Medhue Simoni

Last night and this morning, I released my new Bento Cobra to the grid. I also sent out the Bento Cobra to everyone that purchased my original cobra. So, there are now potentially hundreds of Bento cobras slithering around the grid. Because this is not just a normal update, I personally messaged every single past purchaser of my old cobra. This literally took ALL day, but I did learn quite a bit in the process. The SL of today is thriving, and I was quite surprised at just how many of these past purchasers messaged me back, or were on the grid while I was messaging them. Personally, I think much of this is due to changes we've seen at the Lab, and many of the new features the Lab has introduces over the past couple of years. Kudos to LL, and please keep it up! Skeletons for NPCs next? :smileywink:

Melonie Romano wrote: I am an animator and use Poser Pro and Qavimator for making animations. Will the new skeleton be usable in my program? The last time I used Poser, they had options to import DAE, and FBX files. I would think that you should be able to use those to animate with. Also, Dazstudio has these options, and will also let you export Poser files. Not positive that any of this will work, but they are things you can try.

I'd suggest getting Cathy Foil's Mayastar plugin for Maya. It will make creating Bento avatars much easier.

I'm somewhat confused by what animations you think are needed. For the most part, if someone is making a bento avatar, then they need to animate it themselves or give an animator their files and have the animator make the anims. Things like wings, tails, fingers, and facial animations can be animated with rotations without having the meshes at all, as long as those bones are not moved. All that said tho, if someone is making any bento avatar, then they need to do some of their own animations. Bento heads are very unique. Meaning, the creator has to decide how they want all the bones to work. Like, you could have separate blinking animations, and how far that blink goes down depends on the mesh head and eyes. Even when talking about expressions on heads with all the bones left in the default positions, each head will be rigged slightly differently. I tried to convey this in the bento meetings, but people still seemed to think animations could be made for these that are universal. We'll see. As far as the MP, well it was many times worse a couple weeks ago. So, there must have been some optimization that LL did. What many of the results are tho, are body shapes. People testing these Bento Heads and such, are all releasing Body Shapes that fit some of these different heads. Creating a body shape that actually looks good with these Bento heads does take some fiddling, so people are releasing their body shapes for them. I agree tho, they should not be the top results when searching for Bento.

Sari6t wrote: Hello, I've been making loads of stuff in Blender and using Avastar with out any issues for what I have been making until now. Lately I've been working on more complex clothing, things with collars and sleeves lol. Yes thats complex for me. Anyway, two things that I've not seen. One is that when I select "Fully FItted" the garment and the bones POP up above the avatar. The slides all work pro[erly but now the sleeve openings are at my head. When I test on the Beta site its the same. If I use "Half Way" its fine. Not sure what's going on here, but I will say to make sure you Apply Rotation and Scale on your mesh before you try to rig it to the skeleton. Sari6t wrote: The second and ore troubling is if I have used solidify, or any other way to create interior mesh , like in the sleeves. What happens is that when the arms bend the inner part has what seems like much lees weighting and pops through. I tried loads of different approaches, but its really driving me mad. Anyone have this issue? I went and grabbed some demos from good designers like Hilly and had a look at them and she seems to get away with interior polys all the time. And when I wear it , all is well. I'm trying to get a workflow down so I can create mesh clothing. I use the latest version or Blender, Avastar, Zbrush, and MD (Though not too much until I get this figured out) Technically, in game model development, there should never really be inside geometry that can't be seen, as it is a serious waste of resources. Now, I understand that SL is a special case, and users have many more options in SL, like taking half their clothing off. That said, if the user is never going to see that geometry, then it should not be there. Plus, you are giving yourself much more work, as you are pointing out. Here is a video that I made that might help you. I know it's not exactly what you are talking about, but related.

CiHo Questi wrote: Hi medhue Did you discover how to configure poser with bento avatar? If it's possible? Sorry, I don't even have Poser on my newest PC, and I haven't had time to set my old PC up and test things in Poser. That said, another option could be to use DazStudio, and import a Bento DAE, or FBX, and then create a Poser compatible file. CiHo Questi wrote: How it's great your elepant Bento Thanks! The elephant was quite a bit of work.

So, I been wrestling with this cobra for a couple of weeks now. It seemed that no matter what kind of constraints I used to keep the Bento bones to my control rig, bones would not always stick perfectly, and bones were getting out of alignment. Then it hit me today, after taking a couple days off of beating my head against a wall about it. Gosh, it's so obvious now when I think about it. It's the pelvis! Now, maybe this is just how this is in Avastar, but we have all these bones that parent to the pelvis. If the pelvis moves, so do all those bones, no matter how you set up constraints. The solution is to not use, or move the pelvis at all. The good thing is, that I'm using a control rig, which is just the same rig I orginally made for the Unity3D engine. All the animation is really on or done on that rig. So, swapping out a bone, and rearranging the bento skeleton isn't that big of a deal and doesn't ruin the work I've done on it already. I just need to resave and upload the anim files. I hope this helps others that might be seeing something strange like this, and it might also be smart to always use control rigs when feasible.

