using DAE files do. The default avatar mesh can only be rigged to a maximum of 15 bones. This meant the default avatar could not be rigged to the new hand bones or face bones. (Note: The default avatar is made up of 3 separate meshes head, upper body and lower body / legs. So the default avatar body is rigged to almost all of the original bones of the avatar skeleton.) As for more bones for the hands, again there was a limit to the number of bones that could be added to the skeleton. Those of us who were in the Bento group really pushed for at least 3 joints per finger. Yes perhaps more bones than 3 per finger would make for better deformations but again there was a bone limit. Again hand animations that just use rotations of the bones will work well over a large variation of custom hand mesh. I am sorry if I misunderstood what you wrote and answered your questions wrong. I think I understand your concerns. Yes with more bones things could be better but there was a limit to how many could be added. Yes more bones means any mesh rigged to them making universal animations will be much more difficult though making animations with just rotations will work well for a large variety of them. Remember if you don't want to use the new bones you don't have to. If you are a mesh head or body maker you can still make them in the same exact way you made them before the new bones were added. Nothing has been taken away. Those content creators who do use the new bones and do it well will most likely do very well in the marketplace.

Aditi back up and running normally.

An interesting experiment would be, since we can move the bones around with animations using translations, to move mChest bone and animate it to follow the head bone but not animate the left and right pec bones. In theory one could then turn on breast physics and have ponytails or hair that would bounce around the head. Might be interesting to apply physics to the tail bones but I doubt we have enough time to do it in Bento. It would probably have to be a separate project.

Awesome video Medhue! Did you export out a .anim animation of the trunk to SL's Beta Test Grid Aditi to see if it all worked? I would think it would if the Bento bones you were using for the trunk got keyframed. I would also like to mention to make sure that people using this technique that their animations have to contain translations as well as rotations if the Bento bones rotate. The translations using this technique are 100% mandatory or the disconnected Bento bones will not move together like they are connected together. In Maya we can constrain to a bone's rotation or translation or scales. So doing this technique in Maya you would want to constrain your Bento bones to the custom skeleton bones to both rotation and translation. Unfortunately right now Maya users can not export animations with translations of all the bones. There is a wonderful person right now working on it, not me, but I won't say their name because I don't know if they want everyone to know they are working on it. If anyone knows a work around like a free FBX converter that can convert FBX files to .anim files compatible with SL please let us know. I would also like to let people know that if they are moving the face bones around and using them in unique ways, like Medhue is for his trunk, it must be made clear that the facial sliders in the Appearance Editor must be at their default neutral position. If someone were to move the nose slider to be bigger I suspect it make the Elephant look like it accidentally inhaled an aardvark that got stuck. I think I saw that in a Pink Panther cartoon once. LOL

Interesting idea Medhue but I know we can't add anymore bones to the skeleton. Here's an idea. How about adding an Attachment Point for each of the new face bones in the avatatar_lad.xml? We could make it so that these new attachment points you can not attach prims or mesh to like the traditional attachment points like the left or right hand attachment points but make it possible to weight mesh to and use these new attachment points so they can be animated. This way all the mFace bones are used by the sliders but the animations only affect the new attachments. The attachments are basically the child bones you are talking about. Of course this might get shot down if adding attachment points causes the same lag as regular bones which we are already at our limit. I am not 100% sure this would solve all our problems.

