Gaia Clary

My video uses a modified version of the Bento Rig. We added Medhue's changes there plus a few ideas from ourselves. This is mainly to show what the Rig can do (on the face). About the changes that we made in the face: New bones in the face center We added 3 bones on the symmetry line (mFaceLipUpperCenter, mFaceLipLowerCenter, mFaceForehead. Whith those new bones the automatic weight from bones feature from blender (weight from bone heat) gives much better initial results compared to not having those bones in place. Also those bones helped (me) to make more subtle changes on the lips. Especially the Oh and Ah phonemes have made the lips much more rounded. Note: From all our changes i think this one is the absolutely most important change of all. New Root Bones We added 3 root bones mFaceRootTop, mFaceRootCenter, mFaceRootBottom We used these bones here mainly for organisation and easier layout. So there is no strong reasoning to have them for weighting. They could be useful for creatures where the mouth part needs to be moved to some other area on the mesh. It may also be of benefit when translation animation is not supported or when the animator does not want to use translation animation Extra Bones on the ears I found it a good idea to have those extra bones for flapping ears (creature creators will want that) Moved Cheek bones downwards Medhue's reasoning sound right. When i was working on this modified face rig i found the new cheek position to work much better. Removed unnecessary WingRoot Bones We assume that we get the Bone translation animations. In that case we do not need 3 WingRoot bones. Our alternatvie contains only one wing root instead of 3 as it was proposed. Moved joints to character surface When we only have rotation animation, then we must move the joints (Bone heads) "into" the head because we need a rotation angle to mimic a translation on the surface. The main problem with that is: Having the joints closer to each other and farther away from the surface results in much more spreading of the bone weights over the bones. This needs much more work on the weights(we have the face weighting tool for compensate for that) The rig looks much more cluttered The rotation animation only allows for moving the Vertices on spherical surfaces which means that you can get distortions much faster. Although i found it was not such a big issue with human faces. We believe this is mostly because the human head is more or less a sphere anyways :matte-motes-evil-grin: When we use translation animation then it makes much more sense to move the joints on the surface. This avoids many problems with weighting (see above) and it makes the rig easier to use because now the bones are all on the character's surface and not hidden inside it.

I first wanted to finish our skeleton proposal. so we put all our effort into that including testing the rig. The animation section is surely ther next in our todo list. This includes making it easier to retarget a non avastar rig which we needed first before we can support the feature that you have in mind.

In the past days we made some progress with our Face rig. This is my very first lip synchronised animation in blender: The red mouth is actually a control bone. This bone has 3 functions: move right-left: for narrow/bright mouth move up-down: for open/close mouth rotate : for smile/frown The control bone affects all mouth bones, the cheeks and the nose I was able to make almost all phonemes for the animation with this single control bone. I needed to tweek the Uhhh a bit by fine adjusting the mouth bones (and i made a mistake as you can see in the video :matte-motes-evil-grin: Enjoy

Hi, Gaeline; The weights for the Avastar bento head have been generated and modified with our face weight tool, which limits the number of weights per bone to 4. And while we where working on the weights we did not take the head collision volume bone into account. However you can do that still. All you need to do is to rework the head weights with a limit of 3 then add the Head collision volume weights as needed... I have read Kitsune's explanation but well... i am still missing an example for where having only 4 weights is a desaster. Except in the case of the physics bones (Pec, Handle, Butt, Back...) where an additional set of weights would indeed be very welcome .

[edit]: I found the problem. You need to remove the trailing dot to get to the survey... When trying to access that page, i get a "survey not found" response from surveymonkey. Maybe i have to first create an account with them?

