Medhue Simoni

Cathy Foil wrote: 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. That's actually not a bad way of doing it for a world like SL. Instead of constrantly streaming data to have the proper expressions on your face, the program is tracking your facial and just sending data to SL when it recognizes an expression. So, in SL, you'd have your idle face animations playing, until the system sees a recognizable express.

Cathy Foil wrote: 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. I'm still testing, but I think it is possible to use some bones only with rotation, keeping all slider changes, and then use some bones with both rotation and translation, to be more expressive, all in the same animation. Sorry, if I might have confused some people. It's easier to show than to tell. My video is taking a bit longer than I thought, as I work out how it all could work. Cathy Foil wrote: 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. Well, I don't think anyone would really make the idle face animations that expressive. Whether using rotation or translation, I create a set of around 5 very subtle animations for idle faces, which play randomly. 1 of those usually includes a blink. Generally speaking, these subtle animations can look fairly good only using rotation. Expressions tho, are triggered by the users, when they want them to trigger, using a number of different ways. The most obvious is using a hud. Less obvious is having the expressions trigger when a specific word is said in local chat. So, if I say happy, then a smile animation will play. 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. That would be awesome, but that would require the rig to be set up completely for bone translation, not rotation.

wherorangi wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: wherorangi wrote: 1) lovely (or manly in that case) smile, 2) lower my lashes/close my eyes IMHO, lovely smiles are not possible with only using rotations. You can make a smile, no doubt, but it will never be a lovely smile. lol given the choice between Who said there needs to be a choice? Who said you can't have both?

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.

wherorangi wrote: 1) lovely (or manly in that case) smile, 2) lower my lashes/close my eyes IMHO, lovely smiles are not possible with only using rotations. You can make a smile, no doubt, but it will never be a lovely smile. lol

Mel Vanbeeck wrote: I would also say that BUG-20027 which seems to be getting very little attention should be prioritized fairly highly, as this will take the highly appealing translation animations out of the realm of content-breaking feature disablers to highly useful and and broadly usable. Not a coder here, but I would think that using scale only for sliders would be easier, and make more sense than changing some major code base, with way less bugs to fix afterward.

Sorry I'm all over the forums the past few days, but blame yourself, cause I can't move forward on anything until we have a set skeleton. lol So why not theorize more. I wanted to talk more about making many different options for facial animations. I don't think it's as strange as you might initially think. See, yeah, there are standard expressions, but in real life we have degrees of happiness, disgust, and whatnot. So, as a customer of an avatar with expressions, I'd want different levels of cheer, or sympathy, or fright. Inturn, this helps people with unusual head slider choices to have options that fit them best.

Matrice, I cringe while saying this, but if it is possible to make all the currently possible sliders to work with translation animations, I'd be for doing and waiting for this. IMHO, it is that important, and that much of an improvement. Plus, everyone benefits from it. Everyone! To others reading this, let me be clear. A fair amount of the currently possible slider already work with bone translation animation. I'm asking Matrice if he can get all the possible sliders to work with translation animation.

