Vir Linden

Timmy, Re: how to handle a lip ring: We do have a new attachment point for the jaw, called, originally enough, Jaw. I'm not sure how well it will work for a lip ring, though. Something attached to the jaw will follow along when the mouth opens and closes, but will not track with facial animations where the lips are moving. Attachment points are pretty limited for following along with fine details of the avatar. Once the set of bones is finalized (soon!) we can discuss possible updates to the attachment points.

For the last few weeks, we've been soliciting ideas and evaluating alternatives for updates to the Bento skeleton. We have gotten a lot of great suggestions from our testers, and are approaching the end of this process. A new Bento build with an updated and hopefully final skeleton will be coming soon. Some description of the upcoming changes is below. If you want to learn more, please join us for the Bento User Group meeting tomorrow (https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bento_User_Group), or post to this thread. What this means to you: The Bento project viewer will be updated. Like previous updates, this one should be automatically downloaded and applied. More bones that can be used for more things! I'll go into a bit more detail below about the changes that are coming. Some existing bones are going away or changing position. This means that some existing content that worked with previous versions of the bento viewer will need to be updated and re-uploaded. Previously uploaded content may no longer display as intended. The servers on Aditi will also be updated with the new skeleton, so the set of uploadable bones will change. What's next after this: We will be freezing the skeleton soon. If the upcoming build has serious bugs that require additional modification, we may do that, but in general you should expect that the final set of bones will be set in this build or a near-future one. Once we have the final set of bones for the skeleton, we will work on finalizing changes to the sliders and possibly adding a few more attachment points. So what's coming in the updated skeleton? The build currently going through QA and targeted for release as a project viewer includes the following changes: New spine joints! We were previously unable to add new joints between the joints of the original default avatar skeleton, because of a bug this triggered in rendering the default avatar. We believe this issue is now fixed, and the update will include four new spine joints: two between mPelvis and mTorso, and two between mTorso and mChest. By default these bones are folded up inside the current spine and will not affect the appearance of the avatar, but like other bones they can be repositioned in uploaded meshes, or animated. New face bone root. You may have noticed we did not add extra neck bones in the list of spine joints above; the intent is that this additional face bone root could be used as an extra neck bone if desired. New center face bones. There are three new face bones along the mid-line of the face, two on the lips and one on the forehead. New ear bones. The ears now have two joints each, allowing for floppy or otherwise more flexible ears. An additional pair of limbs. One of the most popular requests was for more bones attached to the pelvis and suitable for use as limbs or tails. We will be adding two limbs of 3 joints each, plus a new root bone that they are joined by. These are named "Hind" limbs, but using the root bone it should be possible to relocate the limbs for various possible uses - for example, as additional hind legs, or as an extra pair of arms. New wing "fan" bones. One additional bone for each wing is being added, and should now allow a simple fan as would be used in a bat-type wing. Removing two wing root bones. Originally the wings were connected to a chain of 3 root bones. This was intended as a workaround for the inability to animate positions. Animating positions is now enabled, so we only need one wing root bone. Various bone position changes.

