Medhue Simoni

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: So far I have only seen one face movement which absolutely needs translation, it's been mentioned several times: the puckered lips. Are you serious here? It doesn't sound like it. No offense, but you obviously are not an animator. Every single good facial expression REQUIRES bone translation. Every single 1. Puckered lips is simply the most obvious. Even in my video I show how different a basic smile is comparing rotation, and translation. Did you somehow think the rotation only smile was good?

Vir Linden wrote: Tornleaf, thanks for the feedback. I like the fox! Could you describe what the problem is with trying to close the eyes using only rotations? You've probably seen this by now, but there is a bit more info on the different joints at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/BentoSkeletonGuide. Alt eyes are intended primarily for people who want to control their gaze direction explicitly, but could also be used for extra eyes if desired. Well, it is possible to close the eyes, but you have to adjust the axis of those bones forward slightly. If the bones are kept on the exact same axis as the eyebone, then yes, it becomes difficult to close them all the way. This is not an advocation for only rotating bones tho.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Maybe it's just late, maybe I am missing something. First you said you'd need translatable bones for such a rig (excluding the shiny extras). In a rig like bento, what would have to be added? You pick up a bone and move it around. That can be done by hand, modifier or script. Without being able to translate the bones, wouldn't you just need a very short IK chain? Then you can again move around the end, be it in a limited manner. The art or hard work or combination of those two would be the skinning if you ask me and that will have to be done for every unique figure. So, back to "I am missing something", what is it you are going to do, and Cathy for that matter. Watch the video again. Most, if not all those movements in the video are not currently possible with our rotate only face rig. Any kind of puckering of the lips would not be possible, as puckering actually moves your lips away from your face. Well, reguardless of whether we have bone translation or not, compatible facial animation is actually pretty dang easy. Just don't move the bone\s start position. So, if someone is making human avatars, then just line the face up perfectly with the initial bone set up, and you are all good. Default facial animation will work. Yeah, weighting is important, which is why Gaia and the Machinimatrix team are working on a system to get better autoweights for the face bones. So, if we have decent autoweights, and the initial bones aren't moved, then everyone could use a common facial rig set up for all their humanoid characters.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: You say that as if there could only be one fee system. One of the big changes they talked about with Sansar will be accounts with varying levels of "trust" and more robust tying of accounts to real-world people, at least with "highly trusted" ones. It should be very possible to have some accounts paying very little up-front with higher commissions (better for small hobbyist creators) and others paying more up-front in exchange for lower commissions (better for those whose virtual business is their real-world job.) I think you are reading into that way too much. Nowhere was this even remotely hinted at, that different merchants would pay different rates. What I think you are talking about has to do with who has more abilities. 1 of those abilities is selling items. Every single person selling items will need to have information about themselves available. I'm pretty sure that was the point of the "trust" convo.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: So what was your point then? What can be done in a seperate dedicated 3d application? I thought you tried to give an example of what could be possible in SL with some minor additions. If you ask me, you're comparing apples and oranges, or apples and pears as we say over here. My point was that we could have a rig, like that, with similar controls to pose our new bones with. Part of the beauty of rigs, is how you control the bones. Just laying the skeleton out is only the first step to creating a working rig. Me loves a well designed total rig system, as most animators would. The person who initiated this exchange was intimidated by this rig, and I was just assuring them something similar is possible in Blender, and someone, would likely make an advanced face rig, like this, for SL Blender users. I'd also be willing to bet, that a certain Miss Foil will create something nice in Maya also. Personally, I'm a little more familiar with setting up shape key facial rigs, but I have had to work with numerous facial bone rigs for Unity contracts.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: Here is a little inspiration for you guys at the Lab. We could totally have rigs like this for our SL characters if LL gave us the translation feature The setup looks quite a bit more complicated than just some translatable bones in a rig, so I don't think we can totally have rigs like this in SL, unfortunately. Actually, some of that is also done with scaling. Now, let's be realistic, I didn't mean all the features of this rig, or the expressions, just for the most part. Pretty much all the controls, to do all those expressions that quickly, are mostly drivers in Blender. So, I could connect all those facial bones to drives, which would dictate how they all work together. Something like this rig, is easily doable in Blender. Expect a video from me this year, showing it off. And really, that 2nd window isn't even needed for the Blender version.