Hey Siddean, I do have some sympathy for the mesh head designers, but at the same time, I think you all are asking for unicorns, which can also be made with Bento. It's a matter of perspective. From my point of view, you head designers are getting way more than you ever had. You have something, right now, that you can do many things with that you either could not do, or you had to do it in a way that caused massive lag. A rigged mesh is a rigged mesh. It doesn't matter the shape. We all get the same features. Yes, someone making an animal is going to have different expectations than a human head makers, but the underlying issues are still the same. Again, it's a matter of perspective. So, why am I irritated by these recent events? It's because all of this could have been worked out months ago. There are many creators that spent 7+ months decidated strictly to helping develop Bento, mind you with no pay at all. We did this in the hopes that we will make money on this in the future. How long can we wait tho? We did our work to get it ready, and it was. We were simply working out the bugs. I personally got many different contracts to create bento avatars, some of those with other creators. I have a half dozen or so avatars of my own ready to go. Now, we are in limbo again, waiting for you all to finally put in your 2 cents. The time for that was months ago, as now the rest of us are all waiting for you. Where do we go from here? Well, ok, so we are back in development. If that is where we are, then we need test heads to develop on, and we need many to test with, not just 1. We also need people trying different things. Thinking outside the box. All that said, this development could go on forever. Literally, it could be endless. A line has to be drawn somewhere, or none of us will benefit from this at all. Rotation vs Translation - Believe it or not, when I say head creators should abandon rotation for translation, I'm thinking of you and your customers. Remember, I'm an animator. As an animator, I know intimately the difference between using translation versus rotation. You head designers make crazy beautiful heads. The whole point of these heads is that they are so much better looking than the default. So, you don't accept the default head, but you are willing to put inferior expressions on these beautiful heads? As an animator, that is mind boggling to me. I would think you would want the BEST expressions possible, to match with the best heads possible. Yes, customers will love being able to customize their mesh head, but IMHO, this means nothing if the expressions on those heads are inferior. Ok, so, how might I help with what is currently going on? Well, I can do my own testing around the areas of contention. I can make suggestions on animating your heads. What I did early on, is that I didn't include many of the bones used for the sliders in my animations for the head. On an animals head, with all unique joint positions, this was problematic, as the positions of those bones never held, and an animation was needed to set the bones back where they should be. Now, if those bones didn't need an animation to set their position back to where they should be, then many more things could be possible. So, maybe here is where time needs to be spent by LL. Possibly an internal animation that set positions is needed. I was going to send Vir a mesh to address something similar to this, but I can't really do that when the final skeleton is in flux.

JadenArt wrote: As a matter of fact, your statements are false. We are talking about a human, not a wolf (animal) head, meaning, customers will want to be able to adjust their nose, lips with sliders. They will want to be able to move the eyes closer together or further apart (and these are just a few examples) in order to give them a more unique appearance and a more versatile product. Well, I tried. That's all I can do. I've rigged numerous avatars with the bento rig, even human heads, and brought every single 1 of them into SL to test. My advice is based directly on experience with the Bento skeleton. I comment on the thread to try and help others understand what is possible. Being a full time creator, I understand the pitfalls of development. Spending months trying to perfect something, and then customers still not happy, it can be devastating emotionally, and financially. I'm trying to save creators from that. Doing a bento avatar is no small task, especially when 1 thinks of the shear volume of animation needed to pull off a good avatar. Just the head alone can get mind blowing real quick. And in SL, don't we always go to extremes? So, do as you will. I'll just keep making bento avatars, and tutorials. You don't need to listen.

Unlike all of you mesh head designers, I have been at almost every single Bento meeting, working with the team to bang out this skeleton. You can go watch half the Bento meetings on Youtube, and you can see my contributions to the project, which are many. Almost half the bones in the face, and their placement, are a direct result of my involvement, as well as many other bones. As I said, my main goal was to get the bones. Placement of them was less important to me, outside of some suggestions that I've made. NOTHING I've said is false in any way, shape, or form. If they were, someone with knowledge, like Matrice or Cathy would have corrected me, and I would have thanked them for doing so. Why would I make false statements? As far as my Coyot avatar not being applicable, that's just BS. Mesh avatars all work the same. It being a dog like avatar means nothing at all to the system. Now, of course there are nuances, but if my avatar works with this or that slider, than all mesh avatars will, or can. If any one of you had been at any meetings in May/June, you would know that the skeleton was finalized and we were all just working out bugs. Matter of fact, it was so finalized that LL asked many of us if LL could use the avatars in promotions for Bento. How exactly could any of us do all the work to create fully working avatars if the skeleton was not finalized? As far as being condescending, It was to 1 person, who was obviously insulting the team, trying to be a bully to get his way. My challenge to those wanting changes, is to make a fricken avatar, and show the team why the change is so important.

Gael Streeter wrote: But translations animations means no sliders... This statement is totally and completely false. This is what I've been trying to point out. With the use of bone translation, only some sliders are affected. I proved this with my Coyot avatar, which uses bone translation. This is why I would like to see creators actually make something, instead of just spouting theories. Gael Streeter wrote: As human mesh heads creator, I fully understand the concerns of Mel Vanbeeck who tries to find the best compromise in order to combine both the animations and the sliders. And I'm telling you, as an animator and avatar creator, that the best compromise is using bone translation, and accepting that a few of the total sliders won't be usable. Now, I could just sit back and watch creators buy into the misinformation, laughing my butt off, while raking in the dough. Instead, I choose to help creators make the best products possible. The way I look at it, the better creators do, the better SL looks, the more we all make in the end.

