Medhue Simoni

Maybe this is somewhat obvious too, but some of the wing root bones need to be removed. Vir has also commented on this, so LL knows. I would not be against keeping 1 wing root bone, as I did find that handy with my elephant's ears, which use the wings. The other 2 wing root bones are completely useless now that we have bone translations.

Teager wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: Here's a tangent, but relevant. The facial bones parented to the skull bone, I really don't have any issues with. Wish we didn't have to, but I do understand the issue fully, and why. Again tho, that said, will I be updating my wolf to utilize that extra head bone? No, I will not be, because I do like to make all my avatar's heads move with the mouse, and then try and blend in the body movement, when that works best. The neck on my wolf is not really an issue, at all. The plural of anecdote is not data. Humans, canines, and many other creatures have short necks without many vertebrae, and therefore look perfectly normal with only a single neck bone. But that doesn't mean that other creatures would not benefit from the option of an extra bone. It's dangerous at this stage of the project to proclaim that anything isn't needed or won't be used, especially when you can see what value it might offer to someone else. Obviously any new bones that come out of the bento project, including the bones already in the bento skeleton, will be properly tested to assure that they don't break existing content or in any way affect those creators who choose not to use them. Notice that I was advocating for the odd parenting, not against it. I was simply pointing out that depending on what the creators requirements are, the extra bone won't always be utilized. As I state later in the comment, I completely understand why a creator would want another neck bone, and there are many different creatures that could utilize it. It's also worth noting, that if LL considered bone constrainst in SL, as Gaia has suggested, then we could parent those facial bones wherever we wanted.

Kitsune Shan wrote: Are you guys sure that you want the facial bones parented to skull rather than head bone? Remember that mSkull bone moves upward with some sliders. I dont think people would want their eyes, mouth and such move upward while the rest of head remains still lol. I think that just having another bone that could holds the facial bones just as mHead children could be the best. It could also work as extension for neck while not breaking anything else. Well a......, if that is the case, then we can't do it that way. I really have no idea. I don't have unlimited time to test everything, and I'm already neglecting my clients enough because of my obsession with the bento bones. I do know that someone else talked about how moving the skull bone moves where the bubble chat and name hover box above our heads, which is handy to know, and moving that is needed in some cases. So, yeah, I'm for accommedating for the extra neck, but not if it isn't fully tested, and interfers with other things.

Gaia Clary wrote: 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? From my experience, a raise to 5 is not without warrant. You have talked about when Fitted mesh is involved, and the complexity there. Yeah, we don't have collision bones for the face or fingers........yet. Vir has already stated tho that this may be in the works. For the most part, I agree with you Gaia, that 4 is good most of the time. There are quite a few times tho, that I have run into verts where I have no real good option which bone I remove to get to that limit of 4. When this happens, I cringe, because I know that vert is going to have issues, and not move the way it really should move. I'm definitely not for unlimit bones weights, but I think a 5 bone limit is much more reasonable, considering what we are dealing with.

Gaia Clary wrote: 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. We've talked about it but, I'll just say here that I think this just comes down to how far LL is willing to go. Of course I want center lip bones, but I'm kind of still in shock I have face bones to play with in the first place. lol Gaia Clary wrote: 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: I can definitely see how this can be handy, but at the same time, we have bone translation, and we are Blender users, so with all the tools we have, this can be mimiced. At the same time tho, I will never turn down more bones. I'll find something to do with them. On LL's end, I think your thoughts on Bone Constraints within SL is something that should be persued. It adds so much functionality, especially considering how we can use SL internal animation with our creations, like making the head move with the mouse. Who knows what else it could lead to? Gaia Clary wrote: 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) I pretty much agree with you, except the part about the lower cheek bone. From the original set, I don't think I could do without any. I think it was a well thought out, least amount of bones possible to get anything decent. If we got even just the first in your list, heck, I'd be happy. Plus, I'm also a business man, and I want things done quickly and out the door for people to start using things, creators making money, and LL making money on it all as soon as possible. So, all that being said, I'm ready to go with what we have if that means we can start working on actual things that make money. lol Here's a tangent, but relevant. The facial bones parented to the skull bone, I really don't have any issues with. Wish we didn't have to, but I do understand the issue fully, and why. Again tho, that said, will I be updating my wolf to utilize that extra head bone? No, I will not be, because I do like to make all my avatar's heads move with the mouse, and then try and blend in the body movement, when that works best. The neck on my wolf is not really an issue, at all. I have rigged a few horses in my time tho, so I do understand the issue pretty well. 1 tip for horse riggers, which I learned in the process of rigging them, is that, on a horse, it is best to run the neck bone near the underside of the neck. This produces better horse neck movements, and is actually how a real horse's neck bones are, giving them that range to reach the ground.