Hi; I am not sure if i understand your issue correctly. But here is some information that hopefully helps you to figure out your problem: When Creating a new Object  Take care that your Selection Mode is set to "Face" Before you add a new Cylinder. Then you see the cylinder caps are NGons. This setting is not strictly necessary. See in the image above, there you just cant grab the cap face. But you can switch to face selection mode at any time, so nothing is lost Right after you added a new Object (Cylinder) then you get an Operator Redo panel in the left lower corner of the Tool Shelf. In our case the redo panel is titled: "Add Cylinder" Here you can tweak the initial settings of your object. This is a bit odd first. But you can think of your new object to be in its "childhood" and it still can be formed to some extend. Right in the middle of the Operator Redo Panel you find the setting for the Cylinder Caps (the Cap Fill Type). There you can select to have no caps at all. When you go ahead from here and call any other operation on your object, then the Redo Panel will be replaced by the redo panel for the next called operation (if that operation has a redo panel) Adding a connected Vertex to an existing Object You can add vertices as follows: Select your active vertex (use the Right mouse button) This indicates the root of your editing CTRL LMB (control on the keyboard and Left Mouse Button) adds a new vertex to your scene. The new vertex is connected to the previous active vertex. the new vertex is now the new active vertex So you can add a loop (set of vertices connected by edges) by repeatedly pressing the left mouse button while you keep the CTRL key pressed Adding an edge Do the same as for the Vertex, but use Edge Select mode (see image). Then select your active edge. When you now CTRL LMB then you get a new edge and the edge is connected to the formerly active edge (similar to above) Adding a face Do the same as for the Vertex, but use Face Select mode (see image). Then select your active Face. When you now CTRL LMB then you get a new Face and the face is connected to the formerly active face (similar to above)

Pu**bleep** wrote: If you ever have that problem select the mesh, export it as .ply and re import it. Now when you export it as .dae SL will show it just fine Now it would be even cooler if we could get this blend file for inspection. Then we can hopefully see why the collada exporter messed this up befoire you did this little trick. Here you can submit a report: https://developer.blender.org/differential/diff/create/ Add "Collada" into the report title then it will be processed faster thanks a lot :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

This one is the official page for newbies: http://avastar.online/reference/3d-newbies/

Well, i realy want to understand what the problems are. But i can't do that only in my mind. It would be very helpful if someone provided a working example of a setup where more than 4 bones are unavoidable. Maybe this is asking for too much. But i believe that Linden Lab wants to see such examples anyways if we want to get the limits raised. So if you(whoever is concerned) don't want to answer here, then there is still the Bento Jira where i am sure any suich input is welcome...

hi; First of all thanks for your detailed feedback! I really appreciate that since we only rarely get any feedback about the documentation and the website. We will check the website issues in the next few days, so hopefully when you get back to us things should look much more pretty About Youtube: Yes i have hidden all videos from public search. They are still there, but hidden. So you are right, we have cut away one important tool for marketing. But on the other side many videos do no longer match up with the current software. And furthermore all videos are meant as supporting material for the reference documentation. The reference documentation itself has been reorganised and can be found here: http://avastar.online Actually our main website ( http://blog.machinimatrix.org ) does not yet refer to the new documents, however we are about to change that over this weekend. About broken links: Which browser did you use? I am astonished... i know we have a couple of broken links to images, but i am not aware of broken links to pages... Anyways, thanks again for your summary. That helps a lot!

Avastar Adds pannels to the User interface. This is the normal way to add new functions to Blender, so it should be ok when you enable sensei and avastar. If you run into issues, we are available to fix them. Sparkles is a somewhat independent toolset mostly for riggers. We tried to keep Sparkles independent from Second Life, but at the end we decided to make a tight integration between sparkles and Avastar. So you can see Sparkles as an extension of Avastar. Sparkle's features are all documented here: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/sparkles/ If you have no idea where and how to use the tools, then you most probably do not need Sparkles at all. But don't get me wrong, Sparkles solves a few esotheric issues and not everybody will run into those problems. So if you don't see its usage for your projects, that is absolutely ok. Regarding questions on the website: we are a bit under pressure all the time, so the questions on the website are often overlooked. But you can get a lot of support from the chat group in SL: Blender Avastar And if you need more info, then just ask here

Gael Streeter wrote: But while experimenting, I rapidly understood that one big difficulty would be the weight limit to 4 bones ! This drastically increases the complexity of the rigging (with some many close bones to deal with)... So I would suggest to raise or best remove this limit. Honestly i do not exactly understand the problem with the limits. Having more bones does not imply that you have to use more weights as well. Actually the vast majority of vertices in a typicall rigged mesh has typically only 1 or 2 weights. A good example is the default Avatar. (And yes, i know what some will answer now. But the weight problems of the default Avatar are not related to the number of allowed weights.) Well, when you also use Fitted mesh bones then the weightcount can double (depending on how you actually do your weighting). However when your typical maximum weightcount is 2 for the classic mesh weighting (without collision volume bones), then with fitted mesh it becomes 4 and that is still in the limits... Ok, here are issues when you take fitted mesh into account. But those issues are mostly related to the physics volume bones on the upper body. There we quickly can get out of weights. Since neither face nor hands have fitted mesh bones, i see no serious issue there. However i learned to never become too strict as there is always an exception for everything :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: So please can you give some real examples where the weight limits are too small on the face?