I just want to mention to everyone that Troy Linden was at the last Bento meeting, and brought up the topic of best practices. It seems the Lab is thinking about the topic and how to better cover it. Troy mentioned possibly doing some videos around the topic. I've suggested that LL have a few of us in videos talking about specific creation topics. So, kind of like this forum thread in a video, but maybe not as detailed. I'm bringing it up here to see what you all think, and who might be willing to be involved in such things. I'm not pointing any fingers, cough Drongle and ChinRey, or any others, but it would be nice to get many perspectives. Contact Troy@lindenlab.com if you have any thoughts on this, or want to be involved.

Here's an interesting side note. Unreal is streaming right now and showing off their LOD generator. At least, I think that is what it is.

Chic Aeon wrote: REALLY love your elephant -- and the eyebrow movement is fantastic LOL. Pssst! If there isn't a baby elephant yet, there really needs to be one! The elephant is using the bento skeleton, which means users can customize the shape to be much smaller. Almost baby size. That said tho, originally the elephant was made for the Unity3D engine. In Unity, you can use shapekeys. Using shapekeys, I made the african elephant morph into an asian elephant, and both of their baby elephants. So, it would not take much to make the baby african elephant. I'd just have to scale that mesh up to fit the big elephant, and then scale the rig down to be baby size, and export him. The babies are pretty cute.  Chic Aeon wrote: That being said, one thing that wasn't shown in this video and I think really needs to be shown (maybe next video) is how the uploader "previews" relate to the models in world and how they look at the distances based on the size of the models (in this case medium furniture size). I don't think anyone not intimately involved already with uploading mesh will "get" the relationship between the viewing pane and the inworld model until it is shown. Hmm, not quite sure what you're talking about here, but I don't really make furniture. Chic Aeon wrote: On that note and taking a segue, I tried on a pair of very cute bootlets this evening. They looked great. I did note however a HUGE jump in my avatar rendering cost as they placed themselves on my tootsies. Took them off, put them on . Went "wow". Then I rezzed them (and happily they would rez rather than giving an error message). They were 128 land impact!!!!!!!!! We haven't really said much about clothing on this thread, but just because one might make wearables, that doesn't mean they can (should) forget about land impact. **************************************** Well, clothing is no different than avatars. With Bento coming, if I can find the time, I'll be doing videos about Bento, and efficiency of avatars will be a pretty important part of that, as avatars have an avatar complexity score. My elephant is only around 6000 triangles, with a complexity score of 9500. This is literally only like 3000 more than the default, which is ridiculously low. I just rezzed the elephant on the ground, and he is only 90 land impact. He is HUGE tho. Chic Aeon wrote: I won't be blogging about those shoes even though they were very cute. Insert sad face. **************************************** You have a blog? Can you give a link?

Well, I did finally make another LOD video. This 1 was just about the uploader and generating LODs. Don't know how happy I am with it tho. Everytime I tried, it just seemed like I was almost promoting the 1 triangle cheat, which bothered me. I guess tho, there is no way around it, if you are going to talk about the uploader, generating LODs, and getting a low Land impact score.

Take note, that Ebbe talks about many things Sansar will be able to do, ie VR stuff, but never actually shows it. I'll also add, that grabbing stuff off of Turbosquid and putting it in your world is not a difficult thing, as all worlds can do that, even SL, and it's not anything to be bragging about. As a side note, I've applied twice, both being months and months ago, and they won't let me in there yet. I did get an email saying something about how more invites will be going out soon, but that was a good month or 2 ago. For the life of me, I can't understand why they aren't letting more people in. If they think Sansar will be good with just some Maya users importing Turbosquid content, then Sansar doesn't have a chance in hell to succeed.

Well, I figured I'd do 2 videos. 1 for the average consumers, and 1 for the creators. I doubt any consumers want to sit thru a half hour video on how to make LODs. So, the first is short and sweet, at least to me.

Drongle McMahon wrote: "the medium level has almost no effect on your ending land impact." Well, that actually depends on the size of the object. I was really simplifying to keep it simple, and had trees in mind. The same sort of considerations apply with the single-triangle trick at different LODs depending on the object size. It's fair to say it's more common at the lower LODs. I'm looking forward to seeing your video, wondering how you will cover such potentially large subject. :matte-motes-grin: Ah yes! Large objects! Yeah, not really something I've played with all that much. Gosh, I really have bento stuff I gotta do, lol. This topic is news now tho, and people are listening, so I'm compelled to do this now. Maybe I'll have to only address smaller object in the video, until I can dig into larger objects more. Unless.... you'd like to give me your observations of how best to handle large objects, or how to cover that in the video?

Drongle McMahon wrote: ETA. In fact I could go further. If LOD meshes are provided, instead of using the defualt LOD generator, it is possible to make sure that a single triangle is invisible (e.g. upside-down, underground). The effect is that the object disppears entirely, rather than collapsing into an ugly state. Although I don't think this is as good as a properly crafyed LOD, it is more acceptable than the ugly collapse cases. I think even better is to have a single plane as the last LOD, with maybe a plane for each face/material. In most cases, an object is resting on something, hence you can avoid people seeing the back side. Really tho, I don't think we even have to go that extreme with it. Yeah, if you gotta save 2 land impacts, then you can do that, but with all these extra prims we are getting, why not spend those 2 prims on a little more detail? At some point tho, whether a plane, or a box, or a set of triangles, there is little benefit to trying to go lower.

