Medhue Simoni

Kitsune Shan wrote: So, basically, we may want to discard bones deforming face shapes in favor of being able to animate them. The most we can keep its the three base bones for each face bone group that act as root and allow for small adjustments which to me would be nearly the same as not being able to change anything at all. Currently, there are a number of face sliders that work, with or without face animations. Of course, not all of the sliders will work, but it is definitely more than I ever expected to have when Bento started. Add Fitted Mesh to the mix, and I think the consumer has many options to play with. The only part that bothers me, is that the user doesn't know right off the bat which sliders will work. So, I wish there was some easy way for the user to know this. Heck, I might have to make videos for every avatar, just to show which sliders the user can adjust. Me, I'm happy we have the options, and that LL decided to push it this far.

Looks like things are fixed now.

I also contacted live support, which informed me that they can do nothing, not even restart the region I'm testing on. Not only that, but there is no path to getting a region restarted on Aditi. So, we're just SOL, until some1 higher up figures out the grid is borked.

A few times last week, and now today, I've logged onto Aditi and I can do almost nothing with my avatar. How exactly are we suppose to create things, and test things, when the grid is unstable? We also get no warnings about these problems, and no confirmation that the grid is working again, as it should. See photo below. I'm obviously supposed to be a mesh avatar, not a greyed out default.

This is exactly why I never proposed any rate hike. I have more to report, and some of it is kind of disturbing. So, I've had 2 more payouts since my original. One of them only took a day and a half. Yay! Finally, an exceptable time period for what we are all now paying. Don't get too excited tho, as the next 1 boggles the mind. My last cashout was done purposely on Friday. I wanted to see how this new system treats the weekend. Well, I'm still waiting. It is going on 3 and a half days now. Please, nobody, especially LL, give me the BS, we don't work on weekends deal. Imagine if we could not spend Lindens on the weekend. How a company in today's world can use this weekend BS as an excuse, I will never understand. They fricken accept money on the fricken weekends, don't they. To sum this up. LL charges us more, a crapload more, then gives us questional improvements, some of which aren't improvements at all. I can only assume that payouts still have to be manually accepted, if they can't fricken process anything on the weekends. I gotta ask. Who approves this crap? IMHO, LL should either rollback the fees, or make them more reasonable for their very marginal improvement.

The head turning is entirely due to how your animations are made. By default, with no other animations other than the defaults, the head will turn with the mouse. It won't do this all the time, but when your mouse isn't engaging with some type of UI. Of course there are more nuances. The way to force your head to stay still, is to buy, make, or get an animation that keeps the head still.

Cathy Foil wrote: Did you export out a .anim animation of the trunk to SL's Beta Test Grid Aditi to see if it all worked? Yes, I did export an anim, and it all worked beautifully, even with the head being influenced by the mouse IK in SL. Everything held together well. Cathy Foil wrote: 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. Ah well, I think the cat is out of the bag, as Nalates recorded your convo about the topic after the last Bento meeting. The afterhours video is on Youtube. Cathy Foil wrote: 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 Yes, I tried to keep most of the other bones in the right place. So, the elephant will still have some customizable facial features. I'm also thinking of using the top lip bones to allow the user to customize the length of their tusks.

I tested out your idea of the alternative bones to animate with, and I made a video on it for Blender users.

I was just throwing out what came to mind, thinking about sliders and animation. What gets done about it is out of my hands. I did have some thoughts about joint positions too. Why can't the uploader just choose which joints to offset by whether those bones have weights? If I'm not weighting anything to a bone, then I obviously don't really care if it's offset. Right?

Gaia Clary wrote: Gael Streeter wrote: Indeed, the Bento project had two main aims concerning the mesh heads : To allow to deeply animate the mesh heads To allow to deeply adjust the shape of the mesh heads And these technical issues completely counteract these aims ! I believe the support for Appearance Sliders was never planned. It was added only a couple of weeks ago as an additional goody. And i believe everybody knew right from the begin that appearance sliders and Animations do not work nicely together in all cases. However we have shown a few areas where shape sliders and animations indeed work nicely together provided you only use rotation animation. So maybe it is frustrating that we can not have everything. But at least we got a lot more than nothing by now :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: I thought about this issue with sliders and animations, and it seems to me that we can have both the sliders and animation work together, if we added a child bone to the bones we want to animate with sliders. Here is an example. Let's say we want the Ear Tips slider to work by offsetting the FaceEar2 bones, and still be able to animate FaceEar2 bones. The way to accomplish this would be to add a child bone to FaceEar2, maybe calling it FaceEar2slider, and the slider offsets that bone, instead of FaceEar2 bones. The creator of the mesh avatar would need to weight the ear tip of the mesh to FaceEar2Leftslider, instead of FaceEar2Left. With this set up tho, both the slider and animation on FaceEar2Left will work. The animator would also need to never move the FaceEar2slider bones. Here's another example, using the same concept, but different set up. Eye Spacing is a good 1 for this. Here, the Slider bone would need to be the parent of the Eyebones, and Eyelid bones. So, the slider here gets applied to the EyeSlider bones, and the Eye bones, and Eyelid bones can still be animated while not affecting the EyeSlider bones.

