Project Bento Feedback Thread

[Vistanimations]

Sorry for the delay, we were on holidays.

i made an animation gif, with the X rotation of the mHandIndex2Left. We can see that is not a natural rotation.

This is the "fbx human female (August 17, 2016)" model in motion builder

GIF--> http://www.vistanimations.com/rotation.gif

[Vistanimations]

Sorry for the delay, we were on holidays

I am patient , I just exposed my doubts.

Exactly, I import the skeleton to 3D Max. We usually work with MotionBuilder and 3d Max, in both we have the finger bones pivots with an unnatural align. Maybe I have to wait for these two months.

Thank you

 

[Cathy Foil]

Hi Vistanimations,
Second Life works in an unusual way as far as the skeleton goes at least for Maya users.
I can not speak for Blender users but I suspect the same is true.

The FBX files you are probably using were made with Maya.  The joint orientations are all X straight forward and back, Y straight left and right and Z straight up and down.  This is why the finger joints are rotating unnaturally.  For animation you just have to re orientate the joints so each joint points to the next child in the joint chain.

Why are the FBX files joints setup the way they are in the files?  In SL for some odd reason if mesh isn't rigged to a skeleton with the joint orientations of X straight forward and back, Y straight left and right and Z straight up and down the mesh will become distorted once uploaded and worn.  It is very bizarre.

I don't know if this is a situation that has always existed or was overlooked when Mesh was added to SL.

The FBX files are setup for people to rig mesh to them.  Not to animate with.  If you want to animate with them like I said just re orientate the joint orientation.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

[Tapple Gao]

How many bones, exactly, did bento add? I made a list using avatar_skeleton.xml from the latest viewer (5.0.0.318969). I counted 107 new bones (31 body, 30 finger, 46 face), 15 new attach points, and 0 new collision volumes. Did I miscount?

[Vistanimations]

Hi Cathy,

Thanks for your tips.

I tried to re orient joints and then make the retargeting of a MOCAP animation. It looks good but in second life the fingers continue rotating " unnatural " this is a hell!

Now i tried to learn blender with avastar, and it seems that in local bones rotate well. I followed a tutorial to make retargeting ,but the finger bones do not appear in the "guess mapping". Maybe someone knows or can help me

 The Next step is learn Maya :matte-motes-shocked:

 

 

[Gaia Clary]

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Vistanimations wrote:

Hi Cathy,

Thanks for your tips.

Now i tried to learn blender with avastar, and it seems that in local bones rotate well. I followed a tutorial to make retargeting ,but the finger bones do not appear in the "guess mapping". Maybe someone knows or can help me

 

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The new bento bones are not yet added to the map guessing function of Avastar. We will add this as soon as the current issues with joint offsets are all fixed.

[Gaia Clary]

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Tapple Gao wrote:

How many bones, exactly, did bento add? ...I counted 107 new bones (31 body, 30 finger, 46 face), 15 new attach points, and 0 new collision volumes. Did I miscount?

---

i believe that's right. Here is another document that may be better readable than the avatar_skeleton.xml file :matte-motes-nerdy:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/the-sl-skeleton/

[Vistanimations]

OK, thanks ,

I'll be waiting for this update

[Psistorm Voxel]

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

[Polymath Snuggler]

Very short run-down, yes some sliders will work, if you want more specifics ~ read through the 111 pages.

Yes the importer now works with partial bone DAE lists.

Not sure what your third question is asking ~ I think same as above. 

position and rotation are animateable, scale is not ( as that is tied to the slider system ) however position based animations will negate sliders that also affect bone positions.

Yes there are lip bones, no they are not tied directly to the speech system ( presently ) 

Polysail ( me ) is working on an animation exporter for .anim files for 3ds max, give me some time, I'm literally trying to write avastar for 3ds max in 2 months time here. 

More than 8 faces project wasn't an increase of the hard limit on face count in world, rather it split up objects that had more than 8 faces into 8 - face- chunks. That project was complete.

[Polymath Snuggler]

@ Vista animations, I posted skeleton files for 3ds max 2012 and beyond onto the Bento Wiki page.  I included copies of the skeleton that are using Dummy Nodes as well as one that uses standard Max Bones.  Take your pick.  Both should be functional to the point where you can retarget animations to them with the proper controller setup.  Let me know if you have any problems with the setup.

