[Project Bento Feedback Thread]

I do have a couple of questions pertaining to bento,  i would have searched the topic for details, but it appears the forum won't let me. Thus, thinking 110+ pages might take a bit long to parse, I figure I'd ask directly.

- About the new bones, especially regarding the hand/finger setup as well as facial rigging. Are they going to respond to the hand/head collision bones, or will they ignore head/hand slider settings? Basically what do I have to keep in mind if I want to do a fitted mesh rig to allow my customers to customize my avatar shapes?

- Is the importer going to change any? As in, will it finally be able to assume/fill in missing mBones, or will I still have to - as a 3dsmax user - edit the .dae file per hand and put in any non-defined base skeleton mBones so the importer realizes there is rigging data?

- What changes for the import process? Do I just need to have the regular 50-ish mBones of the SL skeleton defined, even if they have 0 influence, or will I also have to define all the new bento bones for the importer to identify my rig?

- Will we be able to animate bone positions and/or scaling, or just rotation? I am new to the idea of facial rigs, but making facial expressions using JUST bone rotation strikes me as an extremely complicated task.

- Will we have a proper animated talkjaw/lower lip setup, or do we still have to abuse mSkull or other un-used bones?

Also two somewhat unrelated questions:

- Will 3dsmax ever be able to import animations to SL via other formats, or will I have to resort to blender to get my .anim or .bvh data inworld?

- There were talks of more than 8 faces on a mesh, but no followup. Has this project died, or is it still alive and kicking, or potentially even implemented already?

 

Thank you very much for any helpful replies. I do look forward to the possibilites opened up by this project, and I very much want to see it succeed so that us creators can make even more impressive creations

[Making animations with 3ds max?]

Having just now updated to max 2017 and preparing to launch a major avatar project, I'm curious about this. Is there ANY way for me to create animations in max and have them import to SL? I don't much mind using converters or third party apps, I just would very much like to be able to use max to create the actual animation, rather than blender, since converting a custom model and rig over to blender has been giving me some issues in the past, and with a more complex rig/animation goal, that might quickly turn into a small nightmare.

[Strange behavior with glow on PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_NONE]

This is more of a materials based question, but I hope I can resolve the problem I'm seeing.

What I have is a product with various textures, which may exist either in a non-alpha state (using alpha mode none in the diffuse settings) or in a half cut-off state, using an alpha mask. To save space in my scripts, I use the same texture in both cases, aka the texture has an alpha channel, but I use alpha mode none when I do not need the alpha channel to have an effect.

This works great in all cases, except for glow. For some reason, even with alpha mode none enabled, the glow effect is affected by the alpha channel, aka the portions that would be rendered invisible by the alpha channel do not receive glow.

Since my customers sometimes want a glow effect on the product, this is causing me quite some problems, since my system was initially designed around this one texture solution, as were the scripted appliers, since this particular oddity was only discovered after the fact.

My question is this: Is this intended behavior, or is this an SL bug that we might see a fix for down the road? Since if it is intentional, i will have to redesign parts of my work, potentially.

To sum it up: When using a texture with an alpha channel, but selecting alpha mode none, glow still is limited by the alpha channel, even though - in my opinion - it shouldn't be. Bug or intended behavior?

[Using llXorBase64() correctly]

Essentially mild obfuscation. I have a script that puts out data to the user, and I simply want to obfuscate the message as base64 encrypted string. I'm not worried about people trying to break it as much as just giving the user a simple block of text to copy/paste. Another use is object to object communication, to obfuscate texture UUIDs.

I've used llXorBase64StringsCorrect() with the latter in the past, for a texture application system, but some customers ran into errors that I had trouble reproducing. I've started to wonder if those errors are because bits from the arrays are being discarded and whether padding would prevent that.