It could be any number of things that are causing the skinweights box to be greyed out. To be able to upload Fitted Mesh all the mBone/Normal Bones have to be in the skin cluster before you export your DAE file. You do not have to have all the cBones/Collision Bones in the skin cluster. If a single bone in your skeleton you have rigged to is misspelled or one of the letters is in the wrong upper or lower case then this will also grey out the skin weights box. Starting simple and making sure everything is working first before trying to upload a rigged mesh. 1. Create a simple polygon cube. (Do not rig it) 2. Export the cube as a DAE file and upload it to SL or the SL Test grid Aditi which is free. 3. Rez the cube in SL or on Aditi. 4. Rig the cube to just the mBones/Normal Bones. 5. Export the cube as a DAE file and upload. 6. Wear the cube. 7. Start with a fresh cube and rig it to all the cBones/Collision Bones. 8. Use MayaStar to select all the mBones/Normal Bones and hold shift key down and select the cube. 9. Using MayaStar in the MayaStar menu click Add to Skin Cluster. 10. Export cube as a DAE. 11. UPload Cube to SL or Aditi. 12. Wear Cube. You should be able to do each step. If any fail then that will help point to the problem. If each step is successful then the problem is most likely in your mesh somehow. You may have too many vertices in your mesh or sometimes Maya doesn't like it when texture files are applied to the Lamberts or Phongs. You may have too many materials applied to your dress. 8 is the maximum. Your UVs might be messed up. Sometimes there is garbage nodes created making a mesh just not work. If that is the case export the dress as an OBJ and import the OBJ to clean up the garbage nodes. You can save the weights of your dress first using a plugin like Doraskinweights then import the weights onto the OBJ dress so you don't have to do them all over again. Hope that helps. Cathy

adrem2011 wrote: The problem remains found You do all those things This might require an older version I will contact you in SL and we can setup a time and date to get together to try and figure out your problem. I know MayaStar works with Maya 2012. I have Maya 2014 and it works just fine. There is probably something you and I are overlooking a setting or some step.

OK I been trying to recreate your problem. I believe it has to do with Normalize Weights setting. Either in the paint skin weights tool, which is just above the bone selection in the tool settings for paint skin weights, or when you initially bind the top to the skeleton. In the Smooth Bind settings you can set the Normalize Weights to either None, Interactive or Post. I noticed it was set to Post in the Paint Skin Weights Tool Settings in your video. You will have to try different combinations of the Normalize Weights in both the Smooth Bind and in the Paint Skin Weights Tool Settings. Also when you Smooth Bind make sure you use "Classic Linear". My old Maya only used Classic Linear. I don't know what other types of effects newer types of methods would produce. You also want to make sure Maintain Max influences is off in the Smooth Bind but I think you already have that off judging by the way your mesh reacts. Hope that helps. Cathy

I disagree. LL is not insulting existing SL users. You may have taken it that way. In my opinion Sansar has to try and attract a different customer base than SL. Sansar also has to be a separate product from SL so as to not have to try and bring over content that is based on running on outdated technology. I am not talking individual's computers I am talking bout server code and equipment. If all Sansar was to be a replacement for SL making Sansar SL 2.0 what would end up happening is it wouldn't draw hardly any new customers. It would just draw the same ones they already had. Then nearly all of the SL 1.0 residents would divide their time and money in half between SL 1.0 and SL 2.0. Since LL isn't shutting down SL 1.0 they still have all the expense of running SL 1.0 plus all the new expense of running SL 2.0. Could either SL 1.0 or SL 2.0 survive if all it is doing is dividing up the same amount of revenue that SL 1.0 has now? I doubt it. Being upset or feeling insulted that LL is developing Sansar to be a product that stands on its own is like being upset with EA Sports because it decides to make a new golf game when you are a big fan of their current football game.

I think that Sansar being specifically optimized for HMDs like Oculus Rift is great. Because if Sansar can work smoothly on them then working on a conventional monitor will be a piece of cake. I like to know what is the average amount of time an HMD or Oculus Rift can be worn comfortably. I then like to know the average amount of time residents of SL spend logged into SL per session. My guess for HMD it is like 45 minutes to and hour while average login session for SL is 3 to 4 hours. Personally I think CastAR has much more potential than conventional HMDs. CastAR is much lighter and doesn't suffer from Simulator Induced Sickness so it can be worn for much longer periods of time comfortably than HMDs.

