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Is it still on the to-do list to allow rigged mesh with partial joint positions (like wings only/legs only/hinds only/tail only/face only) prior to bento going live?

 

I'm having issues right now with my centaur, which requires joint positions to set the necessary height and bone deform (without it sinking or crunching when switching animations), but which will deform certain sorts of avatar torsos with joint positions applied. If I assume I am building for the default SL avatar, then many popular mesh bodies will have gaps beneath their shoulders or eyes bugging out. Applying joint positions to the legs and hinds only would be the ideal solution.

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Hello DS, response to you, althought it would be one for the whole human avatar subproject.

That looks cool, yes, I played with the Manuellab addon a little, the customization is really good, very many options and it looks as if Manuel took a long study about body types, shapes, and this makes me respect that work. And when i look at the hands and feet, that is a dream of hands, really. Well, body needs more complexity at some places and there are number of places that are way too complex, like eyebrows or wimpers, eyeballs or teeth, they use much too much vertices for SL. However, apparently Manuel will make a simplier version, or the mesh designer could simplify the body themselves.

I am really support the idea of a resident-driven standard of human and humanoid avatars so the avatar and clothing designers can work together very much like the legacy avatar mesh designer (that is LL) worked together with the legacy clothing designers (that were the system layer clothing) That would improve SL very much if it would be possible.

But, I thnk the part about open source avatar based on Manuellab, needs really a separate thread, which I'd suggest Gaia opens herself and posts a link here. I am sure there would be interest to talk about the standard, implementations and everyting else around it, but that topic tangents the Bento topic only and is not a part of the Bento topic. Hope it not sounds rude, was just an idea.

Something around the idea of resident-driven hummanoid avatar standard. It must not remain by a hummanoid one only. I am not sure at the moment, but perhaps Bennto could birth a few other standards, for horses, pets, animals, dragons and more. Which could be handled in similar way, standarticed open source mesh that avatar designers could adapt on their own needs while the accessory for the final avatars would be similarly useable on all of the avatars based on that standard one. Perhaps its too early to talk about it yet.

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Partial joint positions - sounds really handy, i agree with Teager.

Teager, can uploading legs and hinds separately help here? Uploading them as parts, not rigged to the torso or other problem places in avatar? And link them inworld. Or even having versions... Though i'm not sure what exactly conflicts there in meshes, just thought.

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Vir Linden wrote:

That house fly is both impressive and somewhat terrifying.

Thanks! Wait until I add his tongue!

 

While switching between avatars, I noticed some did import not with the spines collapsing, so I did some checking between the differences. I found out that my wolf's spine was collapsing because the weight maps for the spine bones were not there, even tho I don't use the spine bones, and there are no weights on them. Reguardless, including the spine bones eliminated the collapsing of the spine. I will give images to show this.

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Something I really want to know if is you can move the bones in Edit mode, or if you have to move them in pose mode, and then compensate by  moviing the vertex positions in the model?

I would welcome the ability to move the bone joint positions in edit mode very much so that we wouldn't need to buy third party software that calculates how much you need to deform your model after the fact to get it to look right in SL.

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Issue 1: Partial joint positions

On the question I asked previously, regarding applying joint positions to only part of an avatar instead of the whole thing, this is what I was referring to...


This centaur is rigged to the standard, default human avatar, but I of course want it to be useable with whatever mesh body the user is already wearing - Maitreya, The Mesh Project, Hourglass, etc. These mesh bodies do not share the same exact joint positions as the default body; there is some variance from avatar to avatar. It would be easiest to create partial mesh addons such as centaur bodies, wings, tails, extra arms, extra legs, if those addons could have joint positions applied to only the rigged portion of the avatar, and not to the whole avatar body.



To demonstrate my point, here I am wearing my centaur body while wearing the small mouse avatar I wore to the last meeting. Notice how my head, neck, and torso have stretched vertically to match the height of the standard human body, causing my eyeball attachments to drop below my head. Notice also how my arms and shoulders have been stretched out to match the longer human arms, giving me long, thin arms with a large gap in the arm pits. This avatar is ignoring the mouse's joint positions to play the centaur joint positions instead. Preferred behavior would be to play the mouse joint positions for the upper body and the centaur joint positions for the lower body.


This brings another point - if partial joint positions are made possible for the bento launch (and I think they should be, since the nature of bento encourages the creation of partial body parts such as wings and tails), it may be beneficial to create a heirarchy of joint positions, such that full avatar podies have Priority 1 joint positions, while addons have Priority 2. This would prevent, for instance, the front legs of my centaur becoming shorter to match the mouse joints, when centaur joints would be preferred.



Issue 2: Hind leg joint positions

I am having trouble with joint positions on the hind limbs not working at all. In the following snapshot, I am wearing a copy of my centaur with joint positions enabled and no deform animation applied.




In this photo, I've made the centaur's legs 50% opacity and the centaur's body 100% opacity, to give a better picture of what's going on.