[Using llXorBase64() correctly]

Hiya,

 

first of all thanks for the reply. Though I already did read the implementation section, and while i admit that I may be missing the forest for the trees here, I couldn't find a conclusive answer to the simple question: Can this function lose the last few bits of a message, as in, should I pad every message I send to guard against this possibility? Or will input always match output despite certain bits being discarded?

[Using llXorBase64() correctly]

I've made use in the past of llXorBase64StringsCorrect() in order to apply a mild encryption to some messages. Security concerns aside, when reading up on this function again today - as well as on the new llXorBase64() - I saw a caveat mentioning this:

During the conversion to a byte array the last (bitcount % 8) are discarded from both str1 and str2.

This has me wondering. The wiki doesn't clarify much beyond this point, but to me this reads that data can be lost for certain string lengths. This might explain hard to trace bugs that some of my customers have been seeing.

The question now is: Assuming str1 is my data and str2 is my "password", should I always pad str1 to avoid losing data from it upon decryption? Again, the wiki hints at discarded data, but is very unclear what this actually means for practical use, at least to my eyes. So a bit of a better explanation would be much welcome so that I can improve my implementation if necessary :)

[[3dsmax] Trouble with large avatar]

So I've almost finished an avatar project, but I want to include a large size option for my customers, since bears usually tend to be big and strong.

To achieve that, I figured the easiest way is to create both upsized body meshes (easy and working fine) and to make a deformer to scale the skeleton, to avoid certain issues involving alpha scripting and meshes with joint offsets stored in them (glorious SL, something I had to figure out the hard way during this project).

This second part is hard though. My first attempt involved scaling up everything (body mesh and skeleton) to 150% size in 3dsmax. I then made a small box, and rigged every bone to it with a small influence. This box was then exported into SL, with the joint position flag set in the importer. But it does nothing to influence the skeleton at all.

The second attempt was to then use Bone Tools in max to reset the scaling on all my bones - rather, dummy objects acting as bones - which had me believe it should now actually understand that the bones are 150% the normal size.

Instead, now when I import, the deformer blows my avatar up to roughly 100 times its size rather than just 1.5 times.

I should mention that for some reason, the skeleton I work with had to be scaled extensively, to about 10.000% to fit in the metric system (using meters for display and centimeters as unit setup as advised by the wiki page). However SL was fine to that, yet scaling it to essentially 15.000% did nothing to influence the deformer. Yet resetting the scale somehow just makes it explode into a 100 times as large skeleton, despite all the readings on the bone positions reading sensible values.

 

At this point I'm stumped. What I want to achieve seems very straightforward and simple, yet at the same time, I have no idea what else I could possibly try. I have a nice skeleton with reset scaling, everything is in its proper place and yet - SL utterly hates dealing with it and decides it needs to be way too big.

 

So my question is this: How DO I scale up a skeleton in 3dsmax the proper way, given the information I provided?

[Flickering issues with rigged mesh eyelids]

This one's a weird one, because I solved it once before, but can no longer reproduce the solution.

Essentially, i have a full mesh avatar. Rigged to both the collision bones (HAND, CHEST, etc) as well as some of the m* bones (such as mSkull for animated jaw motion). It features joint offsets (for eye and jaw positions), and uses diffuse, normal and specular maps once inworld.

My problem is this: whenever I edit the transparencies via script (llSetAlpha) for say, an eyeblink or posing the fingers, every rigged mesh piece worn at this moment flickers every time that alpha function is called. Which, of course, looks hideous.

The strange thing is, I've made a full mesh / materials avatar before, and this one doesn't flicker when it plays its eyeblink. I looked at the old files, and from what I can tell, the rigging methods are identical, as is the genreal setup of texture maps used. So this has left me stumped. Has anyone run into similar issues at all?  Any pointers are welcome~

[Which 3dsmax versions are supported currently?]

I've set up max 2016, but ran into an issue. I verified that the FBX version is set to 2014/15, but attempting to import a rigged mesh creates a "can't find skin source" error in both the latest firestorm and latest stable vanilla client.