Qie Niangao wrote: I suspect that LL will adopt something closer to your 15% suggestion, just based on vague noises Ebbe made in some ancient interviews, not anything definitive. But before getting all up-in-arms about a 30% fee, remember, that's exactly the fee adopted pretty universally for app-store-listed user generated content. (Apple goes even further with some really draconian restrictions -- and, personally, I'd be most concerned about any similar limits on alternate revenue sources for Sansar creators.) Anyway, the "sales tax" rate is not a simple, stand-alone number, and its effect on demand for user generated content is more about what it does to demand for the platform as a whole, not a grievance creators should feel because their content is taxed too much, like crates of tea in Boston harbour. Rather, like the cost of "Land" in SL, fees on sale of content in Sansar are just one lever in the economy. In SL, an oppressively high land cost ends up reducing sales of content, too, just for lack of interest in the over-priced platform. It's certainly possible that Sansar could make the opposite mistake, and I sure hope LL has marketing economists smart enough to set rates that don't starve off demand for the platform, as has happened in SL. I completely agree with the points you've made. I will add tho, that if LL accepts FBX files, there will be no way for them to control alternative revenue sources for Sansar creators. For instance, let's imagine they have a 30% tax, and I decide not to sell things there. I could still sell full perm stuff to the community, and not deal with LL at all. See, I have a very different view of commission than these tech guys, as I grew up in a time and era where the curator only asked for 15%. In my younger years, I was a traditional artist, selling paintings and drawings. I was in many of the smaller galleries around Detroit. Only the largest galleries asked for more than 15%. Mind you too, these are real world places, with real world costs. For the life of me, I can't understand why any artist would give away their stuff at a 30% commission, and some places charge more. I refuse to do it. They can all kiss my butt, and I'll still make money off their platform. Now, if they all want to change their tune, and realise how they are nothing without us, really, then we'll all make more money. These platforms are only hurting themselves by limiting their own content. With the market for 3D content growing, and artists having many more options, these platforms are going to need to change, if they want to compete. Qie Niangao wrote: (All that said, I think the most important thing in your first post is the citing of past failures in this space. Folks should realize that Sansar is way more likely to fail before taking public users than it is to survive five years as a going business. Folks are taking this thing awfully seriously, compared to its real prospects of ever getting out of alpha.) This is exactly why I'm begging LL to be more open about the development. The openness will help to promote the platform validly, without unwanted hype, and foster a more open platform for creators to play with.

That corporate side failed miserably, not just once, but twice in SL. Yes, first we had big companies coming in and doing nothing, and then LL tried to cater to them by making SL Enterprise, which also failed miserably. Why keep chasing this? Personally, I don't think LL is doing this. It sounds to me like LL is trying to pull in game developers. So, pretty much everyone that uses Unity or Unreal. I'm 1 of those people. Most of the work I do today is for Unity developers. To me, LL is fighting an uphill battle if this is their goal. Why would a developer choose Sansar over Unity or Unreal? Especially, when only Sansar is limiting what tools you can use. Blender is fully supported by Unity, to the point that you can even drag in blend files. Unreal has dedicated video tutorials on how to use Blender with Unreal. They seem to understand the importance of Blender. Plus, I work with small indy teams, and most of them use Blender, not Maya. Yet, this is the EXACT crowd that LL is trying to pull in. Right now, I can go onto the Unity store, and buy a package to create my own Street Fighter game, in literally an afternoon. How is Sansar going to compete with that, or even get to that point? All the advantages that Sansar would have, is completely destroyed by LL limiting the tools you can use.