These are the results from the recent Bento Bones survey. Thanks to everyone who participated! We had 54 responses that this summary is based on. Rankings: The first question asked for ratings of 7 proposed joints or sets of joints. As some of you noted, questions 1 and 3 were duplicates; sorry about that. We looked at the responses in terms of average ranking (lower is better), and also looked at how many people ranked each proposal in the top 3 or bottom 3. Face root bones for upper, mid, lower face (3 new bones) - rating: 4.00, top 3: 18, bottom 3: 18 2nd bone for each ear to support floppy ears (2 new bones) - rating 3.92, top 3: 24, bottom 3: 19 Multiple face bone roots (mFaceUpperRoot, mFaceCenterRoot, mFaceLowerRoot) (3 new bones) - rating 3.93, top 3: 21, bottom 3: 19 Single face bone root attached to mHead (could also be used as an additional neck bone) (1 new bone) - rating 4.22, top 3: 18, bottom 3: 21 Additional neck or spine bones(assuming the bug preventing this can be fixed) (1-3 new bones) - rating 3.70, top 3: 22, bottom 3: 15 Additional wing "finger" bones (2 or 4 new bones, assuming we're just fleshing out the "fan" of bones a bit): rating 4.32, top 3: 13, bottom 3: 23 Support for the existing mToe bones to help with alternate leg shapes (assuming the bug preventing this can be fixed) (no new bones) - rating 3.67, top 3: 21, bottom 3: 16 There weren’t any runaway hits or complete misses, but some patterns do stand out here. Questions 1 and 3 (the duplicates) got similar ratings, as you would expect. Floppy ears and additional spine joints are particular winners. mToe support got the best average rating, although it didn’t particularly stand out in how often it turned up in the top or bottom 3. Multiple face bone roots seemed to be preferred to the single root proposal. Additional wing bones clearly came in at the bottom, with few showings in the top 3 and the worst average rating. Free-form responses/Other comments: The other 2 questions allowed open responses. Overall 18 people answered question 2, and 14 answered question 3. I tried to break these out into specific requests or types of comments and counted each response toward whichever of those seemed to apply. Responses could count toward multiple items in the list. The requests and counts were: More tails/limbs or more tail joints: 8 Face center bones: 3 More bone weights per vertex: 2 Custom skeleton: 2 Head sliders for shape control: 1 Tongue 2nd bone: 1 Additional bone in groin: 1 Animations allow position and scale: 1 Move the outer cheek bones lower: 1 Toe bones: 1 Ear - 2nd bone: 1 Extra finger bones: 1 Bone constraints: 1 Better access to translations in animation export: 1 Problem with survey or software: 4 Other comment about the survey or project: 5 So here there is a clear winner; we had a vigorous write-in campaign for more more limbs or tail bones attached to the pelvis. Most cited a desire to support hexapods, centaurs, or other multi-limbed creatures. We’re working to get the skeleton finalized in the next few weeks. Watch this thread or join us at the Bento User Group for updates as we continue the process. Thanks!

I like the idea of having a way to override a wider range of animations. Currently I think the llSetAnimationOverride hook only applies to animations that are part of the server-mediated locomotion process, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to extend using that mechanism. If you could point me at sample content that uses the existing facial animations it would be helpful - either send me copies or provide pointers to marketplace listings. Thanks!

I'll discuss the survey at today's Bento User Group meeting, and post something to the forum after that, probably tomorrow. Everyone is welcome to join us for the meeting today at 1 PM SLT - details at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bento_User_Group

There have been several messages in this thread related to increasing the number of skin weights allowed per vertex beyond the current limit of 4. We understand that this would be useful, and might consider it for future work. Unfortunately, it would not fit within the Bento project for scope reasons. Currently the skin weights are packed in 128-bit entities that we treat as optimized vectors of 4 floats, so changing the limit would require reworking a bunch of the underlying data structures, and would have unknown performance impact since various vector-optimized operations would no longer work. That's not to say it's completely impossible, just that it would be too big an additional task to undertake for Bento at this stage. We are eager to get Bento out for all our main grid users as soon as we can, which means at this stage we have to focus primarily on getting the final skeleton done, and fixing high priority bugs.

Thanks Gaia! Fixed the link.

We're hoping to pin down the final Bento skeleton soon. Anyone who wants to weigh in, please take our (very brief) survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RL7F3SX. This is mostly based on user suggestions from BUG-11132. Thanks!

I'm not sure how the new lower face root would work with the jaw. Originally we had jaw as the parent of both tongue and lower lip. Is it now split so tongue is attached to jaw, and lower lips are attached to lower face root? If so, why would that be preferable?

The horse looks great! So you needed just one additional bone for this? Does it cause any problems for the default avatar running with the modified skeleton? I'm thinking it should be OK if the default av doesn't use mSkull. Using the wings as a mane is a cool twist. Nice to see bones getting interesting uses that no one had originally planned for.

Thanks for filing the bug. It looks like we had a configuration problem on BentoExperimental1. Believe it's fixed now, but please let us know if you are still getting those upload errors.

We will be meeting tomorrow, Thurs, Jan 14, but 30 minutes later than our usual time slot. Latest, as usual, is at https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bento_User_Group Hope to see you there. Please bring questions and cool avatars!

Where were you trying to upload your content? It should work in the BentoExperimental1 region, but fail in other regions on Aditi. If it's failing in BentoExperimental1, could you file a JIRA, and attach a file that shows the problem? Thanks!