I'll investigate further, but I'd appreciate further pointers as to what settings might be important to check. I'm using the same settings in the DAE exporter that I use in 2011, but those just concern themselves with unit setups etc

EDIT:

It would seem that setting the FBX version to 2013 fixes the issue, I'll do further testing

EDIT2:

Nevermind that, as usual it was an oversight. Some of my meshes had whitespaces in their names, and rather than tell me that, the exporter gave me a cryptic log error. So yes, max 2016 does work fine~

[Which 3dsmax versions are supported currently?]

I've asked something similar before, but other than "go find out yourself" I had no help here. Hence why, since I'm in the middle of a project, I wanted to ask if someone knew which 3dsmax version is the latest supported one for mesh imports. I'm primarily talking rigged/fitted mesh, since the wiki only talks about collada 2013, which are old plugins.

Ideally I would like to use max 2016 which came out fairly recently, but if I still have to keep an old version around to export to SL, that would only slow down my workflow a lot, hence I'd love to hear what version I can upgrade to safely, since I am looking into leaving max 2011 behind for good and jumping to the latest possible while still being able to work on my projects as before.

Once again, thanks for reading this, and hoping to be enlightened~

[3dsmax 2015 - is SL ready?]

I've recently obtained max 2015, currently I'm still working with max 2011. I've been hoping to transition to the newer versio some time soon now to enjoy a better UI and performance among various other niceties - and for the sake of not having two installs of max laying around.

I only found little to no comments or talk about it, so I'll ask directly. How compatible is SL with max 2015? Can I still import meshes, more importantly rigged ones? Do I need to observe any magic rules with old collada export plugins or somesuch? The wiki only talks about 2013 and older, so it's of little help here.

So any input from fellow max 2015 users would be appreciated.

[Fitted mesh for male shapes]

Hi again - I posted about this months ago, but sadly never got a solution to what seems to be a straightforward issue.

As part of my products, I'm building items rigged as fitted mesh, and while making them work on the female skeleton is easy and straightforward, whenever I try and make them work on a male shape/skeleton, there always are extra deformations happening that just don't occur on female rigs.

Basically what I do for the female is, I build the mesh to be nice and flush with the female body, then rig it to the female skeleton. once uploaded, everything behaves as expected. For the male setup, I instead make the mesh flush with the male body and rig it to the male skeleton, import, and lo and behold, the mesh doesn't fit.

I tried using female mesh with male rig, male mesh with male rig, male mesh with female rig, and female mesh with female rig, then switching to male shape. All of those just won't work as flawlessly as female rig/mesh/shape.

So here is the question: How do I rig a mesh so that these extra deforms don't happen? Surely someone here must've built some article of clothing that's somewhat tight fitting and has had to deal with those kinds of behaviour. For the record, using 3dsmax 2009 atm - mostly because while I own 2015, firestorm at least doesn't like any rigs imported from there.

 

Since I'm hoping to launch products for male and female - and already ran into big problems last time I want to avoid - I'm hoping that someone can help me out here and give me some pointers. And yes, I'm using the official source files LL provides for the rig and avatar mesh.

[Male mesh rigging issue]

I exported the male body, skeleton and the legs in question as FBX for you, hope this helps:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qjcmiun3zogjjvi/Male%20Legs.FBX

This is all male btw, so what I tried initially because it made the most sense

[Male mesh rigging issue]

So after some experimenting, I've come to the following results:

• Male leg shape and male skeleton - nope
• Male leg shape and female skeleton - nope
• Female leg shape and male skeleton - nope
• Female leg shape and female skeleton - nope

So.. unless I'm missing something big, rigging attachments seamlessly to the male body is actually impossible?

[Male mesh rigging issue]

Hmm that's a good pointer, thanks. So you are suggesting I snap the edge vertices to the female body, but keep it rigged to the male skeleton?