Spica Inventor wrote: Sounds like sales tax about 30% and improved land in the form of size and maybe increased pixels at a cost of probably $100 a month instead of $295. 50% and $10 respectively would be much better. 1 free relatively small plot of land per account would be best as another option. 30% sales tax! That is outrageous! If Ebbe takes that line, then you will see me publicly telling every creator I know to avoid Sansar. My suggestion to LL would be a 15% sales tax, and sims at $50/month. Anything more than those numbers, and I will not be advocating for Sansar. Spica Inventor wrote: Limiting creation tools to Maya only would blow the whole thing for sure. I'm sure LL thinks they might increase overall quality that way (which they probably think is the main reason holding things back), but it wouldn't end up having that effect for various other rather obvious reasons. See, the first problem is that they need merchants, the 2nd is the quality. If LL doesn't have enough merchants, then quality means nothing at all. If it is the case that LL is trying to up quality with Maya users, that is the wrong way to go about it. In the process, they will cripple their chances for Sansar to succeed.

Of course, I have no other knowledge about Sansar than anyone else. That said, the talk about a Maya plugin, scares the crap out of me. Why? I'm asking the same thing. What is the point of a Maya plugin? To import the whole scene? What? What for? Again, what is the point? I've never seen a game engine where you built the scene in a 3D package. I don't even understand why you would want to. And, if you want to just build it all in Maya, and use only Maya features, then is LL simply building a Maya viewer? I'm thoroughly perplexed. Again, I have to talk about my concerns about the Maya centric direction they are taking. This has been done before, with not very good results. Actually, it's been done twice. The first was Blue Mars, using the famed CryEngine. Blue Mars was more 3Ds Max focused, and that is what I started out using. Blue Mars had to make all the programs to convert all the content over and usable in Blue Mars. The problems were many. Despite trying desparately, I only managed to get a few things working before it all closed. There just wasn't enough of us that were able to get anything to work. Not because we were incompetent, but the compatibility of the software, and the different versions of the software. So, low creator group to begin with, and only a small fraction of them could even get anything to work, despite the many different converters Blue Mars created. Then add on that only someone with a really good pc could handle those environments that the CryEngine was famed for, at the time. Jump forward to Cloud Party, inwhich all items were designed in Maya. There were compatibility issues from the start with the Cloud Party rig. The whole time Cloud Party was open, there was really only 1 animator able to upload their stash of animations. Me, I could upload a custom NPC avatar, and animate him just fine, but nothing I tried worked on their actual avatar. Their rig would not work in Blender, nor any other besides Maya. My motion capture system wouldn't except their rig at all. I actually got a trial version of Maya just to try and figure out the rig, and I found many issues with it, and did get my mocap software to use the rig, but then I was dealing with the z versus y issue. Despite many of us complaining about the rig, CP blew the criticisms off until the end, when 1 of their last posts was about trying to fix the compatibility issues with the rig. Then they closed. So, why was SL able to succeed, while Blue Mars, and Cloud Party failed? Well, I think it is pretty obvious why. In SL, there were no compatibility issues. You didn't need 3ds Max, or Maya, or Blender, or anything. You could get a free animation program, and figure it out, and the next day you are an animator selling animation in SL.Just like I did. Or get a free pattern psd file from the SL wiki, and the next day you are selling SL clothing. Yes, back then, we didn't even have sculpties yet, but anyone could create. Even when sculpties came, there were instantly free programs to make them, and anyone could instantly become a sculpty maker. Yes, things have progressed, and a 3D program like Maya, or Blender is a better choice to create with, but I'm not sure Maya is really the fit for this. As I have already established, the problem with BM, and CP, was the barrier of entry for people to create. It is impossible for only a small group of creators to create a buzzing marketplace. It takes thousands of creators. At least if LL went with Blender, cost would no longer be an obstacle. Plus, I just see it as a bad move because those very same Maya users, have many more options than Sansar. Even if they got every single available Maya user that wasn't already working for a game company, it would still pale in comparison to just the amount of blender users in SL alone. I wish LL all the luck in the new year. Me tho, I predict alot of back pedaling when Sansar goes public, if that is even possible.