Drongle McMahon wrote: Sorry. I guess that's a biased adjective that I should have avoided. It is the outcome of my view is that setting the second (medium) LOD to a single triangle is essentially an abuse of the intended application of the facility to define LODs, becuase it forces users to use viewer settings outside the normal range to preserve acceptable appearances. I do realise that others don't share this view, and that they are as entitled to that opinion as I am to mine. I'll change it. WTF! People do that? And then tell everyone to turn their LOD levels up? OMG, how much more convoluted can people be? I'm not sure I'd label it as abusive, but more like an extremely uneducated monstrocity. In the first place, the medium level has almost no effect on your ending land impact. So, why would anyone start there? Well, all I can do is make my video on the topic and hope that creators make better choices. I hope I can show creators that spending just a few minutes and making their own LODs, as well as understanding how the upload calculates Land impact, can get them much greater benefits than what they are currently doing. This is not to say everyone will agree with my conclusions, just that mine aren't as convoluted as this crazy example. lol

Drongle McMahon wrote: In the LL viewer, the Object detail slider will only raise RenderVolumeLODFactor to 2.00, the default for Ultra graphics. That isn't generally enough for the products of the extreme LOD abusers. I'm confused by how the LODs can be abused. I've just never looked into it. Can you explain a little?

I keep seeing people talking about raising your LOD level in the viewer. Looking into it, it is my opinion that this is convoluted and completely unnecessary. Simply adjusting your Object slider in the Advanced Graphics settings will up the distance the LODs change. My PC is easily in the top 5% of machines used to render SL, and even my object setting was set extremely low, to the point I have to zoom in to see anything at it's highest quality. Don't ask me why LL sets this as the Default, because it's pretty ridiculous.

IMHO, the problems of bad LODs is 1 of a lack of education. Yeah tho, no matter what, there will be bad LODs in SL. Heck, I'm sure I have some too, from some of my first models that I ever made. That's SL tho. It's a place of learning and advancing, with hobbyists and professionals. Some of those hobbyists becoming professionals in the process. Like I said tho, the LOD issue is really something that is solved with better info and education. All that said, I'm working on a video now, going over my views and techniques related to LODs.

I have used easily 90% of all the bones with Bento and had no issue at all. There was a limit on the file size, which was 112kbs. LL talked about doubling that limit for bento, but I don't know if it's been changed or not. I've release 2 bento avatars already, and haven't come across any problems related to limits.

Catwa Clip wrote: that means uhhhhh only ugly animations can be universal thats very bad news . Yep, and I pointed this out in the beginning of the open beta bento testing. If you watch 1 of my videos on the bento face, you'll see that 1 option that I considered was just taking over the lips and cheeks. With only taking over the lips and cheeks, you get a much wider range of really good facial expressions. Of course, there have been many changes since I played around with this. Not being a bento head creator, I haven't checked to see if this still works. Also, take note, that if you do take over these areas, you could also include animation to customize the lips and cheeks, instead of using the slider to do it. Some of the mouth sliders will still work, like lip fullness, so it can be a nice combination. Again tho, I have not tested any of this since the changes over the past couple months. Oh, and Kudos on the Heads you've put out so far!

So, I'm in the middle of releasing the Elephant, and I'm thinking about how the heck people are going to even know when new products are available. Yeah, we all have our own blogs and stuff, but there is NOWHERE in the SL properties that allows us to announce anything. I sell on numerous platforms, all of which allow creators to post new products in their forums. ALL except SL. Years ago, we were allowed to post products in the forums, on a thread specifically for new product releases. Today, there is no such thing. Yes, LL has improved many things in SL as of recently, but the 1 thing that LL has not improved, at all, is how we can market our products. Having a place to post in the forums is the simplist and the very LEAST that LL could do to improve marketing products. And guess what? We, meaning LL and SL creators, both win. Why this was ever removed blows my mind.

My elephant is now in dancing school. Here he is starting to get the rhythm.

kichaza wrote: Quick question, did Bento increase the maximum number of bone influences per vertex or is it still locked at 4? It's still 4.

Bond Harrington wrote: I'm not sure if this is related, but when I export from Blender to BVH, the axis are all messed up. It took me a hour to get a simple blink animation done, when I realized that BVH is reading X for Y and Y for Z, I believe. I can't swap it over during conversion using the Export BVH - Rotation tool, it seems like I have to reanimate everything by hand before exporting. It was easy enough for a blink, but anything involving more bones because troublesome. I'm assuming that you are using Blender's regular BVH exports, which is not set up for SL skeletons. Personally, I've never used it for SL. If you use Avastar's BVH exporter, then everything should be fine. My guess is that the inherent Blender BVH export is using World vs Local, or vice versa, which is causing the issue. Of course, that's just my guess.