Vir Linden

You said: "I think to animate face bones with rotations only some bones on the face would need an extra bone/joint at the tip to compensate for angle, like the lips for instance and maybe the eyebrows. It does mean a few extra bones but it would help. This isn't the preferred way to animate face bones animators know this but it seems "rotations only' is important to the Lab." Any specifics on which bones or how you would use them? If you want to post a more detailed request, submitting a JIRA would be helpful. Thanks.

We've put together some additional documentation about the avatar skeleton extensions - please see https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/BentoSkeletonGuide for a list of the new bones and attachment points.

We are planning to add support for more sliders during the Project Viewer test period. We do not know how many yet. It's not clear whether we will be able to get acceptable support for all the sliders, since many of the existing ones are based on blend shapes.

Nothing is final until we go to the main grid. The purpose of the testing period on Aditi is to identify and if possible fix any issues with the proposed skeleton. It's possible we will add, remove or change bones as a result of feedback from the project viewer - so bone suggestions or bug reports are both very much fair game.

To clarify, what is different on aditi is that animations that change joint positions cannot be uploaded. Joint positions can still be overriden within an uploaded mesh, so you should be able to define any starting shape for your avatar that you like.

There is a problem with the attachments, and we are working on a fix. Thanks for your patience.

Regarding some of the recent questions about rigging: the limit is that each vertex can be influenced by a maximum of 4 joints. A mesh as a whole can be influenced by the entire skeleton, as long as each individual vertex does not exceeed that limit. yes, multiple meshes can be influenced by the same joints, so for example you could have a jacket mesh and an avatar mesh attached at the same time and moving in sync.

The length of the Open Beta period has not been determined yet. We will keep you posted.

Spritely, yes, the NDA has been lifted - see the post announcing that at http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2010/09/14/next-steps-for-mesh-import. Rigging is is attachment based; if you import a mesh with compatible bone weight information, you will be able to use it as an attachment that will animate along with your standard avatar. If you wish, you can use an alpha mask to make your standard avatar invisible, giving a fully mesh-based appearance. It is also possible to use multiple mesh attachments, so for example you could have a mesh jacket or mesh hair that animates along with your mesh body. Specifying different mesh densities (LODs) for different distances is supported. More documentation is coming soon.

Yes, mesh will be free during the testing on aditi. Details of pricing once it goes live on agni have not been finalized yet.