Hi, Medhue; Of course the cheeck bones are of value. My reasoning was more like this: First: I believe the mouth and the eyes are the main focus on the face when we take animation into account. So i love the idea to get more bones for the lips to get the ability to make realy amazing animations there. Then: The structural bones in the middle of the head are more than just cosmetic. Think of a creature where mouth and eyes move independently. Yes we can use translation to move the bones wherever we want, but having the ability to animate a complete subgroup of face bones sounds more practical to me. Finally: I know that the number of bones can not be infinite. And we must keep the balance. And since we actually can move the bones around in animation AND by using joint positions, the cheeck bones and the lip corner bones could possibly be candidates for reuse. However, all of this is still playing with ideas. I hope that we can get something more substantial out in the next few weeks :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: oh, btw: If you are playing with new bones then Avastar-2 has a avatar_skeleton.xml exporter File -> Export -> SL Avatar Skeleton (xml) as far as i have seen the workflow is this: Create a new Avastar (rig only is sufficient) Take care to set the appearance to SL Rest pose (the white stickman icon in the Appearance panel) Edit the (green) control bones Snap SL to Control Rig Export as modified avatar skeleton file And for creating a test character from a modified skeleton file: File -> Import -> SL Avatar SkeletonI might look into that later and add some better documentation to this. Some parts of this importer/exporter pair seem to be not optimal yet

ops, sorry, i made a mistake. i replace the image in the other post.

Hi, Medhue; I wonder if having bones at LipLowerCenter and LipUpperCenter would make it easier to get more decent mouth animations. It appears to me that the mouth is a super important animation spot and you can easily get from acceptable to creepy if you do not take care. For example it appears to me like the mouth tends to become a bit "squarish" even when you move the upper/lower lip bones closer to the center.So i propose to add 2 lip bones on the vertical center line of the face. And when thinking of creatures then i believe that adding 3 extra structural bones to the head gives some interesting freedom:  [Edit:] (I replaced the above image because in the first one i unintentionally parented the lower lip bones to the wrong bone) The intermediate structure bones (lower,center,upper) also clean up the head structure a bit. But my favorite change is still to add 3 extra bones on the face vertical center line:  From all what i tried so far i found that having those center bones in place has 2 advantages: The automatic weight creation creates much more useful results The squarish mouth animations can be fully avoided So if you'd ask me, i would do the following 3 changes (ordered by "most wanted"): Add visual center bones (mFaceUpperLipCenter, mFaceLowerLipCenter, mFaceForeheadCenter Add Extra bones for the ears (flapping ears) Add structural BoneRoots (mFaceUpperRoot, mFaceCenterRoot, mFaceLowerRoot) When asked which bones could be removed i tend to say, the lower cheak bones might be less important (could be replaced by the lip corner bones if needed)

The construction of your mesh has a few oddities. Its not easy to explain in words, but maybe a picture can help. I have moved the 3 selected faces backwards. Now you see that these faces are connected to the rest of the wall only by single vertices:  Here is a closeup:  Actually the problem (flickering) is caused by duplicated edges in your construction. You can get rid of the flickering by reworking the walls a bit by connecting faces by edges. Here is a proposal. I am not sure if this is the best that can be done, but it may give you direction:  This wall needs one more quad but it works for me.

Your question made me curious. So i gave it a try and made a very quick model of a table with its own physics shape. The table on the image behaves as a table normally behaves :matte-motes-nerdy:  You can stand on it The feets can not be traversed If you scale it up you can walk under it:  Now for the more complicated part: If you are lazy and just reuse the table mesh as the physics mesh (which is no work at all) then you end up with a perfect "table physic" but the LI goes up to ~5. If you are a bit smarter then you can put some work into optimizing your table's physics mesh. Then the physic might no longer be "perfect" but you can get it good enough for all practical purposes. The tables in the pictures above behave correct in almost all cases and they have LI=1 even when you oversize them as in the lower image. For the experts: the trick is to NOT create volumes but only use simple faces. The physics mesh in my example looks like this:  I hope this of any help?

well, i can not tell if its a bug. But i can look at it and try to find out why it does not behave as expected. Then i can tell if its a bug or not :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

if an obvious error happens, then please can you report that to our ticket system? http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/tickets it may take a while to answer but we process every incoming ticket. thanks :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