Etheria Parrott wrote: That's wonderful Medhue. How were you able to so quickly switch between moving bones on both sides at once rather than just left or right? Perhaps you could share how this is possible in your next video. It's so time consuming to move a bone then go below the window to copy and paste mirrored. If you watch closely, you will see that whenever I'm moving both sides at the same time, I'm doing that with a bone on the right side of the face, or left side of the screen. All the bones on the right side of the face control the bones on the other side. All the bone on the left, can move independently tho too. So, with that combo, normal symmetrical animations are quick and easy, and distorted expressions are also quick and easy, as long as they are on the left. Distorting the right side isn't hard. It's just isn't as quick. Really, I'm just using Blender constraints to do it all.

In this video, I'm using a rig that I made up from the Bento bones. This face rig has special controls to more quickly animate the face. At the same time tho, I'm not using any ik or other bones to make it all happen, just the original Bento Face bones, with some constraints set up in some handy ways. I will have a video tomorrow about how it works.

Teager wrote: The hilighted bone is my added bone, faceBase. FaceBase was inserted between mHead and the facial bones and acts as a new parent bone to the facial bones. This allows me (or anyone else who needs it) to create a two bone neck without inserting any new bones into the existing spine chain or breaking rigging to any existing meshes. What you could do, is constrain all the facial bones to the skull bone, in Blender, and have the same effect without adding new bones. I think the Facebone idea was great when we didn't not have translations, but now that we do, it's not as needed. Would be interesting to hear what you think. I saw your tongue animation and I had to post my own. https://gyazo.com/447cf838cb8bdc75bd6ed3981b6c98ad

Now that my wolf is starting to work and act like I want, I decided to work on something that uses the Bento bones in vastly different ways than intended, whatever that really means. lol I decided to transfer the Elephant that I made for the Unity engine. I use almost all the Bento bones, except the fingers. I don't know why the gif is so short. It should be longer. Anyways, the ears are made from the wing bones, and the trunk is actually the tail. The Groin bone is being used to animate the tail.

There is my proposal for the face bones. It's not a major change from the current face, but some major differences in the end, I think. I added the extra ear bones that I suggested before. The only other bone added was a center forehead bone, to really scruntch the forehead, which could be up higher, looking at the image now. The cheek bones, I moved somewhat drastically. I kept finding myself not wanting to move the outer cheek bone too much, so I figured the other cheek bone could handle most of the upper cheek movements, but there needed to be a lower cheek bone, to be able to balloon the lower cheek out, or sink them in for sunken cheeks. The Lips, I moved the top 2 bone in quite a bit, and a little lower. The bottom 2, I moved them together slightly and then up a little. Other than those things, and some minor adjustments, I also adjusted the lengths of all the bones, because now we can use translations. This is simply a proposal, and not a working set up. These are just my suggestions.

Gryphon Ronas wrote: This has been a question that has come up a few times, it may have been answered here but I did not read 34 pages to find out. The finger bones seem like a great idea, but the release info I saw looked like we will not be able to attach to each bone as an attachment point. If this is the case, then one of two things will happen. Either we render existing jewelry useless, or Bento is useless before it ever goes live. It's great if the fingers move, not so great if the rings on them don't follow along. I really hope this has been addressed - I know a lot of work went into this, it would be a shame to have people not use it. Regardless if there is an attachment point for each finger, rings can be made to move with the finger that it is intended to be worn on. The ring simply needs to be rigged to that finger bone. No existing content will be useless, as not everyone will be using a bento avatar. That said, if someone does sell rings, it would probably be smart to learn to rig a simple ring to a finger, as this is really the only way it can really be done effectively, attachment points or not. All that said, after thinking about this for a bit, I see an inherent problem with hands. Fitted mesh uses collision or volume bones to make the mesh morph with SL sliders. With Sliders, there is only 1 for the hand. Well, how does this work out for a ring? If someone is using a fitted mesh body, with bento bones, and they enlarge their hands, how does that work? How would I rig the hands to achieve this? Is that even possible? I'm not sure it is. I'll have to do some tests.

I created some low poly boxy bones for my wolf's skeleton, just for fun. Thought it looks cool with the new bento bones, so here is a look. Working on expression and speech gestures today.