And well, the files from the wiki on fitted mesh have very, VERY bad and wrong weights. the entire chest area is done very badly. I imported it into SL once, and it had problems all over in that area. Had to do a lot of cleanup for my purpose. But I'll try that, thanks again!

[Male mesh rigging issue]

I've lately come across a problem rigging parts for an avatar. I have digitigrade lower legs that are supposed to seamlessly join with the male avatar shape at the knee. So I made sure the vertices are correctly aligned, and i took the weights from the only source available to me - the old old old rigged mesh female body.

Except today i discovered that this creates a very visible gap between the lower legs and the SL body. This gap does not occur on the female version of those legs. So this leads me to believe that the weights on the knee are different for the male and female avatar meshes. And yes, I rigged the male legs to hte male skeleton and the female ones to the female. Still the seam persists.

Since I can't ship the product this way, I need to find out what the correct way of rigging seamlessly to the male body is.

If someone has an OLD - not the fitted mesh rigs, those are actually weighted very VERY wrongly - SL avatar file with the rigged, correctly weighted male mesh, that'd be appreciated greatly. Or if someone could point me to a correctly weighted template mesh for this. Thanks!

[Rigging for male fitted mesh]

Once again me, breaking things left and right it would seem.

The problem this time around is this. My avatar uses the default SL mesh, clipped and re-rigged/imported to enable use of materials on the default-ish SL body shape. I've conquered the rigging issues now, but one weird problem remains.

I did the male body the other day, and while it is on a female shape, everything looks fine. But the moment I transition to male, everything bulges out weirdly and deforms wrong.

Thus my question: How do I properly rig something to a male base shape? The skeletons and influences from the source files seemed to be identical as near as I could tell, so why is the male shape breaking things so badly? I want my head/hands/etc to also blend proper with the base SL avatar for this project, so their seams bulging out on a male shape is a pretty huge problem.

[Looking for properly rigged default avatar meshes]

Hmm.. well I was more looking for fbx files etc that have a more correct weighting. At least I managed to overcome some issues I had with the mesh. Turns out a reset transform was needed, now things are looking better. I still need to clean up some weights, but the whole thing is coming together more than before.

[Looking for properly rigged default avatar meshes]

This is something that's been keeping me busy with yet another roadblock for my av. I want to use the default avatar mesh - just clipped a bit - so I can make use of materials. The problem I ran into is while the joint deforms look pretty good on the rig that LL gave us for fitted mesh, their fitted mesh weights are HORRIBLE. I have tried to fix them, but have been tearing my hair out at the stupidity that is 3dsmax's skin modifier, which apprently can do nothing right except break weightings.

So I wonder, has anyone in the past bothered to fix LL's badly done default rig for fitted mesh? Mostly the CLAVICLE, CHEST, UPPER_BACK bones are vastly out of place as far as their weights go, and it's really messing things up for me.

[Need some help with joint offsets]

I'm recently working on riggin an avatar head, and I have all the weights the way I want them, even got a rigged jaw going, with some help from the forums. Now there is one last problem, namely joint offsets. When I import the dragon, the eyes are pushed forward. Since I have to import joint positions, this means SL decides to import ALL joint positions, not just the one I edited. And even though I am working off the default fitted mesh skeleton provided by LL, it seems that the eye positions are slightly offset or something.

The question is this - using 3dsmax btw: is there a way to import only the mSkull offset and ignore other joint positions? Or what would be the most elegant solution to avoid the eyes moving about? I was thinking of simply moving them back enough to compensate, since they seem too far forward for whats normal

[Need help animating a jaw]

Update time.

So I managed to make it work - turns out rigging to mSkull works, you just have to remember to check "Include joint positions" when importing. With the help of another creator, I have managed to get the jaw animation working as well.

That said, I ran into the next problem. Putting on the head with the mSkull offset causes bugged eyes, aka they jut out too far. I haven't modified any other joints other than mSkull, so I have no idea why this is happening. Can anyone give me any pointers whatsoever on how to fix this issue? The weights and all are fine now, but this one issue needs fixing before I can ship it.