Kitsune Shan wrote: I'm not sure why the reuse of animations is so important. I don't think anyone expect animations to be reusable between different meshes like heads and custom avatars. There is no way, even limiting animations to just rotations, to do such thing. Every mesh head or avatar may require custom animations. Due a mesh head being so different between them and different positions on mesh joints offsets, this is expected. I don't think we will ever see "AOs" for heads unless they make it on purpose for certain models purposely. This is the same for mesh avatars, having different shapes and proportions, no one should expect for animations to be compatible between them. So, basically, I'm just trying to say that this is something totally irrelevant. Even now, you can't use an humanoid AO on an animal avatar. If this didn't matter before, it shouldn't matter now. I think it is also worth pointing out that rigs are not as protected by creators than meshes. So, if a creator makes a line of unusual avatars, they could easily share the rig with the community, for anyone to create animations for them. Or........... another good example is my werewolf/lycan animation. I know a number of the other creators of Werewolves and the like, and I'm sure I could get their rigs, especially with bento. Before bento, it would have been harder, as we all had special tricks to get things to happen. Now, with a bento rig, we can all use something similar. So, of course, I can't speak for other creators, but I'd have no problem handing over my rigs to the public to do as they please with. In the case where others would give me their werewolf rigs, I could transfer my animations over to their rig, and customize the fit of the animations to their rig. My point here is, that some times there is no way that compatibility is truly possible. It's not really even possible on our avatars. Every single animator in SL knows this. As we speak, people are running around with my Lycan AO, on avatars it was never made for, and accepting the problems, because they love the animations that much. There is no way to standardize a werewolf rig that all creators would accept, so the best way is to just allow the animators to customize the animations to those special rigs, and now everything works perfectly. I might not fix all my animations to fix custom avatars, but something like my Lycan AO is more than worth it. Or, it could work in the reverse. For example, as an animator, I release my rig, for any avatar creator to use to fit their werewolf to, and then they know my animations will work and instead of worrying about animation, they focus on the avatar. If LL truly wants compatibility, then they need to go back to the default rig and make a praying animation fit both a tiny and a huge avatar, Right? I mean, that logic totally follows. So, if they don't give a crap if the 1 praying animation fits everyone, as they obviously do not, then why are they harping on facial animations being compatible? Heck, even the wing bone, talking about compatibility. Here is what I did with them.

Cathy Foil wrote:. I agree translations of for the face bones would be wonderful. I also think animating scales of the face bones would also be just as useful. The reasons translations were not included were two fold. One was a concern that if someone did upload their own mesh with different joint positions then the default animations with translations would not work. Rotating just the joints only should work well over a larger variety of bone positions or at least that's the theory. If you can show the same animation that use translations works well with two more head meshes who have significant different face bone positions I think LL would really consider making it so translations work with the face bones. The second reason I believe is that their just wasn't enough time to modify the code to allow for all the face bones to be able to be animated with translations at least not for the initial release. After playing around a bit, I realise that translation was disabled, at least for those face bones. So, I can't really show them how it will work. To me tho, the reasoning somewhat fails from the start, as every single avatar created with these bones will need to have their own facial animations. Now, a creator could think, why not just never move the initial set up of the face bone, and use that as a standard, voluntarily, to ensure that their animations work across all their avatars. In this case, bone translation is not a problem, because every avatar using animations have the same start position. So, whether bone translation is used, or not, compatibility could still happen, with a simple basic rule for creating compatible avatars. LL doesn't need to force anyone to do anything to have compatibility. With all other avatars, whether you use bone translation or not, it's irrelevant. Every single custom avatar will have their own facial expressions. Now, in the future, when LL adds collision bone support, then moving a nose around with sliders would need to move those nose bones too, and not mess with the translations. It sounds complex, but really just about interpreting the animation correctly, from whatever point you are starting from. Like I said tho, It's not possible to show LL how this could work in SL, as the ability to translate those face bone is not there.

Da5id Weatherwax wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: Here is a little inspiration for you guys at the Lab. HOLY... That rig is some mindblowing work. If we could do that in SL I'd be happy and sad. Happy because it was available and sad because I'd be totally unable to compete I would not worry too much. If we can use translation, someone, likely an existly Blender addon or Maya plugin creator, will make a similar face rig. In Blender, it's just a matter of adding more IK bones and Drivers. I don't have alot of experience setting up these rigs, but I might play around with it all, if no body else does. If I created something decent, I'd sell it for a few bucks.