Actually the feet do already have two bones that can be animated but that for some reason the vast majority of animator and mesh designers ignore. Most animators only animate the mAnkle bones for walking animations. There are two other bones to animate the feet mFoot and mToe bones. The mFoot is for animating the ball of the foot and the mToe bones can be used to animate the toes. While all the toes would have to move together the mToe bones are more than adequate. There really is no reason why mesh body creators couldn't make just one pair of feet and use animation overrides to position the feet so that the same mesh foot could be used for both flats and high-heeled shoes. I know overall it is easier to just make multiple sets of mesh feet so they work with basically all walk animations than it would be to make one pair of mesh feet and rig it to all bones in the feet. Hope that helps. Cathy

What Kwakkelde Kwak is probably the easiest and most practical solution. This being said there is another way. If the floor is it's own separate mesh it can have up to 8 materials. For the example I am about to give I will only be using 4. Take a flat square plane and divide it into 4 equal quarters so that two are across the top and two on the bottom. Create UVs for each quarter but have them in the same UV set. Make each of them cover the whole UV space so you have all 4 stacked on top of each other. Select one of the 4 and move it out of the UV space so that the lower left hand corner which should have been at coordinates XY UVs of (X= 0 Y=0) and move the whole shell or island over so the lower UV left hand is now at (X= -1 Y=0). Do the same for the other 2 UV islands / shells but put them not on top of the one you just moves. So put one so the lower UV left corner is at (X=-1 Y=1) and the other can be at (X=0 Y = 1). What this will do is allow you to bake out the shadows and floor texture for the UVs that are still in the UV space between XY = 0 and XY = 1. You will have to bake out 4 separate textures. So to bake out the other 3 you will have to move the UV you just baked out and move one of the others back into the UV space. Thing about SL is it doesn't care if UVs of the mesh are outside the XY = 0 and XY = 1 space so you don't have to have the UVs stacked on top of each other when you create your DAE file. Now if you don't want to keep moving the UV islands / Shells and bake all the shadows at once you can. Just increase the UV range in the Baking Options window. And you will want to bake out a texture that is minimum 2048 by 2048 with fill texture seams set at zero. Then take it into Photoshop and cut up single image into 4 1024 by 1024 images so you have 4 separate textures to upload to SL. One for each of the 4 materials or in SL are called faces of the mesh. Basically what you would end up with, in my example, is one mesh object with 4 faces but each face has the maximum UV area for maximum resolution of the 1024 by 1024 texture. Kwakkelde Kwak's method is way more efficient and easier and produces less lag but sometimes it just can't produce the effect you are looking for so good to know the method I just described. Hope that helps. Cathy