AdelleBelle wrote: While on live chat i also asked details. My sim will stay the same. The server will not be changed, the only thing that changes is the tier sum i pay montly. I even asked about Sansar. I got assured that one will not have an influence on the other, Sansar will not kill down SL, either SL will get closed because of it as i was reading speculations. They are two different entities with totally different styles and life, if i got it well. Also there are no intentions as of yet from LL to announce a release date. Might still take years before Sansar will be launched. Until then i hope i made up my bank account enough to say that was well worth the investment. There are some dates that LL has talked about for Sansar. Supposedly, developers will be let into an exclusive beta/alpha near the start of summer, with open beta/alpha starting at the end of the year. I have no inside knowledge tho. What I predict, again not knowing anything, is that Sansar will be very basic to begin with. Yes, Sansar will "launch" but it won't be mature enough compared to SL. It will take a few years before Sansar will be mature enough to compete directly with SL. Again, remember, this is all just my speculation, based on my 3D knowledge, and not based on anything said by LL.

Interesting, but I think you are asking for a lot. I don't want to say too much tho, as I haven't tried anything like this myself. Who knows, maybe it's easy. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. lol

Not really replying to Perrie, but to LL. I don't want to just bash, but I'm a Mainlander, so I had to bash a little. This Grandfathering move is, I think, a great move. Even economically, although I'd go further and just change the pricing all together. You went this far, so just go all the way. That said, the grandfather is a very nice thank you to your dedicated users.

Vir Linden wrote: That house fly is both impressive and somewhat terrifying. Thanks! Wait until I add his tongue! While switching between avatars, I noticed some did import not with the spines collapsing, so I did some checking between the differences. I found out that my wolf's spine was collapsing because the weight maps for the spine bones were not there, even tho I don't use the spine bones, and there are no weights on them. Reguardless, including the spine bones eliminated the collapsing of the spine. I will give images to show this.

I'm having trouble understanding entirely what you are explaining. Maybe some visual examples would be helpful, or a demo at the next meeting?

Rya Nitely wrote: YES, they took advantage of the constant whining about long payout times, and used it as an excuse to charge us more. They didn't care about any of the complaints over the years, or any of the suggestions people say they made. It's gonna cost us more to send digital information(money), than to have something physical sent to our house. Heck, even sending someone an ounce of gold, with insurance, will cost less than cashing out of SL, in some cases.

Perrie Juran wrote: Remember the original vision was that commercial areas would go up around the telehubs and the outlying suburbs would be residential. That was the vision but nothing was put in place to guide it in that direction. Instead what many people refer to as the Wild West happenned. Possibly, we could compromise, like we have any say at all, lol. I would be for zoning, if it only applied to the ground level, up to some limit. What I often find ugly, on the Mainland, is when owners put up mega prims with images to change their surroundings. So, they wanted an ocean view but can't have it, unless they use images. These people do this on the ground level when it doesn't really matter where their little paradise is, and the rest of us get to look at ugly walls, blocking everything. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.

KrystalKandy wrote: I hear what you're saying, I really do. But automated processing does not mean "immediate results". As I said in a reply to someone else on here. I cashed out late evening on the 5th and had my funds by 9:00 am yesterday morning (the 8th) in my paypal account. So it is definitely faster than it was for me before in having to wati 8 full days just for them to process it. This is my second account, but like you, I have been in sl almost 9 years and also like you, have always cashed out L's regularly. I wish it was faster for all of us ... it's frustrating to have to wait. Hopefully you will see something soon. I aos imagine that with the influx of people who know about this that are trying to cash out every L they can, that is bogging the system down as well. Well, I don't think I implied that automated means immediate. My standard for LL's new system is 1 day. That's my standard, as to me, if it's not done in a day, or 2 max, then everything they did was pretty pointless, at least to me. There are many reasons for me only accepting 1 day as a good standard and I won't go into all the reasons why, but the main reason is because we are now paying a pretty ridiculous fee. I'm fine with companies making money, but to go from $1 to $3 minimum, and possibly a lot more, they have to give us back that same value, which they are not, at least not seemingly yet.