Here is a little inspiration for you guys at the Lab. We could totally have rigs like this for our SL characters if LL gave us the translation feature.

Ok, so I did some testing....... I rigged up my wolf, which I originally made for Unity. It was pretty straight forward rigging him up. I did not go for a fitted mesh version with this attempt, just a standard rigging job. I started with the rig from the original Bento blend file, and then purchased the upgrade for Avastar2, and coverted the rig over. I didn't need to purchase Avastar2, just wanted to have it, but it converted the rig over pretty nice and cleanly, without screwing up any changes I did make. With the face, I set it up first with bone translations in mind, and then was forced to changed it when the upload failed.  In these next 2 images, I show both rigs, with me attempting a snarl like wolf expression. Granted, I could work on them more, and play with the weights more, but this was an honest attempt to create the same expression with the 2 different types of facial rigs. This is with only rotations:  This is with rotation and bone translation:  As you can see, they are pretty similar. They both use the exact same weights too. So, can't only rotations work? Of course they can. But....... It's a matter of quality, and opinions. It's also about the freedom of the artist. It's important to note, that I had 1 expression in mind, and set up that rotation rig to try and get the best result for that expression. Now, if I go try to make a totally different expression, it likely won't work out so well. With the rotation and translation rig, I had full control and anything I wanted to do was only a push, pull or rotate away. Quick, easy, and responsive. The rotation rig, I had to figure out, and likely needs more work, with some weighting tricks to pull with other bones too. The last point that I'll make is about motion capture facial expressions, or face tracking tech. Mostly, I've only played around with Blender tracking, as far as this goes, but I imagine most systems work the same. It's all based on translation, not rotation. It can't actually be based on rotation, as there is no rotation data to interpret. You are tracking with a webcam, and dots on your face, or some facial feature tracking system, which is still kind of tracking points. On the Draxtor radio program, Oz and Vir talked about SL being able to use this facial tracking data. Are they sure about that, when our bones can only rotate? http://draxfiles.com/2015/12/25/show-100-one-hun-dred/

Tat00ine wrote: Hello Project Bento Creators, I am looking at the proposed bone/addition attachment points and see NIPPLES as a huge oversight. I would like to see attachment points at each nipple. Especially with the movement from physics, it seems nipples would be important. In my mind, this is where some jewelry is attached and it's where nipple add-on's need to attach. I am not a technical person so maybe there are reasons and I just don't understand. Why isn't this on the new Project Bento attachment points? Why has this been left out? I would appreciate conversation and feedback on this. Let's start by saying I could be wrong. lol Nipple attachment points would be useless, unless they moved with the sliders. As far as I know, attachment points don't move with body shape sliders, outside of those slides that change bone lengths. Plus, attachment points don't work with breast physics. That said, a set of nipple rings could be done using fitted mesh. Something like a ring could get real messy tho, when adding in cleavage, and bouyancy sliders.

To me it is just a bit frustrating to listen to developers talk about settling for something subpar. This is what I'd expect from indie developers who are looking to cut corners, not an established multi million dollar company with a 10+ year record. Now, if we were talking about something crazy, maybe I'd understand, but we are talking about something that is basic. The debate about what is best for facial animation has been over for a very long time. Why do we even need to defend bone translating? Now, if there is some major technical problem, that somehow only SL has, then please do share this with us.