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: PS Despise might be a too strong word, I don't despise anyone, but insinuating I am hypocritical is out of line if you ask me, happy new year to you as well. I apologise if you felt I was out of line. The whole point I was trying to make was that worrying about a rule being broke especially when the rule would only be broken if LL were to sell mesh created by a particular resident is over exaggerating the situation. The chances of LL actually selling mesh outside SL is so remote that it is not worth worrying about. I am glad that you realized that despise was too strong of a word. I have a fairly good idea that there are people out there with pirated copies of my MayaStar and MayaFit though I can't say for sure. I have worked over a year full time on MayaStar yet I would not despise these people. Don't get me wrong I don't have warm cuddly feelings towards them if they exist and would hope if they liked my work would eventually end up buying a copy. Let's just agree to disagree. Hope you are having a very happy new year.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: So partially based on the chances of getting caught, your advice is to break the rules? I agree the chances are slim, but the chance is real and the penalty is huge, especially for a student. (Think tens of thousands of US dollars) My advice would be to contact Autodesk before using an educational licenced version of Maya/3ds Max/Mudbox etc. to build content for SL. Explain what your educational goals are and how SL fits into the picture, make clear you will not sell the items and explain the LL TOS. Of course that puts you on the radar, but it will eliminate any unknowns completely. Autodesk is always looking for future customers, so they might agree. As much as I enjoy using their products, I despise how they operate. They have proved over and over that they are a power and money hungry company, you as a user should be well aware of that. Then again I also despise people who illegally use products I pay dearly for PS If anyone is interested in a licence for any Autodesk products, they are changing their business model next year from perpetual licences to subscriptions. I lived long enough and am too old to worry about the small stuff anymore. I have learned long ago that worrying about something that the chances of happening are so minute that worrying about it will paralyze you from doing anything. Do you own a cell phone? Is it wifi compatible? If so then most likely you have committed a felony every time you drove in a car with it and no I am not talking about talking or sending text on it. If you have it set to connect to wifi networks automatically your phone connects to many wiki wireless routers as you drive down the street and no it is not the routers owners responsibility to secure their network with a password. It is the cell phones owners legal responsibility to keep their phone from connecting illegally to unsecured networks. I have had police officers state that they can pull anyone over they wish. All they have to do is follow them and within 10 minutes the person they are following will commit a traffic violation because no one is a perfect driver and follow ever single rule and law of the road because there are just too many rules for anyone to be able to follow perfectly. On average studies show every American citizen commits one or two felonies a day wether intentional or not. I can predict what most likely would happen if the original poster contacted Autodesk as you suggest. Nothing. I doubt Autodesk would even reply. Why? Because it wouldn't be worth Autodesks time to bother paying their lawyers to get involved in answering a question of something that they could get so little compensation for and for something that might only happen if LL were to sell the mesh that is if LL even were able to dig through the millions of items residents made and decided that the original posters mesh was worth selling. An event that will most likely never happen. I mean there is a point of worrying about breaking rules which become rediculous. Do you search the Internet after you make an original design in mesh to make sure that no one ever had made something in mesh or RL that is so similar that you are in copyright violations? My guess is not. Why would you? Worrying that to that much of an extreme would be ridiculous. I have looked at your stuff on the Marketplace and I can tell you that you are probably in copyright violations for a number of things you sell there and I am sure that stuff is only a small fraction of the stuff you have made and uploaded to SL. Despising people for breaking rules when one themselves breaks rules is a bit hypocritical. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Cathy Foil wrote: Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: I take it that means you have an educational licence.... That means you are not allowed to use your copy of Maya for SL. I am not sure you have that quite right Kwakkelde. From what I understand you can not sell things for money with educational licence for Maya. So as long as you don't sell the things you upload to SL Autodesk doesn't prohibit this. I'm not a lawyer but to me the SL TOS seems pretty clear. Except as otherwise described in any Additional Terms (such as a contest’s official rules) which will govern the submission of your User Content, you hereby grant to Linden Lab, and you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and sell, re-sell or sublicense (through multiple levels)(with respect to Second Life, Inworld or otherwise on the Service as permitted by you through your interactions with the Service), and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media, software, formula, or medium now known or hereafter developed, and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed, and to advertise, market, and promote the same. You agree that the license includes the right to copy, analyze and use any of your Content as Linden Lab may deem necessary or desirable for purposes of debugging, testing, or providing support or development services in connection with the Service and future improvements to the Service. The license granted in this Section 2.3 is referred to as the "Service Content License." How can you allow Linden Lab to sell your items if you aren't allowed to do so yourself? Kwakkelde you bring up a fair point with LL TOS but I was only responding to Autodesks TOS for using the Student Version. LL's TOS really isn't completely enforceable under all circumstances. There is no such thing as an iron clad TOS. I highly doubt the few little things the original poster might make for their own personal use in SL even if by some miracle LL were to sell the items for profit at a later date that for a couple of dollars that Autodesk would go after LL or the original poster. Chances of Autodesk even being able to determine that the mesh objects LL sold were indeed made with a student version are about a billion to one. Battle Star Galactica and Star Trek have both said officially it is fine with them for SL residents to make BSG and Star Trek items in SL as long as people don't sell the things they make. I doubt LL would be foolish enough to try and sell those types of items and try to justify their TOS to get away with it. I am sure that the current TOS was written to try and keep residents from sueing LL because LL inadvertently used something they made or a design of something that was similar. I highly doubt LL will ever actually sell content made by residents to other companies for use outside of SL. You bring up a good point and it shows that LL really needs to go back to the original TOS or rewrite the current TOS in such a way that they will never sell any item made by residents outside SL. If LL is hoping to get Indy game developers to use Sansar as a game development platform then Sansar can not use the current TOS. No game developer would ever give LL such sweeping rights to their work. It would make any Indy Game developed on Sansar impossible to sell. No company like EA Sports or Google would buy such a game if they couldn't have exclusive rights to it. I still stand by my original advice to the original poster. Take some classes. Use the student version to practice with and upload them to SL for your own personal use but do not sell them. Rent Maya LT and make things to sell on SL with it not your student version. Your more likely to get hit by lightning ten times than to get in trouble with Autodesk for LL selling any of the stuff uploaded for personal use.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: I take it that means you have an educational licence.... That means you are not allowed to use your copy of Maya for SL. I am not sure you have that quite right Kwakkelde. From what I understand you can not sell things for money with educational licence for Maya. So as long as you don't sell the things you upload to SL Autodesk doesn't prohibit this. I always suggest to people just starting out in Maya who also want to sell the things they make with Maya to rent off steam Maya LT for $30 USD a month. With Maya LT you can make up to $10,000 a year before Autodesk requires you to buy the full version of Maya. One can still take Maya classes and use the educational copy for practicing and making mesh they don't intend to sell and then only use files and mesh created on Maya LT to upload things to SL to sell. YouTube is a great place to learn Maya. I particularly like Cannedmushroom's channel https://www.youtube.com/user/cannedmushrooms Hope that helps you EVM5555. Cathy