Whirly Fizzle wrote: Oz Linden wrote: Gael Streeter wrote: This is a very very old known bug : When importing a BVH animation into SL, the SL viewer performs an "optimization" of the animation (to reduce its load). But this "optimization" algorythm has bugs and induces very big problems of "phantom moves" (I call it like that) when the animation has very small moves between keyframes : the fine moves are replaced by big and long incoherent moves. We are trying to find and if possible fix any bugs related to the Bento features. If you can find a good quality report (meaning one with usable instructions to reproduce it), please add a pointer here; if not, please try to create one. Extra points for including an animation file that demonstrates the problem. It may also be that we should implement checks in the viewer to alert the author that an animation does not use an appropriate frame rate, but let's see some actual examples before we draw any conclusions. I believe this bug is caused by the same optimization issue - it has a repro bvh and a video showing the problem BUG-5146 - Animation skipping frames 5146 is probably the same bug as VWR-2461 - Preserve subtle movements when uploading animations I've uploaded tens of thousands of animations, and I've only come across this problem a few times, if that. I really didn't even know about it until people kept asking, but hadn't experienced it myself, because I always somewhat adjust the frame rate to what the animation needs. Some people tho, just use 30 fps as their standard and every animation they make has that frame rate. This is where problems arise with the uploader. At 30 fps, it is possible to make a movement so slight that the uploader ignores it. The solution is simply to use a lower frame rate. If the movement is that slight, lowering the frame rate is not going to impact the quality. Now, you could say this is a bug because the user gets an animation that doesn't match. So, IMHO, this is really an issue of letting them upload the animation at all. IMHO, the uploader should just fail, and give them the reason. It's also worth noting that we can upload animations as fast as 60 fps, so it is likely more people see the issue because of that.

MoonHowler Snowpaw wrote: Though, of course, i hope the final decision will be to allow bone translations for more freedom in animations, just the current avastar still doesn't allow bones translations, so i'm experimenting with the current abilities to see what is possible with rotations for the tongue. Avastar just has some constraints on the face bones, to only rotate like LL had wanted. But since LL has openly stated they are allowing and working on bone translation, you just need to go into the bone contrainst in your Properties Window in Blender, and delete those constraints.

polysail wrote: My hope is to nudge the community in the direction of keeping facial animations and body animations as two separate animations. The situation I'm trying to avoid here is having animators animating the face when creating their own somatic animations and then having the head-designer community trying to fight against the incursion of "bad head animations" that don't work for their particular content. I want to set precedents and minimize user AND creator confusion from the start. In addition it would help solve the animation file-size problems if we had a established 'split' between facial and body animations, but I don't want to go so far as to ask the lab to enforce a restriction, as that would limit the creativity of the platform. But ideally I would like an announcement that establishes this precedent when Bento goes live. I'll just point out that it need not be either/or. A creator could include face animations in their normal avatar animation or AO animation, and as long as those animations are priority 4 or below, you can still override them. All facial animations should be priority 5 or 6. I'd actually encourage creators to, at least, include a default facial expression in their body movments, because if you do not, then the face will be stuck in whatever expression was last played. With a facial animation in the body movments, you know that at some point the face will come back to some normal expression.

The problem with your analysis, is that the amount of merchants will go down more and more according to the tax on goods. There is no maximized bell curve when it comes to how many will participate. The higher you raise it, the less merchants you have. IMHO, the last thing you want to do is limit the number of merchants, cause they generate money. Less merchants equates to less profits, and less products to buy. More merchants equates to more profits and more products to buy. So, any tax on the products will lower the amount of merchants, which lowers the amount of products, which lowers the amount of profits.

Kitsune Shan wrote: I have once played with it but couldn't do too much as I am 3d max user. I actually switched from 3ds Max to Blender. I think it was easier for me to switch from 3ds Max, because there are quite a few similarities between the 2. From how modifiers work, to rigging, it was all very similar, at least to me. Maybe you just need to play with it more.

Gael Streeter wrote: This is a very very old known bug : I really don't think it's a bug, but an LL feature. Personally, once I understood what was going on, I've never had an issue with it. If I did, I'd just lower my fps, and it would likely work fine.

Gaia Clary wrote: 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? Not sure I can answer that, but I can talk about SL's importer, and the problems people experience of the animations not turning out how they made them. Yes, it is about how LL interpolates the keyframes, and the rules it uses. When 2 keyframes are right after each other, and no movement, or very little movement is changed, the importer seeminly ignores the keyframe. It is my experience, that this happens mostly because users are using an extremely high frame rate. When 1 thinks about animation optimization, 1 has to think about frame rates. Not all animations need 60fps, or even 30 fps. Most animations could get away with less than 10 fps. It all depends on how fast the movement is. When SL animators try to import an animation with very slight movements, at 30 fps, then they are going to see issues, for sure. If they just lower their fps tho, then the movements between keyframes will be greater, and the importer will upload the animation correctly.

