Tyrian Slade

One thing at a time, Persephone. I'm glad to hear you'd like to see something new on the wolves!

Water Horse is seeking a scripter to help us update our popular horses. An applicant should have a lot of experience in Animation over-ride systems and experience in basic AI behavior. Details will be discussed with applicants. Pay will be either by hour, in installments, or a percentage of sales. Please message Tyrian Slade if you're interested! I've attached a picture of one of our products, so you can get an idea of who Water Horse is. here

Vir, I may have missed an update. There's been a lot of information to wade through on this thread. Is there an update on an option to have your bento rig not efected by the default SL sliders?

Thanks Vir! I look forward to testing the fixes in a few days. I'm also encouraged by the proress you guys have had on overriding scale of the bones.

I'd like to report what I think is a bug. I tried making some rudimentary wings. I uploaded them with both the "Include skin weight" and "Include joint positions" boxes checked. I wore a female shape. I saw this at place the wings joined my body:  I switched to a male shape. I now see this:  Note how my shoulders are detached from my body? I thought that maybe this was just a difference between joint positions on the male and female shapes, so I decided to move the wing bones away from my body and see what happened. Female:  Male:  Notice how the wings are about twice as far from my body on the male shape as they are on the female shape? I don't believe this is intended behavior. It will interfere with any non-sex specific attachments that change the position of the wing bones. For additional reference, here's a screenshot of the blender file.  I'm copying this into a bug report, so it'll be registered there as well.

Vir, your proposed solution would fix my problem in an ideal way, but if we were to implement only one of these solution, Teager's - Hi Teager!- may be more flexible for everyone in the long run. Still, I think your proposal would solve most of the issues that content creators may have with bento bones scaling in unwanted ways, and it would be simpler than including many bento bone shapes with your creation. Can anyone come up with a scenario in which it wouldn't work well? It also seems to me that if we took Vir's idea of a checkbox for scale overrides, then added Teager's of bento bone scaling (on top of avatar scaling?), we'd end up with something that's easy for the end user, and maximally flexible for the creator. I have some other thoughts about implementation, but I think I'll save them for later in the discussion.

Wow! That was fast! Thanks for moving Bento onto the main grid so quickly! I've been testing Bento more on Aditi the last couple of weeks. I have an observation and a suggestion. I wanted to use the hind legs as limbs other than hind legs. I also wanted to appropriate some of the facial bones to use in other locations, kind of like Medhue did with his elephant. However, I am facing a problem. When I upload my mesh, the hind legs scale with the height of the avatar, and with the leg length of the avatar. Since the facial bones scale with the face, they end up disproportionate with the part of the body they are actually on. I'm not terribly surprised the facial bones scale, considering where they are on the skeleton, but I am quite surprised that the hind legs do. Since I'm making an avatar add-on, not a full avatar, I can't really include a prepackaged shape with what I'm making. Is there a way we could upload rigged Bento-mesh that did not scale with the sliders? Or is there some way we can disable the sliders on our meshes other ways?

Thanks, Vir. I look forward to testing it.

I've had a chance to explore the new skeleton. It seems much more versatile than the previous offering, but I do have one question: Why offer "hind legs" if they're going to be done half way? They have only three joints, and so they cannot stand in place of any real animal anatomy, which have four joints. They also are attached to only one root bone when they really should have a flexible spine if they're going to be particulary useful. Aside from that, the "finger" in the wing is an improvement, and the double-boned ears could be fun.

Hi Jack. I know this thread is a month old, but i thought I'd reply anyways. I have tried to change the Avatar bone hierarcy (for example making the shoulder bones be children of the Torso instead of the chest). It didn't work. It worked great in Blender, but when I uploaded the animation and my custom mesh in SL, the shoulder bones were children of the chest, not the torso. I'm not sure I completely understood what you're trying to do, but I think that mToe will be forever a child of the mFoot bone, and I don't think you can change that either in an animation, or with a script. Tyrian Slade

I can't paste anything into the SL viewer. This is putting a bit of a cramp on my building. Copying from SL and pasting into a word file works fine. However, I can't take text from a word file and paste it into a text bar in SL. I also can't take text from one place in the SL viewer and paste it into chat, search, or anything. I'm having this problem for all my alts, in both Firestorm and the standard SL viewer. I haven't tried phoenix. Thank you for your help!