As you can see, the front of the centaur's body around the pelvis is formed correctly. The front legs, more difficult to see in this photo, are also formed correctly. The hind legs and the parts of the back weighted to them, however, are not displaying correct joint positions.




These photos are taken wearing the mesh with joint positons applied through the mesh uploader and no backup deform animation applied, since it was decided early in the bento process that deform animations should no longer be required. As you can see, my hind limb joints are not deforming to where they should be. Oddly, it appears that they've actually all moved up to a single point behind my pelvis.




By contrast, here I am wearing a mesh without joint positions applied and with a deform animation applied instead. Notable differences:

  • The hind legs have deformed into the shape I want them in (desired)
  • My upper body has stayed in the shape of the small mouse avatar; it has not tried to stretch to fit the human torso, since no animation was applied to the upper body (desired)
  • My front legs have moved upwards a bit to match the joint positions of the mouse avatar's legs (undesired)


...I don't even know what's going on with the Hind Limb 3's. Don't ask. I haven't yet managed to get them successfully rigged, and can't figure out why. Hind Limb 4's are fine: there are correctly positioned hooves somewhere inside those giant leg blobs.

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I would rather ask for a lot now, if I feel what I'm asking for will make the most sense long term. It makes no sense to apply the joint positions of an entire avatar to a mesh that contains only a tail or a pair of wings. Since users are more and more moving away from using the default avatar and switching to using custom mesh bodies, applying a second, not identical set of joint positions for the entire body would cause deformation in the vast majority of avatars.

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While your suggestion makes sense at time of wearing parts with different joints offsets, you should know that those mentioned mesh bodies havent custom joints at all.

But leaving that aside, the main point now is not using joints offset at all but animations. Thats why we asked so much for being able to animate the position of bones. So in theory all you need to do its upload the mesh without custom joints and apply an animation to only the bones that should move to fit the desired shape. This is far from a good solution as I can already see animations that, due priority or creator not knowing how exactly has to do them, will break your whole joints offset because he probably added the whole bunch of bones to them.

Your solution would be the more viable and profesional one. The problem right now its that, with every new feature, we are carrying all the bad decisions taken in the past. I highly doubt they will add your request to Bento but you may agree with me that few months after its release we will see a nice show of deformed meshes. Not to mention those people that, since the animation havent been played for them because they entered later after the trigger, will see us all wrong till the animation decides to play again.

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I am beginning new tests with the last versions of the viewer and Avastar and I have noticed a very strange and annyoing behaviour of the Head Length slider with Bento riggings.

I have my original FITTED MESH HEAD and the same head now rigged on the Bento head bones (and no more fitted) that I will call here BENTO MESH HEAD.
When playing with the Head Length slider, my FITTED MESH HEAD is changing smoothly but my BENTO MESH HEAD is rapidly deformed : the nose and the upper lip seem to be much more impacted by the slider that the rest of the head.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I tried the same tests with the BENTO AVASTAR HEAD and it is also completely deformed by the Head Length slider.



Why is it so ? Is it a bug ? Could it be fixed ?

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The Slider definitions have been adjusted so that they can create results similar (but not equal!) to the System Character's head deformations. How the meshes will deform with the Sliders is also very dependent on the Weight maps. So you have full control over the deformation by adjusting the weights as needed.

Here is a screenshot of the Bento Head with the most recent weightmaps and the most recent slider definitions:



The most recent Avastar update (2.0-9) is based on information from last week. So it is already a bit outdated :matte-motes-sour:

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  • Lindens

Teager -

I believe the current version of the bento viewer supports partial joint position changes, so if you have two meshes that do not fight over what joints they want to reposition, they should be able to work together. It's possible that's not working as intended, or there could be some joints that the meshes are both trying to override. If you could send me a copy of the test objects you're using I can take a look.

With the hind limb positioning issues, do you see the problem when you're wearing a single mesh? Or only with multiple meshes?

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Thank you Gaia for your answer I will make more tries when the new versions will be out.

But is your System Avatar pics taken inside SL ?
Because today, as I can see, the Head Length slider does not react the same way inside Blender than inside SL on mesh heads.
Here is an example of the Bento Avastar Head inside SL and inside Blender with the Head Length slider set to 0 and 100.



In fact, I am already surprised by the fact that the Head Length slider does something with the Bento bones... It is not indicated as "Bento" in Avastar and, until today, it was only working when the Mesh head was rigged on the HEAD "Fitted" bone.

I can no more rig my mesh head on the HEAD bone because of the 4 weights limitation. So I would be happy to achieve the same results with the Bento bones...
But which Bento bones are concerned by the Head Length slider ?
Is there somewhere a file indicating the relations between the Bento bones and the sliders ?
Is it in fact possible to adjust the weigths so this slider works well and the other ones still work too ?

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Kitsune - 

The mesh bodies named may not all have custom joint positions, but at least some of the popular mesh bodies do. I don't know precisely which ones, but I do know that the centaur avatar I am already selling on the main grid, which is rigged using standard sl joint positions for the upper body, gets frequent complaints from users of various mesh bodies about small gaps under the arms, wide or narrow shoulders, and slightly misaligned eyeballs that clip through the face mesh. The changes are minute, but they're there.