Cathy Foil wrote: If you can find better joint positions please do and let us know their new locations. LL wants feedback and if you can find significantly better positions I am sure LL will adopt them as the standard. If rotation is all we can do, then I would want all the facial bones moved back a bit more. Cathy Foil wrote: I agree translations of for the face bones would be wonderful. I also think animating scales of the face bones would also be just as useful. The reasons translations were not included were two fold. One was a concern that if someone did upload their own mesh with different joint positions then the default animations with translations would not work. Rotating just the joints only should work well over a larger variety of bone positions or at least that's the theory. If you can show the same animation that use translations works well with two more head meshes who have significant different face bone positions I think LL would really consider making it so translations work with the face bones. The second reason I believe is that their just wasn't enough time to modify the code to allow for all the face bones to be able to be animated with translations at least not for the initial release. It seems to me that translation will work, as long as you are translating from the right point. If the starting position of a bone is changed, the translation of the bone animated after that is from that starting point. Vir talked about adding support for more collision bones, and I'm assuming he means for the face. The starting position for the actual facial bones need to match with the movements of these eventual collision bones. If they did, then anyone could use translation on for the facial bones and it should work. Now, imagine custom avatars that are animals using the fitted mesh system, so their animals could be customized by the user, just like the default avatar. We can now do this with this bone system. Yes, they would have unique facial bone positions, but with the system working like I explained, the animals with similar facial bones set ups could all still use the same animations, cause the collision bones will make sure the normal facial bones are starting from the right position. Of course, this is all just theory in my head. I did start on rigging my new wolf to these bones, and the facial bones were very cool, placing them around the face. Cathy Foil wrote: My hope is that the bones are not going to cause as much of a performance hit as our initial test has led us to believe. I love to have two bones for each eyelid instead of one each. In my test they made for way more expressive eyes. I would think, that these new bones will eliminate the need to do things in SL that are many times more laggy than bones. Yeah, if you are in a room, full of custom avatars, these bones are going to cause some lag, just because of how many there are, times the amount of avatars. This makes me wonder if it would help to only export bones that are needed versus all the bones in every upload. I have no idea how all that works tho. Cathy Foil wrote: Please Medhue keep assessing the bones and making videos. They could certainly have a great impact on the decisions LL will be making. Cathy I did start on rigging my new Unity wolf to this rig. My Unity wolves use blend shapes for all their expressions, but it will be really interesting to see how these bones work out. I don't have much time right now tho. Well, lately, I never have much time. Then again, I do tend to stop everything to play with new stuff. Right now, I have 12 old buddhist masters I have to make for a client, who will be ghosts in the game. When I'm done with these, which are due by new years, I'll have more time to play with the new rig.  Overall, I'm pretty excited and I think the team did a really good job.

Oh, but I really did love the simple IKs you included in the rig. It really does make animating it fun. I haven't seen the Avastar 2 version yet. Heck, I just realized there is an Avastar 2. I just cashed out, so my lindens are low and my pp acount is almost drained from the holidays, unless I finish this contract. But I'll be upgrading soon. I can't wait to see what the Machinimatrix team has done.

Gaia Clary wrote: Hi, Medhue; What you see in this character's weight maps is just the result of a simple Automatic weight from bones which does not at all work for this sort of rig. In fact the automatic weight from bones only works properly for "limb like bones", you can see that on the character's fingers and tail which have also been auto weighted with no manual tweaks at all but work properly out of the box. We shipped the "Bento Angel" with these not at all satisfying initial face weights to get something out as quickly as possible and we are working on enhancements already Improvements ahead: For the face we are about to test an idea which could possibly generate by far better suited initial weights for the face. We will get into this in the next few days. I figured as much, which is why I tried not to make it a big deal, but still point out how it could be better. Gaia Clary wrote: The lips: I also miss a bone at the center of the lips. Something like mFaceLipCenterUpper mFaceLipCenterLower would be awesome improvement here. If LL wants to save on bones, maybe the 2 sets of bones on the top and bottom lips could be move to the center a bit more. Gaia Clary wrote: Rotation versus Translation: The rig was constructed such that the issues with rotation get minimised: You see the joints are all placed deep inside the head. But of course you are right, the mesh still gets distorted in an odd way when you rotate too far. I am not sure why bone translation is forbidden. Nobody could tell me so far the reasoning behind this decision. maybe it related to some issues with the appearance sliders... If LL keeps things like this, may I suggest moving those facial bones even farther back, so that there is even less rotation in the movements. Ultimately, LL really should consider supporting translating the bones. It's about how things look. No matter how LL does this rotation trick, it CAN'T be as good as translating the bones. A classic example is puckered lips, which actually move the lips away from the head. This CAN'T be done by rotating bones. IMHO, the bottom line is, does LL want our avatars to have good expressions, or just expressions. I vote for good expressions. I fear that LL thinks the gains are little, while I think the gains are huge.