We've had some requests for the ability to experiment with alternative bones to the current Bento skeleton. Since bone names are checked on upload of animations and meshes, trying to change the bones will not work on most Aditi regions. To enable such experimentation, we have set up a region where the bone name checks are disabled, so uploaded content can reference any desired bone names. The region is called BentoExperimental1. Some things to keep in mind about testing with alternative skeletons: You don't need to use this for typical Bento testing. The experimental region is only useful if you want to experiment with alternative bone proposals. Testing alternative skeletons requires you to edit a complicated and undocumented file in the viewer, called avatar_skeleton.xml. If this file gets messed up, things may display incorrectly or the viewer may not run at all. We suggest saving a copy of the file before doing any editing. If things get completely messed up, you can always restore the file by reinstalling the latest Bento project viewer. The viewer only has one representation of the expected skeleton structure; if you change avatar_skeleton.xml, you will change how your own avatar and all other avatars will be displayed in your viewer. On the other hand, no changes you make to your own viewer will affect how anyone else sees you. If you want someone else to see your altered skeleton, they would need to change their own copy of the file to match your changes. So bear in mind that people running un-altered Bento viewers will not see your new bones as intended and your avatar may look completely wrong to them. There is a known limitation that adding new bones between the bones of the standard skeleton does not work correctly - for example, trying to add additional joints along the neck/spine. If you make such changes, the default avatar will display incorrectly. We may or may not have time to investigate this issue before Bento is released. Please let us know how it goes!

The discussion on animating joint positions produced some good examples of use cases where this type of animation is helpful or even required. Based on the feedback to date, we will be re-enabling animation of joint positions on aditi. We are looking forward to seeing what you all can do with the additional capabilities. As before, nothing is final until it goes to the main grid, and as always, please test things, break things, and tell us about any problems you find. Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion. So that’s the short answer: if you have been waiting to try to upload animations including joint positions, you can do that now. However, the issues that influenced us to disable such animations in the first place are still present, and in the remainder of the post I will discuss those issues in a bit more detail, along with what implications this may have for development of Bento during this test period. What are the problems associated with animating joint positions? The main ones are: 1. Avatar distortions. Animation of positions (except for the special case of the pelvis) was never designed into the product and is not supported as well as we would like for a supported feature. In particular, it is easy to get the avatar into a distorted shape by running such animations, which can require relogging to fix. This is not a good user experience, and one thing we will be investigating during the test period is whether we can improve this behavior, providing ways to re-initialize joint positions in a predictable way. This will likely require delving into some complex corners of our code, and could affect our schedule if it turns out to be feasible at all. 2. Bypassing the skeleton hierarchy. Given the ability to move joints to arbitrary position, it is possible to use animations to put a mesh into basically any desired shape. This has generated some impressive and creative work, but since it bypasses the intended bone hierarchy, it requires much more complex animations. For example, consider the extreme case where there is no defined hierarchy at all, just a collection of unrelated joints that can be animated independently. To do a “touch your toes” animation, you would have to move every joint of the upper body at every keyframe. With a conventional skeleton, you would have to bend at the waist and shoulders, and the rest of the bones could just follow along based on the skeletal hierarchy. So this means more complex animations, which require more bandwidth to send, and more work to run in the viewer. Result: more lag for many users. Bypassing the hierarchy is especially of concern during this test period, because we are trying to come up with the best set of bones for the extended skeleton. If a large percentage of testers are working with arbitrarily free-floating bones, then they are not actually testing the skeleton as designed, and are not giving us useful feedback. The implication here is that if you are working on a project that seems to require such hierarchy-ignoring free-floating bones, we ask that you (a) do this with as few bones as possible, for efficiency reasons, and (b) let us know about the issues you are encountering so that we can potentially update the skeleton to support those use cases. 3. Scaling issues. One advantage of rotation-only transformations is that they work independently of the size of the avatar. For example, you could make a rotation-based dance animation that worked equally well for a tiny, a normal-sized human, and a giant. But what if you wanted to make a smile animation that included translations, and use it for all those avatars? The magnitude of the translations would be appropriate for only one size of avatar, and would generate effects far too large or too small for other sizes. (This is actually a somewhat more complex issue, since it depends on whether we’re talking about changing the avatar size via sliders that affect the scale of some bones, or via bone position overrides in the mesh - these two mechanisms do not combine with animated positions in the same way). During the test period, we will do some investigation into whether we can improve on this behavior, but at this point it is by no means guaranteed that we will have a fix before Bento goes live, or ever. This means that animations that include position changes may always be tied to particular avatar shapes and sizes, in a way that rotation-based animations are not. It will be important for content creators to be aware of this. Overall, while we would like to address all the outlined issues and go live with animating bone positions enabled and all the bugs fixed, it may prove impossible to do in the time we have. We look forward to a productive investigation period on this issue. To keep things actionable and efficient, please make sure comments on the subject of bone position animations include reference to specific examples on aditi. And of course we are still looking forward to your feedback on other Bento-specific topics as well!