Innula Zenovka wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: KrystalKandy wrote: Stop saying it is supposed to be automatic. They never once said it would be automatic, you crack me up lol You should actually listen to what Ebbe actually says. Before it was all manually checked. With this new system, trusted merchants with consistent credit processing get in the fast lane, and get cashed out sooner. How exactly do you think this can happen, if it isn't automated? This is basic logic. Could it not mean that it's partially automated? There is, as you will be aware, a concept in basic logic known as the fallacy of the false dichotomy. It could also be the case that the automated system involves a built-in delay, in case the the known and trusted merchant has unknowingly received funds that have been fraudulently obtained. Yes, it could very well be partially automated, but that still means it's automated. Of course there needs to be some safety measures in place. Now, a built in delay is what I was thinking yesterday, but does that really make sense? I have no doubt that LL could have built in a delay, but they could simply revoke the money transfer, if they do see something. Could they not? I'm still open to this not being a complete fail by LL, as it was mentioned, I think, that LL would be more cautious in the beginning. So, we'll see. That said, these extra fees should have been delayed until their system is actually functioning in a beneficial way, and LL knows they have the system working well, IMHO.

Landon Edenbaum wrote: Medhue, I am curious as to what time of the day did you cash out? Also I would like to know just how many people have cashed out since the new fees and have gotten their money faster than usual (let's say within 3 days)? I cashed out on the 5th late at night and have gotten nothing yet. I know they say that some people won't get their money faster but then what exactly are the factors that will determine who does and who doesn't? I've been cashing out for almost two years every week and have never had a problem aside from having to wait too damned long. They even have all my RL information on file because they requested it last year. So what exactly determines who does and who doesn't get paid faster? To me all this just seems like a gimmick to squeeze a few dollars more here and there by the Lab because they really need the cash and by saying "some people won't get it faster" they are just really saying "nothing really changes here but we are using careful words so you won't sue us". I cashed out at 1:42 SL time on the 6th, and got the money in my PP at 5:40 SL time on the 8th. Ebbe talked about some of the factors, and it seems that you have most of that info. Beyond that, I can't say. Yes, the way LL has presented this, it does seem very gimmicky, as they aren't really promising anything, except higher fees. When I ranted about these long wait times and proposed the similar system as LL is implementing, I proposed this system because, in theory, especially today, LL gains nothing by holding the money. By distributing the money out faster, LL could gain because of users using that money to buy sims, or equipment to better serve their customers. LL also gains because more users will see SL as a viable way to make money, and more people will create, and/or take their creations more seriously. Any restrictions on the flow of money is a detriment to doing business, not a benefit, as I'm sure you can understand.

KrystalKandy wrote: Stop saying it is supposed to be automatic. They never once said it would be automatic, you crack me up lol You should actually listen to what Ebbe actually says. Before it was all manually checked. With this new system, trusted merchants with consistent credit processing get in the fast lane, and get cashed out sooner. How exactly do you think this can happen, if it isn't automated? This is basic logic.

Rya Nitely wrote: It's probably still not a good idea to cash out too close to a weekend, or maybe they don't know you. I believe they need to know you. Do they know you? :matte-motes-dead: It's supposed to be automated, so it shouldn't matter, at all, what day I cash out. IMHO, it's ridiculous that a person with 9 years of documented transactions/credit processing, it takes an automated system 2 days to approve me. No, I don't feel like a valued customer. And really, what bonehead at LL thought it was a good idea to charge us more for this crap? Again, it's fricken ridiculous. I'd also like to point out, that I told LL to do this exact thing when they took over Xstreet. Strangely enough, all of a sudden LL is implementing quite a few things I've ranted about over my many years. And Yes, I'm going to fricken claim my dues on things I told them to do in the past, cause it's all here in the forum archives, for anyone to read. I told them to do the credit processing in this exact way they are doing it. Again, I can prove this in the forum logs. What they've done here tho, is a total fail. Plus, never once did I advise them to raise the price of cashing out. Economically, it is just not smart. Why do I say this? Because LL should want their creators/merchants to make as much as possible, as the more the merchant class makes, the better SL does. We are LL's real marketing. It's kind of like they are biting the hand that feeds them.

Well, I did finally get my money. It took over 2 days. This doesn't impress me at all, and if it can't be done in a day, then I'd rather pay less and get it in LL's usual 4 days. This improvement is minimal, at best, and they are charging us quite a bit more. Now, I'm on the side of those that are complaining about this. I had to use it first tho. Maybe it will be faster the next time, but I have little faith in that maybe. And seriously, what did they improve here? LL can now say the credit processing can take 2-5 days, instead of 3-5 days. Whipdido!

Medhue Simoni wrote: I just cashed out about 9 minutes ago. It's definitely not instant. I'll give an update when I get the money. OK, NO MONEY YET! Working on day 2 now. At 10:42am it will be 2 full days. I have little to no faith it will be processed today. Call me cynical. Also, take note, that a cashout I made on the 2nd, was processed yesterday. That's 4 days, yet this new system can't even do it in 2 days. This is truly ridiculous, especially since we are paying more.