Perrie Juran wrote: In the meanwhile they do continue to issue updates and new features such as Project Bento. As to other projects LL's track record is to keep mum on what they are working on or thinking of until they are about ready to go live. This irks many of us. There are some of us who are of the opinion that no major project gets approved for developing in SL unless it can be a direct benefit to Sansar. Project Bento certainly has that flavor. I was and am in the Project Bento group. I was there at the very first group meeting. I can clear up a few misconceptions. One the project wasn't announced to the general public because when we started working on Bento we didn't even know if it would be possible to add that many bones to the skeleton. We had to do test skeletons and see just how many bones could we add before major problems would show up. Then LL had to send the test skeleton with 100 or more bones added to a special company that ran it on like 300 graphics cards just to make sure there didn't appear to be any major issues. This process took months. Basically we were still making changes to the Bento skeleton just a couple of days before the project was announced. My feeling and understanding was LL didn't want to get everyone excited about the new bones only to find out a couple of months down the line that it wasn't possible. The second thing I keep hearing is Bento is somehow related to Sansar. This couldn't be father from the truth. None of the bones added or any of the decisions were made with Sansar in mind. The Bento skeleton has nothing to do with Sansar. The Bento skeleton has always been and is only for the benefit of SL. My hope would be that Sansar could upload custom skeletons. This would mean that the Bento Skeleton might be able to be used in Sansar. Don't get me wrong. This is not insider information. I am not in any Sansar project group. Nor have any of the Linden's given me any sort of clue or information about Sansar. What I come away with from being on Project Sansar is that LL isn't giving up on SL nor is Sansar a replacement for SL. While resources at LL are mostly going to Sansar LL is still devoting resources to improving SL.

You can get Maya and Blender files here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Testing Now you can only upload mesh rigged to the Bento Skeleton on the Beta Test Grid named Aditi.

If you can afford ZBrush get ZBrush. If ZBrush is a bit too expensive get 3D Coat from Steam. 3D Coat auto retopology has gotten much better over the last two years. You need to know the way you model in ZBrush or 3D Coat is different than how you model in Maya or Silo. ZBrush and 3D Coat is more like modeling in Clay where you sculpt the shoes. Maya and Silo you more model what is called subdivision modeling. Benefits to clay type of modeling is it can be fast and end up with a more organic feel. Bad is you have to retopologize your mesh in order to get it ready for SL. Benefits to subdivision modeling is it can also be fast but less organic in feel or at least the final product. Another plus is it does not need to be retopoligized to once you are done with your initial design it is ready to go and always has better edge flow and quads than having to retopologize with the auto features in ZBrush and 3D Coat. If you want to try the clay modeling approach try Sculptris it is free. http://sculptris.en.softonic.com/ For shoes I say subdivision modeling would be my perfered method but what ever method works best for the individual creator is what is most important. Since you are only doing shoes you could rent Maya LT from Steam for just $30 UDS a month. Maya LT you can model and rig in but you don't get all access to all the Maya features and tools. You have to export your rigged FBX file and convert it to DAE with Autodesks Free stand alone program FBX Converter. Maya LT allows users to make up to, I believe, $10,000 a year before being required to buy the regular version of Maya. You could also take some online Maya classes or sign up at your local community college and get the Student Version of Maya for free. The student version is a full version of Maya. Once you made enough money with Maya LT you could then buy the regular version of Maya. This is what I would do if I was just starting out. Hope that helps. Cathy