Gaia Clary wrote: Hi, Medhue You may be pleased to see that the mEye bones now scale custom meshes similar to the system eyes. I have collected some more details about the newest changes here: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2016/06/27/avastar-2-0-alpha/ Thanks Gaia! At least some good things have come out of this delay.

Mel Vanbeeck wrote: arton Rotaru wrote: Looks like today 10x is actually an understatement. :matte-motes-smile: Uncharted 4 Dev Flaunts New Milestone In Face Animation Smokes, 300-500 bones is where they go after ~100, lol. Well, I guess if the engine and hardware can handle it why not? Nice find ty. Again, take note what they are doing. They are likely using face tracking technology that uses dots on the face to record the motion. The more dots, the better the animation. And, it is all done using bone translation, and NO rotations, except on maybe the jaw and eye bones. It's also worth noting, that we could have real time face tracking in SL, but that would require that the default rig be set up for bone translation, not rotation. That said, in Blender, I can track my own facial expressions using the same dots on the face system and apply those translations to my own SL rig made for it.

Mel Vanbeeck wrote: I'll go ahead and eat my words a bit. Here's where they're using a facial rig very similar to Snappers rig. They had 98 joints in the face. They also use wrinkle maps and 14 corrective blend shapes along with a number of other techs. So yes, 10x the bone budget was an exaggeration. The rest is on-target. As I said, though, I'd love if SL could handle this sort of rig, but I understand why it's outside the scope of Bento. I'd be willing to bet that rig is strictly for cutscenes. What would be the point of having 90+ bones in the game character's head? It's not SL, where your avatar sitting around chatting with people. It's also not the Snapper rig. You are just making assumptions that you can't make. Do you think they only used rotation on their facial rig? Mel Vanbeeck wrote: By the way, when I pointed out that the people who built this rig were not rigging experts, I was not being condescending, nor was I claiming to be a rigging expert myself, since in my opinion a rigging expert is someone who can name every muscle and bone in the human body, where they are attached, and what they do. That and they've spent a figure of years working on building advanced character rigs from the ground up. I was merely pointing out that we weren't looking at something that is beyond critique since there were many highly questionable choices for bone placement. What? How many rigs require the knowledge of every muscle in the body? Only a small number of movies or games would ever use this knowledge. When muscle deformations are used, it is mostly done by the computer. There is no person adjusting every frame of an animation to take into account muscle and skin movement. They might clean it up, but the computer is doing most of the work, based on the muscle. So, what you are saying is that LL was wrong not to hire 1 of the 10 people in the world that are experts on muscle deformations. I don't know about you, but I have easily made dozens and dozens of rigs from the ground up, with the vast majority needing some kind of facial rig, or blend shapes. All I care about is the bones being there, and I'll place them where I want.

Mel Vanbeeck wrote: I can get pretty far with "theory alone" a.k.a. just examining the demo rig. However, many of my diagrams were showing our Simone head rigged to the bento mesh. Granted I chopped Simone up quite a bit to help focus on the areas I was talking about. Does that give me enough cred to talk now? Generally speaking, I try not to convince other people to make corrections solely based on theory. A theory is just that, a theory. Actually doing it, is proof. If you wanted things changed, you should have been involved before we all got the FINAL SKELETON.

Oh, and really Matrice, the only thing I'd want to change, would be getting eyes to scale on mesh avatars. That, IMHO, is worth doing.

Mel Vanbeeck wrote: Actually, SL's rig can't work just like Snapper's rig, because that rig has about 10x the budget for bones It does? Where did you read that? I'd be willing to bet you that it has a similar amount of bones. Why exactly would it need 10x the budget of bones. Please do enlighten us. Mel Vanbeeck wrote: Don't get so carried away with talking down to me that you stop making sense. With a limited bone budget, yes, you can still move the bones to the surface and use translations to your heart's content, but obviously I'm already aware of this, so your condescending tone is off-target. My condescention is only mirroring your own. Mel Vanbeeck wrote: The fact that your coyot avatar was susceptible to bone scaling really tells me nothing of how those sliders will work on a human face. In many cases the translations are used to prevent scaling a bone from turning into an unsightly bulge in the affected area, like in the case of the eye size slider, where the eyeballs are moved backwards as they scale up so they don't bulge out of the face. These corrective translations are lost when you've overridden the bone position, and maybe that's fine on something like a coyote when it becomes cartoonish with enlarged features sticking out, but in most cases it won't be fine on a realistic human. Take note how I actually made a bento avatar(actually I've made many), and you have not. You are totally working off of theory alone.