 

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Testing

 

In addition ~ your Gif of "unnatural finger" movement is tied directly to the fact that SL operates off of using the T-Pose as "Zero joint rotation" in order to accomplish the 'additive" way that animations play ( IE playing more than one animation at once ) As a result if you don't set up your base skeleton file with dummy nodes preserving the actual joint oritentation,  it looks like all the joints are behaving incorrectly.   Since all bone nodes MUST be oriented along zero-rotation world-axis coordinates , that means their pivot angles will be locally incorrect for that specific joint ( which is why the posted skeleton files contain said point helper nodes that preserve the correct local axis of rotation ) Hopefully my posted files will help you.   The actual avatar_skeleton.xml file ( inside the bento viewer ) has correct joint positions and rotations.  The difficulty was mimicking that setup inside 3ds max.

Please note that if you are using my Max non-'basic' file to animate, you will need to animate the "mBoneName_DRV" nodes rather than the named bones directly, then export animations from the actual bone rig itself.

I wish there was a way to simplify the explanation further, but it's a rather technical subect to start with.

[Psistorm Voxel]

Thanks so very much first of all! That was pretty much all the info I needed, I appreciate it a lot.

So many good news in all that, it's very reassuring to me that LL is doing these new features right. As for the third question, I mostly build anthro avatars, so I was wondering if I'll be able to have a jaw-joint bone I can use in order to animate the muzzle's jaw. Lip bones will come in handy for expressions to be sure, as will pos/rot animations for bones.

Also, good luck on the .anim exporter. As avid max user (and sometimes loather), this will be a huge deal for my workflow, so you get all the kudos from me for tackling this

[Teager]

Yes, there is a jaw joint bone you can use to animate the jaw. It's parent to the lower teeth, tongue, and lips, so you can fully animate facial expressions in a way that makes sense, and it's tied into the shape slider system as well.

[Vir Linden]

Due to a conflicting meeting here, we won't be having the user group meeting today. If anyone wants to use the location and time slot to discuss matters of interest, they are more than welcome. See also: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bento_User_Group

Brief summary of where we are with development: working on some minor issues to get Bento out in RC. We do not currently have any must-fix bugs before RC, so the RC release could come soon. No skeleton/slider changes are currently in the pipeline. As usual, please let us know of any issues found with the latest project viewer.

[Medhue Simoni]

I know that many of us are a bit burnt out on all the development stuff. What excited me about bento is all the exciting things I'd be able to make. Now is that time tho. Most of development is over and now the FUN begins.

Here's a little inspiration!

[Tapple Gao]

I wanted to know what the new limit on bones per animation was in Bento. I could not find any information, so I did some research of my own. I am happy to discover that Bento does not seem to have any meaningful limit on how many bones you can upload in one animation. I just uploaded a single animation that poses all 206 mBones, attach point bones, and collision bones, and it works. I did have to fight with avastar to export said animation, but once I did, SL has no trouble with it

[Gaia Clary]

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Tapple Gao wrote:

I did have to fight with avastar to export said animation, but once I did, SL has no trouble with it

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You make me curious :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

If you tell us what sort of fight you have with Avastar, then maybe we can add some tranquilizer.

It would be helpful to get your insight right away because we are very close to a new update.

[edit]: After talking to tapple in chat i found that Avastar suppressed the export of animations of the volume bones. But actually SL supports volume bone animation. So i removed this limitation (the fix will be in the next Avastar bento update).

Tapple, thanks for mentioning this!

[Tapple Gao]

Hi all. I just released a free kit of meshes and animations that show you where exactly every bone in the body is and how it rotates. I passed out the meshes to some of you at the last meeting, but I'd advise getting the release as it also contains a hud with 618 animations for testing the rotation of each bone individually.

I and my clients have been using these for years. Hope you also find them useful

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Avatar-Testing-and-Visualization-Kit/9842033

 

[GWKTM]

Hi!

Just in case you didn't notice this earlier

Could you please add the bento av a full body size parameter/variable? That would make avatar size change much easier. I especially expect if it could increase/decrease the size till target value like this:

Three variables: size, growth/shrinkth speed and target size

If target size < size

    subtract growth/shrinkth speed from size (or set size=size-growth/shrinkth speed)

If target size > size

    add growth/shrinkth speed to size (or set size=size+growth/shrinkth speed)

So the growth/shrinkth would be smooth and noticeable instead of instant

[Medhue Simoni]

The Alpha 7 version of Avastar with Bento is out, and after some messing around I have successfully imported a dae with custom joint positions, meaning the Reset Skeleton works properly.