Kitsune Shan wrote: Otherwise, animations will be very limited to users considering that blender isnt by far a good animation software at all. What? Sorry to break this to everyone, but Blender's animation system is FAR superior to any other I've ever touched, and I've pretty much touch them all. Really, there is no other animation system that even comes close. When I use Blender, I feel like I have complete control over everything animation. From mocaps, to IK systems, to having half a dozen ways to just rotate a bone. I really would not want to animate in any other program. Heck, I should do a video on just Blender animation tricks, as they would blow away Maya users. Not Blender users tho, cause those tricks are second nature to us. Now, of course, some of this is opinion, but to say Blender isn't good for animation, is just flat out silly, IMHO. How many programs can do this, without using any other program? If you ask me, Blender is the king, at least to us peasants.

Which do you use Kitsune? Blender, Maya, or 3Ds Max, cause you have to use 1 of those to make an avatar. Ok, yes, Blender has Avastar, which allows you to export anim files. At the same time tho, Maya has Mayastar, and I'm sure Cathy could get that anim file formating from the Machinimatrix team. So, with that, both blender and maya are covered. I just don't think you are going to get LL to rewrite a whole new uploader. That said, I did bring up the problems with the current bvh uploader, which needs to be rewritten, and if they actually do that, then you might get what you want with extented BVH files.

Vir Linden wrote: 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. Just thought I'd highlight the important bit, so nobody misses it.

Oz Linden wrote: I've seen a number of posts here that include some variation on "we have always had to do XYZ this way because of the SOMETHING bug, and so we can't do SO-AND-SO" (for example, joint offsets not loading correctly). If there are existing issues that are directly related to Bento (like joint offsets not loading correctly), we'd like to get them fixed so that we can get some of these obstacles out of the way. So, if you've got one, please describe it (see previous paragraph - concrete examples we can experiment with) by filing a BUG in Jira (put [bento] in the Summary). References to long-standing issues are ok; we're not only trying to do new things, we're trying fix at least some old ones too. Oh really Oz! Let's test you on this notion. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2550 This bug is over 8 years old now. It affects EVERY SINGLE looping animation in SL. On human avatars standing upright, you won't notice the bug, but anything outside of that, and the bug is plainly evident. So, this bug makes it impossible to blend between 2 looping animations, as the bug happens every time the animation initially starts. Actually it happens everytime the animation loops, but we can route around the first frame when we set the loop settings. This bug is especially problematic on 4 legged avatars, and the only way to quiet the problem is to keep another animation playing over top of everything else. Again tho, this doesn't stop the problem completely. Yeah, bento is nice, but it doesn't make the quality of animation in SL better. LL is simply building on top of their crippling bugs. Before this bug, I made a cat ao, and with blending animations together, I was able to create a pretty realistic cat AO, and that was 9 years ago. Today, that is really not possible. I just created a set of wolves for the Unity platform, and I created most of the movements for them from real wolf videos. I could easily convert those animations over to the SL rig, but what is the point if the avatar is going to jump inbetween the animations, and I have to try and use tricks to even get it to work? Allow me to point out again, as I have done many times now, that SL has probably the most amazing animation system there is out there. Even Unity's Mecanim system can't really hold up to what animators can do in SL. The bugs tho, make it junk. If you want quality Oz, then you need to address the bugs when they happen. Not wait 8 years, if you even fix this, which I have my doubts. This bug has cost LL major income, and it frustrates me that LL doesn't understand that.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Both smiles look a bit creepy though I'm sure better weights would help this.

Interesting stuff Gaia! Please allow me to make a few suggestions. Note, that I don't have that much experience with facial bone rigs, but actually much more with shape key facial rigs. That said, I have had to animate expressions using a number of facial rig set ups. I think you mistakenly added brow to your eye bones, but this is the actual eyebrow bones that I suggest. Eyebrows: mFaceEyeBrowUpperRight (centered) mFaceEyeBrowInnerRight (corner) mFaceEyeBrowOuterRight (corner) mFaceEyeBrowUpperLeft (centered) mFaceEyeBrowInnerLeft (corner) mFaceEyeBrowOuterLeft (corner) mFaceEyeBrowCenterI do like the extra eye bones tho. Lips could have many different configurations. I'm good with 4 bones, but I do think 6 could work, if the top and bottom bones where a little more centered than the original set. That's interesting about constraints, and whether we can do that in SL.