Edit: SOLVED!

On a hunch, I thought to mess with the position of the eye bones when exporting, pushing them back just a little. And lo and behold, the bugged eyes are gone. I can fine tune with slider settings and I'm set!

[Need help animating a jaw]

Hi, sorry for the late reply. I busied myself with a few other things that needed doing, but got back to it again. I got blender working with avastar, and I thought I had a working method. Rigging the head isn't really a problem at this point, but creating the animations still is.

What I did:

• imported the dragon head to the blender avastar scene tog et a point of reference for where the jaw sits
• put the avatar rig into edit mode, showing extra bones
• moved the skull bone after disabling move/rotation locks to where the joint should be
• created position/rotation keys for the skull bone at frame 0 and 10
• did an anim export, range 0-10, included translations, high priority

What I received:
Essentially an animation that does nothing. The skull bone offset isn't reflected at all. The goal here was to make a "closed jaw" base animation using just an offset so that the jaw has a default rest position, and from there on out i could make rotation driven talk animations.

What am I missing? I've seen other people move the skull bone like I did for eyeblink and it worked for them, so it seems like a feasible way (And sadly, I /have/ to move the skull bone, it wont work in its default position and look good)

[Need help animating a jaw]

So I've made a fancy dragon av using the SL body, materials and all, and now it's time to animate it's jaw. From what I gathered, I have two options to do so:

* make a new bone/dummy called "chin", hook it up to mHead, and rig to that
* use mSkull instead, and use its rotation to drive the jaw motion

The first one apparently is both impossible and posisble at the same time from what I saw so far, but I couldn't manage. The second approach was easy to rig in 3dsmax, but now it comes to animating.

Problem: 3dsmax can't do bvh natively. There is a script/scene that DOES allow bvh export via a script. Except it doesn't work, since it just tends to ignore whatever animation i throw at it. So I tried blender. Imported - after much fussing - the head with a small marker for the skull bone position, and found out that you can't actually drive the skull's rotation. Tried another scene, can drive skull, but it turns out the skeleton LL provides for rigging isn't actually the skeleton accepted by the bvh importer. So all animations I do on the fitted mesh skeleton actually aren't supported.

TL;DR: The SL animation system seems to be a right mess for my purpose, and I honestly need help so I can carry on and release this. What I need is to have a bone at a specific position on the avatar's head that I can rotate to drive a jaw open/close animation. It sounds simple, but it really seems to be quite difficult. So any help I can get is welcome there. Whether I use mSkull or a custom chin bone, either should work I suppose, but I sadly don't know how.

[Animating Mesh/ Mesh Deformers]

I would like to know how you managed, because lately I've been trying to do the same and it was more than a bad trip. I tried max - nope, can't export BVH at all - and then tried blender, nope, the SL skeleton isn't actually the one you animate with. Oh there's an export script from 6 years ago. Nope, that one's broken. Also nope, you can't actually move the end bone for skull into position where the jaw joint should be at, either and drive its rotation from there.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm frustrated, since this is blocking me from releasing my work. So if you could give me pointers as to how you did it and how I can get a jaw set up myself, that'd be much appreciated. There is as good as zero documentation out there, but I've seen other people do it as well.

[Using standard SL mesh as fitted mesh base]

Well, regarding custom bones, I know that there are limitations, but Kensuke Leviathan has discovered that you can indeed use /some/ custom bones if you name them after single-word attachment points. I personally have seen this working (the Orange Nova Sergal avatar would be a great example of such), I'm mostly just working out how to set it up correctly in max, since documentation is sparse and Kensuke uses a different 3d package.

 

As for fitted mesh, thanks for the input. I may try some manual vertex adjustments, mainly the breasts area could do with slight tweaks, but at least its a "close enough" scenario