Bento on MP

[ChinRey]

I know this is rude of me but has anybody tried a search for Bento on the MP? How many actual Bento related listings are there among all the "Bento compatible" body shapes and hairs and who-knows-what?

And should we laugh or should we cry?

[Callum Meriman]

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ChinRey wrote:

I know this is rude of me but has anybody tried a search for Bento on the MP?

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Hehe. I noticed that, especially with the hair

But it is a search that can make one very hungry. 

Near where I work is a wonderful Korean restaurant that makes the most amazing Japanese foods. The most wonderful Sushi, colourful Bento boxes for lunch, Tender juicy Karage, Udon noodles, Miso soup (OMG so good)

But Bento boxes in themselves are a wonderful lwork of art. I am going to blame the Lab for picking a tasty food based name.

 

 

We need to have our Japanese friends rename the tasty 弁当箱 to be instead a ヤムボックス, then the Lab can better steal the Bento name for our faces, fingers, wings, and tails.

[Nalates Urriah]

Laugh or cry... or may be just exercise patience.

The Bento Project only solidified the skeleton about 3 months ago. A viewer with working shape sliders for new Bento bones only came out 3 or 4 months ago. MayaStar only was considered complete a couple of months age and AvaStar has yet to finalize their Blender add-on for Bento. Today something like 3/4 of SL users can't render Bento rigged mesh.

Later this month will be the first time the majority of users will run a viewer capable of rendering Bento rigged mesh.

When we shifted from sculpties to rigged mesh and later to liquid/fitted mesh adoption of the tech took months, about 18 after the 'live' release. Of course there were early adopters and in the case of fitted mesh early releases preceeded the 'live' or official release of the tech. But, these tech's weren't ubiquitous for months.

Most merchants and designers haven't been creating Bento stuff. Tutorials are rare. It is going to take some time. 

We still don't have good filters for rigged verses fitted mesh items in the marketplace. We often only have specific logos in the promo images making the info unsearchable.

Not only do designers have to learn to work with Bento rigging they have to decide how to package and name the stuff so we can know it is Bento stuff.

We haven't even got into figuring out how to tell users which Bento animations will go with which skeletons... It is going to take some time for the MP to handle Bento stuff well.

The best way to find Bento stuff now is to follow blogs like Strawberry Singh's and Mesh Body Addicts. You'll find the designers working with Bento and then you can follow them.

[ChinRey]

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

Laugh or cry... or may be just exercise patience.

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I know. Toady told me their first Bento avatars were coming up soon. They just had to rerig them since they were made very early in the process and don't match the final skeleton.

But that wasn't my point, it was all those merchants who try to capitalize on the latest buzzword and the presumably many buyers who are taken in by it. Says so much about human nature.

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

The best way to find Bento stuff now is to follow blogs like Strawberry Singh's and Mesh Body Addicts. You'll find the designers working with Bento and then you can follow them.

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Thanks! I doubt those blogs are going to mention the kind of Bento avis I'm interested in myself but it's a good tip anyway.

 

Apart from the tragicomedy of fake overly creative advertising, the one worrying thing is what the animation makers are going to do. So far the answer seems to be not very much but it may be they're just waiting to see what meshes that need animating turn up.

People like Toady and Flea and Medhue are fully capable of creating their own quality animations of course but those guys don't make the dollatars that are going to be featured in blogs and make up the major part of Bento's potential market. Most mesh makers will have to either learn a new craft from scratch or rely on the experienced anmiation creators if they really want more than simple mechanic movements that grow old fast.

[ChinRey]

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Callum Meriman wrote:

But Bento boxes in themselves are a wonderful lwork of art. I am going to blame the Lab for picking a tasty food based name.

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Yes. I feel especially sorry for the poor creators who have made bento (in the RL meaning of the word) related items and are now going to be falsely accused of keyword spam. Quite a few of them on the list too.

[Medhue Simoni]

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.

[ChinRey]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

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.

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Yes and making good smoth natural looking animations requires a different skill set than making good mesh and there aren't that many people in SL who have experience with both. Also, people will want to personalize their avatar's animations. This is probably not a big issue for nonhuman avis but for the human ones you don't really want exactly the same facial expressions and exactly the same hand gestures as everybody else regardless of how good the default animations are.