We are adding a weekly (most weeks) meeting for discussion of the Bento project. It will be held in the Mesh Sandbox 2 region of Aditi. Please feel free to join us. Details at: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bento_User_Group

We've had a few requests for additional bones or attachment points in this forum thread. I've tried to collect them all in a Jira BUG at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-11132. Please add any additional requests there.

Tornleaf, thanks for the feedback. I like the fox! Could you describe what the problem is with trying to close the eyes using only rotations? You've probably seen this by now, but there is a bit more info on the different joints at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/BentoSkeletonGuide. Alt eyes are intended primarily for people who want to control their gaze direction explicitly, but could also be used for extra eyes if desired.

Polysail, thanks much for adding your JIRA with the detailed discussion of facial animations and translations. We are very much still looking at the issue, and specific examples like this are very helpful.

Re: using "Right" vs "R" and so on in attachment point names: unfortunately the older attachment points aren't named consistently either, so we have "Right Ear", "Right Pec", but "R Uppper Arm", "R Forearm", so you could legitimately make a case for naming the new attachment points either way. Since the long form, with "Right" and "Left" fully spelled out, is more common in the existing attachment points, as well as in other existing bones, I think it may make more sense to standardize on that.

Inarra, you wrote: "What is *really* needed is more options on upload. The extensions to the skeleton are good and certainly will increase the opportunities for unusual avatars. For humans, how many bones are there now of the 206 in the human body?" Even with the additional joints, we are by no means including all the bones of the human body. For performance reasons, it would not really be possible to include all the bones of the human body in our skeleton. Also, some joints don't really correspond to parts of the skeleton at all (for example, the new face ones) and others correspond to parts of a non-human skeleton (for example, the wings). Are there particular bones that you expecially think should be included? And are there other upload options you have in mind besides adding more bones? Thanks!

Hi all. We're back from the holidays and looking forward to getting back into Bento work. Thanks for all the feedback over the last couple of weeks. We'll be responding to individual issues and in some cases asking followup questions over the next few days. As before, if you have specific bugs or feature requests, the best way to follow up with us is to file a bug report with [bENTO] in the summary, and as much detail as possible in the body. More about filing bug reports is at https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-report-a-bug/ta-p/733545. If you have data files for upload we can test (mesh or animation), that would be especially useful - please attach any relevant test files or images to the bug report.

Sorry, if that was unclear. We're not planning to revisit fitted mesh as part of Bento - what I meant about adding support for more sliders was that we hope to have more of the new bones hooked up to more of the existing sliders. For example, some of the sliders that affect the nose of the default avatar might also be connected to the new Bento nose bones. But since a lot of the existing sliders are based on blend shapes, there isn't any guarantee that we can get something equivalent in all cases. Basically we will do what we can, updating some subset of the sliders. Having a more complete solution for mesh avatar customization would be great, and it's possible we will get a chance to address it at some point, but it's not specifically part of Bento.

Re: what is the "anim" format, it's a little confusing. Basically what is called anim format in SL is just a direct dump of the contents of one of our keyframe animation objects. There are other formats called ".anim" out there that have nothing to do with the the SL one. So a tool will only produce a .anim file that we recognize if it's specifically designed for that, and such a file won't be useful outside of Second Life.

The alt eye bones are mainly there in case you want to take over animating the eyes yourself. With the standard eye bones, the viewer takes control of the eyes directly. I suppose you could also use them for a creature with extra eyes. See https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/BentoSkeletonGuide for a bit more info on the motivations for the various bones.