I also know that using deform animations instead of joint positions is the better solution, but as Vir and Oz have stated numerous times over the couse of the bento project and preceding jiras, they believe it causes other issues of deformation and should not be used any more. More importantly, the vast majority of small mod creators - the sort of users who will be rigging only wings, tails, heads, or hands - will not think to use a deform animation, nor have the scripting knowledge to cause it to play at efficient intervals. They will more likely use the more obvious solution, which would be to apply joints on the mesh uploader.

 

Vir -

I'm not at a computer I can log in from right now; I'll send you a copy of files and look into the back leg deformation when I'm home.

 

Vir and Gaia -

You say that partial joint positions are already in place - are they activated only when the mesh is exported with a subset of the avatar bones, or is the mesh uploader intelligent enough to apply joints only to the bones that are weighted?

If joints are applied to all bones exported, regardless of whether they are weighted, it may be beneficial to make a change in the way Avastar exports a mesh. At present, it will throw an error if you try to export a mesh weighted to an incomplete skeleton. For example, it's currently fussing at me for having no mEyeLeft.

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That what you mention about mesh bodies are the results of some people uploading some parts with joints offsets when they arent even required. I can confirm to you that none of them (except Kemono) uses joints offset. I own all the kits and been working with all of them throughly. They all have the bones in the same place just like the default avatar. I have compared them.

 

But leaving aside that subject, thats it. As you just mentioned, isnt just that Blender doesnt allow you to export the mesh because it lacks one bone. I can do this easily using Max. The problem comes within SL itself which requires every default (old ones) bones to have information on the mesh. Even if it just at zero weights. Otherwise your mesh will appear on the uploader as non skinned one. It was supossed to be fixed long ago on the Mesh Uploader Project but it never was. I may be wrong as Im not Blender user but I guess Avastar its made in that way so you dont export your mesh wrong which would lead to not having weights later on.

 

About joints offsets. I think you missunderstood my comment. I wasnt trying to say that you were wrong, right the opossite. I was saying that the good way its indeed joints offset. Animations are useful for some things but they arent a total fix and more like a workaround to evade using joints offsets. Believe me that using animations to change permanents bone positions will lead to some big deformations. Im not saying either that bone translation its bad, its nice we have it. But using it to put in place a whole avatar isnt the best solution.

So basically we would need first SL to accept weighted meshes without containing all the bones. Just like it was right at the begining. If thats something fixed already on Bento then nice. I didnt test since long time when the first versions comes out so didnt pay attention if they added that possibility.

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I've confirmed through testing that bento will now recognize that a mesh is weighted even when exported with only a few of the avatar bones included, so that much is working as intended. When worn, the mesh looks like a hot jumbled mess of verts, but I never have had much success at getting a mesh exported through the default blender dae exporter to agree with second life...

 

@ Gaia - it would be beneficial in your next avastar update to allow avastar to export a mesh even when parts of the skeleton have been deleted.

 

I apologize for all the back-and-forth and for possible false bug reports; it's difficult to be testing two beta applications at once, which each rely on the other; hard to know which end the problems are coming from.

 

 

 

@ Vir - I've sent you copies of my centaur on the beta grid, both with and without the full skeleton. Each version has its problems. I did not notice an improvement in hind leg positioning when wearing the mesh with no other mesh worn. 

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Here is a very very very quick made first impression of using Mesh Shapes with one Character and one simple animation that only uses Rotation:

Please note: It is important to use a rotation only animation here otherwise the Shapes will break.

We used the Bento Angel mesh (basically a clone of the System Avatar Mesh with additional Wings).

We used our development version of Avastar-2 to export the Mesh and create the Animation.

And we used the release candidate of the SL Bento Viewer.

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Teager wrote:

@ Gaia
- it would be beneficial in your next avastar update to allow avastar to export a mesh even when parts of the skeleton have been deleted. 

Yes, we will add an option to the exporter soon that allows to "only export weighted bones".

But we try to also allow to setup just partial skeletons so that you can remove unwanted bones and still keep the rig intact (but no proimises here :matte-motes-sunglasses-1: )

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Possibly your avatar definition does not match to the viewer's definition file. Also the weight maps for the default Avastar head have meanwhile been optimized a bit (see the video that we just released, that uses the most recent weight maps for the face)

In general it is not easy but doable to get all shape sliders to work. It took me about a day to get all sliders working almost smooth. Of course you still can create very odd shapes when you use many sliders at the same time with extreme values.

However the Head length slider should now work nicely.

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MoonHowler Snowpaw wrote:

Hello, i'm trying to animate with Avastar2.0.9 bones translations of hind legs, but can only rotate them. The unlock locations button does nothing in them, though works on all other bones.Is it a bug or is there a reason for preventing hind legs from bones translations?

This will be fixed with Avastar-2.0-10 (also for the new Spine1-4 bones)

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