Groin Bone

Then there is the sex thing… a boner’s bone… Seriously there is an mGroin bone. I’m not sure there is any use for this bone… other than the obvious. But, do we actually need it? I’m not at all sure what the purpose is. If it stays, I am sure people will find a number of uses for it.

Passion Flames

Penises in SL all seem to work well enough. I suppose there could be some animation benefits from having a groin bone. About the only thing I can think of that it will add is an animation of the bone could raise mesh pants… but, I still think noobs would do the rite-of-passage and walk around with their newly acquired penis erect. I just can’t quite get my head around what the Lindens were thinking… there is a pun or double entendre in there some where.

More

The  joint limit on a single animation has been raised from 32 to 106. And the bones divide up this way:

• Hands with 3 bones for each finger
• 2 Wings with 4 Bones on each side
• a Tail with 6 Bones
• a face rig with 30 bones

Restrictions

Wiki: “Animations cannot include animation of positions, except for the pelvis”. (Ref) This statement has created the most discussion in the feedback thread.

Wiki: “This has always been enforced in bvh upload, but it has been possible to bypass the constraint by uploading animations as .anim files. In the Bento test regions (and on Agni once Bento is fully released), this will no longer be possible.”

The Lindens have said in the wiki that bypassing this position restriction using ANIM files will not work. It is unclear whether that means the ANIM format is not accepted or just checked for position changes.

Vir said, “To clarify, what is different on ADITI is that animations that change joint positions cannot be uploaded. Joint positions can still be overridden within an uploaded mesh, so you should be able to define any starting shape for your avatar that you like.” (Reference)

Teager: “Unless Linden Lab has specifically tackled the problem of the viewer failing to load joint positions on an uploaded mesh, this is false. Because I am around animal avatars all the time, which have drastic differences in shape compared to the default human, I can very clearly see exactly how often joint positions fail. Moreover, joint positions will fail by viewer, so one person might see you deformed while you see yourself perfectly fine. Playing a backup deform animation which forces the bones to move into the position they should have ALREADY moved into based on the mesh’s joint offsets completely fixes this problem, and should be allowed to continue as a backup measure.” (Reference)

Teager is talking about a common enough problem of render update information not reaching the viewer and things going wonky. Over the last few weeks I’ve seen less of this, like my hair being attached to my butt or other attachments being attached to air and left behind as I walk off. So, it may be fixed. But, I wouldn’t put big cash on it.

Teager is seeing the problem happen with deformed animal shapes. Since the shape doesn’t always load correctly, it is corrected with a script that runs and that causes the servers to update everyone. Not being able to animate ‘positions’ would defeat that work-around.

Vir Linden: “Nothing is final until we go to the main grid. The purpose of the testing period on Aditi is to identify and if possible fix any issues with the proposed skeleton. It’s possible we will add, remove or change bones as a result of feedback from the project viewer – so bone suggestions or bug reports are both very much fair game.” (Reference)

So, the Lindens are open to feedback and that includes hearing use-cases where position animation is needed. During this beta period they will be deciding if this needs to be a permanent restriction or can be removed. Listening to Vir, quoted earlier, I get the idea the Lindens think position can be controlled via mesh construction. But, Teager’s use-case suggests it is not as simple as it may seem.

Still, I’ll have to leave it to more experienced animators to decide what needs to done and hope they can convince the Lindens.

A good part of the current discussion centers around not being able to change the position of face bones being a significant restriction that seriously nerfs animations for creating facial expressions.

Avatar 2.0

For a complete Avatar 2.0 we would need a new mesh skin. We pretty much have that with the Slink and Maitreya bodies proving we can make our own. So, with these new bones and our ability to upload mesh bodies, we pretty much have Avatar 2.0.

Some are talking about making the mesh skin on the classic avatar a wearable item. That would give us a way to turn off the Avatar 1.0 skin and add our own. It seems like removing those 7,000+ polygons, skin, and alpha textures from the render pipeline would reduce viewer side lag.

Problems

We will find problems as we work with the new Bento Avatar.

Whirly Fizzle: “Not sure if this is a bug or expected behavior – it seems that anything rigged to the new joints either partly disappears, collapses or melts when viewing that avatar as an imposter?

There was a guy on ADITI with a mesh head using the new bones & his head melted when viewed as an imposter. This was at ground level.

This gif shows the effect with the bento_angel.dae test content. See how the wings & tail get clipped when the avatar becomes an imposter. The wings actually flicker quite badly when the avatar is an imposter but the flicker is too fast to show on the gif.” (Ref)