Matrice Laville wrote: Hey, Medhue; I believe the Mel has got some points as long as we talk about making life easier for the animators. If a rotation only rig already yields acceptable results, then tweeking with translation might be faster compared to tweek everything from scratch. Getting animation to work more smoothely with sliders probably gives another benefit. Well, easier when you are talking about facial animation is dependent on whether the animator talks themselves into accepting rotation only. I guess if they do, then everything is easier to them, but that doesn't make those magically better animations. The problem with starting with rotation only, is that the rig won't be optimized like a rig created for translation in the first place. My lips in the video are a good example. Matrice Laville wrote: What i want to find out is how much effort we have to put into this to get it to work and how much benefit will we get from this. I can not judge at this moment if the change is feasible, doable, wanted, needed. But still i like to understand about what we are talking regarding workload. IMHO, little to no benefit. Why? Because people will see the difference between expressions with translations, and those without, and reject the rotation only heads. How many more sliders they use will not be relevant if the expressions are inferior. It's no secret that I was never a fan of rotation only facial animations for the default rig. Yeah, I can make meshes and textures, but I still consider myself primarily an animator, and this is my professional opinion. No real animator would start from such an inferior place. This is also why I lobbied hard for bone translation support. Take note how we have yet to see rotation only facial animations from any of these mesh head designers who are complaining.

Mel Vanbeeck wrote: I get it. You're not interested in making the sliders portion of this project work with animations, and I'm a bad guy for trying to get that portion patched up well enough that it can be used freely. In the video you posted, most of the expressions you made using translations can be reproduced fairly accurately with rotations, though. I don't disagree that building animations with translations is far more flexible, but it's only really a choice if the rotation animations have the benefit of working alongside sliders to a degree that justifies the constraints it imposes. I seriously doubt that you GET IT. Do you deny that only rotating facial bones is a bad technique, which is why it was abandoned? Show me a game today that uses only rotating bones in the face. IMHO, your allocation of importance is skewed. How the head looks with expressions is the MOST important thing. Sliders are secondary. If you make a mesh head with a few less sliders working, but with really good expressions, that is preferable to a mesh head with more sliders and bad animation. The sliders you use once, and set them. The expression you see all the time. To me, it's just crazy to hear someone say that they know facial animation, yet accepts only using rotation. Those 2 things don't jive. The beauty of SL tho, is that you can do it however you like.

Mel Vanbeeck wrote: I would be thrilled if SL's facial rig could work like that, and believe it or not I'm very familiar with such facial rigs. If you were, you would not be thrilled if SL's rig could work like that, because you would know that it can, and create a rig to do so. Mel Vanbeeck wrote: I'd be delighted if there were a professional rigger working on this project who could advise on the best way to handle this, but when you jump in and start talking about translation animations for everything, you've completely stopped trying to solve the problem of how to work with sliders. If you were throwing sliders out the window from the start, the facial rig would have just about all of its bones right on the surface of the skin and look a lot more like this. The current rig would be complete nonsense. Your example shows a completely lack of understanding. My standing Coyot avatar uses mostly translation to create all of it's facial animation, and yet the diversity in shapes from the sliders is quite mind boggling. Not all the sliders work anyways. If I lose a few minor sliders because I want to use bone translations, then I'll take that because really good expressions are essential. Mel Vanbeeck wrote: That's not the problem we're working on right now, though. I'm a little puzzled that you're saying that I haven't adequately demonstrated my points, though. You want me to do video rather than still images with ghost frames? The problem that Bento is made to solve, it does. YOU have demonstrated very little. What I'd like see from you is a working mesh head, with expressions, and sliders at play. Then you can show us the issues with that, not your theoretical mesh head.