In the Binding pannel: The Attach Sliders option tells Avastar to enable the SL Appearance Sliders right after binding the mesh to the Armature. In the Skinning Pannel: When you have selected a Mesh then the shown value is related to the Mesh itself. So you can attach the sliders (enable SL Appearance Sliders) for each mesh separately. When you have selected the Armature, then the shown value is related to ALL meshes attached to the Rig. So you can enable/disable SL Appearance Sliders for the complete character. When your mesh does not react on the sliders even when you have enabled the SL Appearance Sliders, then you most probably have not enabled the Fitted mesh bones as Deform bones. Avastar-1.7.0 has an option to enable the Volume Bones as Deform Bones: http://avastar.online/help/rigging/ check the chapter Bone Deform Settings For Avastar-1.7.1 we will add an automatic check for this when you use the "Keep weights" Option during binding. So as soon as 1.7.1 is out your mesh will react to the SL Appearance sliders right away.

Bone translation is now fully supported ( in Avastar-2.0.6 ), also see the documentation help page: http://avastar.online/help/rigging/ ( chapter "Bone Constraints" ) edit: in Avastar 2 there is one more selection "same bone group" which allows to select one face bone for example, then enable location animation for the entire group of "Face" bones. You also need to enable "Use Translations" in the export options. We can enable this option by default (and remove the option completely when location animation becomes officially supported).

the refresh shape button has been hidden behind the white arrows right to the [Apply Slider] button: 

The problem with importing dae or fbx to Avastar is actually a problem of blender. If anybody has issues with importing a second life compatible Collada file into blender, please report this to the blender bug reporting system. We (Machinimatrix) look at Collada related issues. Please add a reference to "SL" in the subject. That speeds up things a bit :smileyhappy: Currently we do not provide an easy method to transfer animations. However we can take a look into this next week. Here is what we have by now: Once you could import your model into blender, then (assuming it is compatible to the SL rig) it is easy to transfer your rig to Avastar: This is a typical third party SL compatible Rig (including meshes) imported to Blender: After you click the "Convert to Avastar Rig" button, you get this: This is a default SL compatible Avatar Mesh character plus the custom mesh(es) all rigged to the Avastar rig in its full glory (including the Bento bones of course) However if your imported object contains an animation, then we still need to add some magic to get the animation converted and attached to the Avastar Rig as well. It is probably not a big thing to do, but it needs to be implemented. I am also not sure what Avastar does when it gets a Bento skeleton as starting point. We have not yet tested this situation yet (we will check this and if necessary fix it in the next days) If someone can provide an SL compatible Collada file that includes an animation, we can give it a try and see if we can improve the workflow so that at the end we have something like this: import collada/fbx to Blender convert to avastar export animation as .anim or .bvh We also might be able to eventually provide an export to .anim without need to first convert to Avastar (but no promise here)

The version Avastar 1.6-124 was a development version. The problem that you report should have been fixed in the most recent Release Avastar-1.7.0

Kitsune Shan wrote: "Re-enabling" kinda means that it will work like in the old way with just anim files? Because if thats the case, we cant hardy test anything considering that those animations can be only made with avastar and blender. Would it help when we give away Avastar-2-beta for testers for free? Kitsune Shan wrote: Any chances of importing animations through DAE? I would like to see FBX support but we already have DAE support which can contain the animated skeleton and which SL could parse into SL animations. If (if ever!) LindenLab provides an Importer for animations based on Collada or FBX we are ready to adjust Blender's exporters (if necesssary). Kitsune Shan wrote: Otherwise, animations will be very limited to users considering that blender isnt by far a good animation software at all. Can you give a few examples where blender's animation system is bad compared to other tools? I am asking out of cusiosity. Maybe we can improve things when we know what non blender users think is bad. (no offense intended, i just have no experience in tools other than qavimator and blender so i do not know what cool things other tools offer) Kitsune Shan wrote: Also, something to keep in mind, DAE can save individual keyframes meaning that only those keyframes that have been animated would contain info saving a lot of data (ie. you would just get info of the keyframe that have been moved/rotated and the rest would be left blank instead of saving a keyframe on every single frame of the animation). We could get better quality animations in less footprint. When you transport only keyframes to the target system then you let the target system decide how to interpolate. This is not bad at all and i do not criticise this. But doesn't interpolation possibly result in slightly different animations depending on how the interpolation is made? So how else is a keyframe based import less quality compared to a frame based import?