Fingers crossed!

Yay!

[Feynt Mistral]

Been taking a break from SL and just now getting back into things.  Glad to hear Bento's progressed so far.  

 

One thing that's caught me up in the past (which I'm now tackling because I'm getting deeper into 3D modelling) is the bones not being arranged right.  I'll import the collection into Blender using the Collada files, but they're all miniscule and not attached to each other.  Instead, they're offset parented, almost every one of them, and X aligned (again almost all of them.  The new mSpine# bones are the only ones which are correctly linked to each other.  Unfortunately SL's searching is still ass so I can't find any posts regarding this.  So a few questions are in order:

 

1. Do I need to keep all the bones?  I don't think I'll be using the hind legs or wings any time soon for example, and I probably don't need all the spine bones.
2. Can I relink everything so they're properly oriented and relationally everything makes sense at a glance?  (applying rotations afterward of course)
3. Are Collada files acceptable for animations yet?  Or are they still just for mesh and bone positions?
4. Assuming I can't relink all the bones, what is considered the bone's location?  Blender doesn't use the bone's mid point, it only gives the head and tail positions.

[Matrice Laville]

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Feynt Mistral wrote:

1. Do I need to keep all the bones?
2. Can I relink everything so they're properly oriented and relationally everything makes sense at a glance?
3. Are Collada files acceptable for animations yet?  Or are they still just for mesh and bone positions?
4. Assuming I can't relink all the bones, what is considered the bone's location?  Blender doesn't use the bone's mid point, it only gives the head and tail positions.

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1. You can use any subset of bones in your models. But you need to maintain the bone relationship. When you work with joint offsets (edited skeletons) then for each bone that you actually use, you must also include all parent bones which have joint positions defined regardless if you use them or not. You need to follow the parenting up to mPelvis in that case.
2. You have to maintain the bone relationship. the location of the joints can be edited.
3. Collada files are only used for the skeleton, mesh and weighting information. Collada animations are not supported with the SL Importer.
4. The Bone Head in Blender corresponds to the Joints in other 3D tools. the bone orientation vector in Blender normalized(bone_tail - bone_head) is equivalent to the joint rotation matrix in other 3D tools

Question: From where do you get the "wrong" skeleton information? Are you importing from a dae file ? which one?

[Medhue Simoni]

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Feynt Mistral wrote:

Been taking a break from SL and just now getting back into things.  Glad to hear Bento's progressed so far.  

 

One thing that's caught me up in the past (which I'm now tackling because I'm getting deeper into 3D modelling) is the bones not being arranged right.  I'll import the collection into Blender using the Collada files, but they're all miniscule and not attached to each other.  Instead, they're offset parented, almost every one of them, and X aligned (again almost all of them.  The new mSpine# bones are the only ones which are correctly linked to each other.  Unfortunately SL's searching is still ass so I can't find any posts regarding this.  So a few questions are in order:

 

1. Do I need to keep all the bones?  I don't think I'll be using the hind legs or wings any time soon for example, and I probably don't need all the spine bones.

No, you do not need all the bones. That said, you will likely need to include the spine bones, as they are deep into the hierarchy, so you need them.

2. Can I relink everything so they're properly oriented and relationally everything makes sense at a glance?  (applying rotations afterward of course)

No, but what you can do, is create your own, or a copy of your skeleton with better parenting, and then make the Bento skeleton move with your skeleton with better parenting. You just constrain the Bento bones to your new bones.

3. Are Collada files acceptable for animations yet?  Or are they still just for mesh and bone positions?

No. Yep, still for mesh and bones.

4. Assuming I can't relink all the bones, what is considered the bone's location?  Blender doesn't use the bone's mid point, it only gives the head and tail positions.

No clue!

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[Polymath Snuggler]

Importing the DAE file back into blender directly with default settings does yeild a very strange looking skeleton.  I tested / confirmed that awhile ago.  Most people are using Avastar or similar such tools to create their skeleton rigs rather than importing the DAE files.  The DAE file itself seems sound ( as it pulls into 3ds max correctly ) but something to do with the way that the standard Blender Importer functions yeilds a deformed skeleton, at least for people ( like me ) who don't really know how to use Blender, and are just using default importer settings.

That's not to say that there's no way of doing it correctly, just that my knowledge of blender isn't quite good enough to get it to work right for me.

[Vir Linden]

Tapple, those reference models are terrific! We can link to them on the Bento Testing page if that's OK with you.