Adeon Writer wrote: The Lindens have stated that they want concrete examples of what why bone translations are important - examples of what can be done with translations, and what work-arounds and compromises must be done to accomplish similar results with rotations only. That's a very good point, and yes, we really need some emperical evidence here. But one problem I feel Linden Lab really should bring to mind is that they didn't actually block bone translations on Aditi. Many people exersizing the Bento skeleton right now have no idea bone translations were even intended to be blocked. You can rig and animate the face just fine right now, and many people are just declaring it "ALL CLEAR!" See the problem with LL's request is that it is not based on objective analysis, and it can't be. The differences between rotating bones and translating bones in facial animations is subjective. Now, I'd be willing to bet that EVERY SINGLE animator in SL will objectively say that translating facial bones is better, but better is not the standard that LL seems to be seeking. I did my best to give LL exactly what they asked for with my video showing the differences between the 2 techniques. That is really all we can do is show how and why rotation is never really used for facial bones. Personally, I don't really care what is or is not doable right now on Aditi, only what LL says they are going to do.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: As a customer I seriously hope you are able to sell those kits for the mesh bodies. I really want to see more designers able to support them. I may like the top brand in this a lot, but I don't want everything I own to use the same designer's style... So I wish you as much success as is possible in that endevour - as it will be a major boon to every consumer in SL if these bodies can get better support. I wouldn't get your hope up. Many of the most popular mesh body designers are pretty secretive about their bodies. With many of the new advancements, who knows where things will go. There is even talk about more sliders being available to us. So, I could envision a new mesh body based entirely on the default, but with all the qualities of fitted mesh. As I have talked about before, fitting fitted mesh clothing to a fitted mesh body is actually technically more sound than fitted mesh clothing on the default avatar. The problem I see is all the crazy differences in weights for these different mesh bodies. I can see a reason to just put out a standard avatar that matches the default exactly. If LL does add more sliders for us to use, I will likely put out some kind of mesh body, just so clothing designers have a simple and quick system to create for. Who know tho, everything is up in the air at this point, lol

Tornleaf wrote: The original work-around involved wearing a small invisible cube or something that was brought in with joint positions checked, and then wearing the multiple other fitted mesh pieces that didn't come in with joint positions. I didn't know that was fixed. Handy! And yes, ideally, if you move your fitted mesh bones correctly with the proper offset, which is a tedious task (though avastar was working on those bones getting snapped automatically), you can get non-human sliders to work. That is my eventual dream. X) I played with this for a bit, but it just got far too messy when having the compounding bugs. I got a good understanding of it, but didn't think the final result was worth the headaches. Now, it seems very easily doable, but will be very tedious and time consuming to get just right. I really can't wait to put full expressions on my wolf and Lycan avatars tho. It will really make them come alive. OH, and to avatar creators out there, you can also creat speech gestures for your custom avatars, and with these new bones, it should be much more interesting. Speech gestures are trigged when using voice, and the different pitches of your voice can trigger different animations. It really does make your customers feel more real when the avatars are moving with the voice.

ChinRey wrote: A friend of mine just asked me a question and I have no idea about the answer so I pass it on. How modifiable will a Bento avatar be inworld? Well, outside of the faces, as modifiable as the default, with even more options with all those bones. If you notice in the bug fixes for Bento, a bug was fixed which stopped creators from using fitted mesh with different joint positions. So, now that the bug is fixed, I could make a wolf that could be fat, or skinny, big head, huge paws and what not, just like the default, again outside of facial changes. These facial changes could also be done with these new facial bones, but then you would likely lose your expressions. Another point to add, was Vir responding to me in this thread, that LL is planning on adding more collision bones to give us more sliders to use. He didn't expand on this, but I imagine LL will only be adding collision bones for facial sliders, and not the body, as that would mean old fitted mesh clothing would break, Because of that, I'm assuming Vir just means facial bones. With this addition tho, our full mesh avatar will be just as modifiable as the default, and likely much more with all the options we have now. Of course, this is all just my observations, and please don't take them as fact.

Here is my quick evaluation of the project.