Silo is a great basic modeling program. I bought it two years ago but haven't used it much. I have played around with it and I think it make a great beginner's modeling program. I am not to sure about its ability to make UVs but you could use other free tools for that like Blender. Silo's user interface for basic modeling looks wonderful and very intuitive. Since all it does is modeling there isn't a whole lot of stuff in there to get you confused. Silo doens't do rigging so you will have to rig in another program. Right now Silo is on sale on Steam $27.99. Only real drawbacks to Steam is you have to log into Steam every time you want to use the program but for the price it is worth it. Here's a link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/100400/ There are lots of other programs for sale on Steam as well. You should check them out but I say for $27.99 definitely get Silo. Hope that helps. Cathy PS if you can't afford ZBrush another totally awesome program for sale on Steam is 3D Coat. It doesn't quite match up to ZBrush yet. I say it is about 70 or 80% as good as ZBrush but a fraction of the price and it has Physics Based Rendering PBR for short which last time I checked ZBrush didn't have. Get the Educational version for $80 USD. You will be limited to 7 layers of textures at 1024 by 1024 but that is perfect for SL. You can always combine textures in Photoshop or Gimp if you need more than 7 layers. I have used 3D Coat extensively and can honestly say it is one of the best programs I have every used. It also doesn't do rigging so you will still need a program like Blender. Here's a link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/100980/

If you are using Maya make sure you only have one UV set. Mesh in SL can only have one UV set. When I have uploaded mesh with multiple UV sets the textures do funny things in SL. Hope that helps. Cathy

Hi Medhue! I loved your video. I think it is a pretty fair assessment of the situation with the face bones. Remember you can move the face bones around and upload your DAE with Include Joint Position. If you can find better joint positions please do and let us know their new locations. LL wants feedback and if you can find significantly better positions I am sure LL will adopt them as the standard. I agree translations of for the face bones would be wonderful. I also think animating scales of the face bones would also be just as useful. The reasons translations were not included were two fold. One was a concern that if someone did upload their own mesh with different joint positions then the default animations with translations would not work. Rotating just the joints only should work well over a larger variety of bone positions or at least that's the theory. If you can show the same animation that use translations works well with two more head meshes who have significant different face bone positions I think LL would really consider making it so translations work with the face bones. The second reason I believe is that their just wasn't enough time to modify the code to allow for all the face bones to be able to be animated with translations at least not for the initial release. The nose bones are a lot closer to the surface of the skin than all the rest. You might want to try moving them deeper into the head so you get less distortion. Personally I wonder if we really need forehead bones. I suggest you move those to bones and add one to the upper lip in the middle and one to the lower lip in the middle. My hope is that the bones are not going to cause as much of a performance hit as our initial test has led us to believe. I love to have two bones for each eyelid instead of one each. In my test they made for way more expressive eyes. I have also put forth that lower LODs could have fewer bones than the highest LOD. Wings and tail certainly should be on all levels of LOD but I think we could do away with the face and hand bones on the low and lowest LODs perhaps even on the medium LOD as well. This would certainly cut down on the performance hit. LL wants to wait to see if there would really even be a need for this though before they commit resources to changing viewer code for this and I don't blame them. Please Medhue keep assessing the bones and making videos. They could certainly have a great impact on the decisions LL will be making. Cathy