Hello fellow SLers! I am trying to create a quadruped avatar in Blender Avastar. I've been able to successfully rig it, mostly. Though I've changed the mesh and rig to be standing in a quadruped position (spine horizontal, legs down), when I upload it to SL, it wants to orient the spine vertical, legs sticking right out in front. Any ideas on how I can fix that? Tyrian

I would like to hire an experienced videographer/machinimaist to produce a video demonstrating my newest product, a mesh deer avatar. I'll say up front that I would like to compensate you fairly for your time, but I cannot pay anywhere near RL wages. If we like working with eachother, there could be repeat business. If you're interested, please reply to this thread with examples of your work. I'll contact you in-world if I'm interested in hearing more about you, and we will discuss details like what I want in shown in the video and payment. Looking forward to it! Tyrian Slade

I'm having trouble finding the rental box I need. I'm trying to track people and prim usage in a mall-type area. These people ideally should not need to pay me anything. I need to set up a box in a stall area. When someone decides to use the stall, I want them to be able to select the "rental" box, and for their name to become associated with it. I then want to box to hide completely. No hovertext or anything. I'd be fine with a system where they pay me 1L but then the box needs to opay them that Linden back. Does anyone know of a system that meets these requirements? Thanks, Tyrian

Sounds like that would work well enough. I'll give that a try, Medhue.

Okay, I understand that the animation might not upload perfectly in SL. Is there a process by which I can lock the feet in blender though so that *I* don't inadvertently cause foot-sliding?

The crash thing is new to me, though I'd heard of it happening to others. What does the log say? I believe I had a similar problem, but I can't quite remember just now. Oh yes... I remember now. SL stopped liking my rig. I had to re-rig my avatar to fix it. I had been using the simplebot rig, but I had to switch to domino designs' rig. I never figured out why SL stopped likeing the simplebot rig. I hope this helps.

As the person before me stated, mesh is only a new option. No one is making you use it, and actually, a lot of people aren't using it yet. Nothing will change for you. You can still use gimp and photoshop to make things, and it will still be worth something. You can still use your templates and your sculpts. Only now, you can also use mesh if you want to.

Okay, I'm using Jacek's animator. I want to make an animation where the avatar sways from side to side without moving their feet. I thought this would be easy, but I can't figure out how lock the feet in place and move the body. Does anyone have some instructions or locations of instructions for me? Tyrian

I meshed a quadruped in blender. I modelled and rigged it in a quad pose not a T pose. It uploads fine and looks nice. So, I went to animate it using Jacek's BHV exporter. I snapped her skeleton into the correct places for my bones, then I posed it and uploaded. I did NOT get what I expected. SL took the joint positions my altered skeleton is in and added them to the animation positions. Instead of my quad standing there, each joint is rotated double what it should be. I see now that I should have modelled in a T pose, but it's a tad late for that. Also, it wouldn't have been the right orientation for the verts. Are there ways to get things working the right way aside from going back and pulling my verts into a T? Any help is appreciated. Tyrian Slade

I currently use Jacek Antonelli's blender animation exporter for animating. However, as I've been working with mesh, I've noticed that the SL avatar skeleton has more bones than are used in Jacek's. Are these other bones animatable? (specifically the ankle and toe bones). If they are, where can I get an animatable skeleton that has these bones? Thanks, Tyrian

As far as I've seen, you have to sacrifice a joint somewhere because SL doesn't give us animatable toes. I usually choose to sacrifice the thigh, since in animals it's close to the body, and it's easier to disguise that it's missing. If you do that, you'll have to make the joints bend in ways they might not want to. I've also seen people use a morphing sculpty for the foot to get the appearance of an extra joint.

I tried using a different base file: the domino designs one instead of simplebot, and I was able to upload a rigged mesh with no troubles. I have no idea why the difference, but I'm content. Thank you all for your assistance. Tyrian

Gaia, You might be on to something there. When I first tab into weight paint mode, the bone I was looking at the weights for was weighted strangely (only the ends were weighted, with the middle blue), so I manually painted it correctly. All the other bones I checked were fine. I had used "create from bone heat". I tried posing my skeleton, and the mesh would follow the armature... kind of. I'm still not sure what this means. I tried to attach pics, but the forum doesn't much like that.

Thanks, Gaia. I'll try that, look over those, and report back tomorrow!