This is to all those top mesh head creators, or wanna be mesh head creators. Rotating bones in a face can not compete with using bone translations. Real facial expressions are done using muscles in your face. The best way to mimic this is to use bone translation. As Mel has already pointed out, there are quite a few facial animations that aren't even possible, unless you use bone translations. I bring this up again because I don't want creators wasting their precious time doing things a bad way, only to see their creations fail in the market because of bad advice. If you chose to use only rotation, there will be expressions you just can't create, or they look terrible if you try. And, with a rig only set up to use rotations, you'll have to redo the whole rig again when you do decide to switch over to using translation. Bone positions are very important when consider how you want your rig to work. A good example is in the lips. With the only rotation method, your lip bones have to start far back in the head, to get a decent rotation on them. In a translation based facial rig, the lips bones are short, so you can curl and pucker the lips as needed. Do you really want to release a mesh head with no pucker, or a terrible looking pucker? This video, I did early on in the Bento project, and it was mostly to show the diversity that bone translations give you, as an animator. It uses a very early version of the rig, and is missing some key bones we added later. I wasn't even trying to make expressions tho. I was just moving from the top of the head to the bottom, trying to move things around and seeing what I got. Take note of the lips tho, and how short the middle lip bones are, which allows me to bend the lips more realistically.

Again EVERYTHING you talked about moving can by done by you, without affecting anyone else. Me, I'm good with things how they are, and if I'm not, I'll just fricken move it myself. Mel Vanbeeck wrote: Looking at where this facial rig was, it is that it is clear that from the beginning, this project has lacked an expert in the area of facial rigging and facial animation. The placement of the lip bones is a substantial error, and I am afraid that I can't accept the defense that "the people who put them there may have had a good reason for doing so". The bone placement errors of the jaw and eyelids should have made it abundantly clear that the people making these decisions were learning as they went, rather than drawing on a wealth of experience in this area. This makes complete sense, since rigging is not something that anyone in SL working on human heads normally has to learn, other than just basic skinning. The lip bones are just another case of this inexperience. Obviously this is a fairly special case since the challenge of trying to animate using only rotations is unusual, but I've explained the logic of all my statements on the subject in detail, and the validity of that logic has not been challenged. Huh? You know what I see a serious lack of? Actual examples! Where are your examples of facial animations that you have made on a Bento head, using only rotations? Where are your examples with those distortions? Expert? Yet, you think you can make good facial expressions using only rotations? Hmmm. You think you can make expressions like this, with only rotations? Who's lacking experience? Only rotating facial bones was popular only because technology had not advanced enough to allow for translation. You really want to go back to the year 2000?

Matrice, I first just want to say THANK YOU for all the work you have done. 2nd, I'm EXTREMELY happy with what we have, and what you and Cathy did. 3rd, I consider the majority of changes, since the "final" skeleton was announced, mostly a waste of time. 4th, I'm ready to start selling Bento stuff, even if some don't understand, nor appreciate what they just got with Bento.

Mel Vanbeeck wrote: Human customers don't have the kind of patience for those malfunctions that furries have. They expect the things they pay for to work well without extensive configuration and troubleshooting. Hmmm, In my video, where I take a non human head, and make it work with a system made for human heads, I had little to no problems with those variations working almost perfectly with the animations I designed for them. Granted, I didn't show expressions, but at best I would need to make a few different versions of an expression to match everything fairly well. Which do you think is harder tho, to make a dog's head work with this system made for human heads, or a human's head with a system made for human heads? Which do you think is going to have more problems? Mel Vanbeeck wrote: For your custom slider system, it is far more efficient to just lock all the bones in place and build a different head mesh to suit the different appearance than try to mix and match 100 animations. Then it would be you deciding what the appearance is, not the customer. The point of a customizable slider system is for the consumer to decide what they look like, not the creator. Mel Vanbeeck wrote: Aside from that, if the weighting on the model used to develop the sliders in the first place is not good enough to serve as a rock solid standard for all content, that is another missed opportunity for the grid. With every head designer going their own way in terms of how to weight the face, compatibility for animations and accessories is not possible. About the only thing that is guaranteed to be standardized is the skull in order to match hair. Is compatibility across designers now possible with most of their parts? I also think you are making many more assumption than can possibly be assumed. As far as weights, I haven't looked at them or tested them very much because I'm mostly doing animals right now. That said, I have every bit of confidence that the Machinimatrix team has done a decent job, and ....... that despite this, I'll likely tweak them anyways, as I expect every artist that is decent at weighting would.