I learned more about using Bento bones and animating after the meeting than I did during the meeting. The meeting lasted about 45 minutes. Discussion after the Lindens went back to work lasted over an hour. I broke my coverage into 2 videos. The meeting part is in the video here: Second Life: Project Bento 2016 Week 16. The ‘after’ meeting part is here:
I’ve trimmed the hour plus video down to 45± minutes by removing parts where there is no voice. This means you’ll notice some video jerks where I trimed out parts. You’ll have to watch the chat window too. You’ll hear some voice responses that are answers to questions and statements made in text/local chat that got trimmed out. You can see the text, you just don’t have to wait while it is typed.
One of the first things talked about is the sliders, animation, and a possible problem. Medhue is being a coyote. Cathy Foil (MayaStar) is getting him to test the operation of the face adjustment sliders, the pointy-ears part. They run into a problem that the animation is overriding one of the sliders. Cathy will be talking with developers to see if the problem can be fixed.
The pointy ears thing illustrates the type of problems that are being worked on now.
If you are wondering if you’re wondering if you can make your classic avatar’s ears pointy with the new slider they are talking about, no. The ear things are based on new bones. The classic avatar is not weighted to those, so changing that slider will have no effect on the classic avatar.
TM 07:00± – Discussion touches on translation and rotation of bones in animation. We do have both. In this context translation of bones means moving their position of a bone in relation to the rest of skeleton. This isn’t just moving an arm in the shoulder joint, but moving the arm to the hip. This what allows us to more easily make 6 or 8 legged creatures.
TM 09:25 – Discussion of teeth bones.
TM 10:15 – Chin Bone
TM 14:00 – Face weighting: an idea for easier weighting. Cathy is using MayaStar. I am not sure one can ‘save’ weights in Blender. But, we can transfer them.
Cathy is talking about creating a wolf head, for instance. Then morphing it into a human face. This makes sense if you have worked with morphs, but I think you’ll understand even if you’re working with the dictionary meaning of morphing. Once your wolf head is human shaped, do the transfer of weights from a well-made human head to the wolf. Then morph the wolf back to wolf and complete the weighting.
This is the basic idea of leveraging work. Whether it will work and how well is yet to be tested. I use the idea
The Matrice Cathy mentions is the programmer at Machinimatrix that is coding AvaStar and helping the Lab.
TM 19:00± – Medhue is talking about how he is animating his wolf. It is about layers of animation. He gets into what he’ll be contributing to the open source side of SL.
TM 23:30± – Medhue leaves
TM 24:00 – Cathy explains what she was talking about in the meeting when she was asking about the groin bone. If you make guy clothes, you need to be at the next Bento meeting 4/29. Or go to the Bento feedback forum and leave a comment. See: Project Bento Feedback Thread.
TM 30:00 – No compensation for non-Linden developers
TM 31:30 – Smaller number of Lindens working on SL means they have to rely more on user help. Cathy gives lots of props to those that have been helping with Bento.
TM 33:45 – Talks about how users influenced Lindens to include bone translation.
TM 34:40 – Use any bone anywhere… due to translation.
TM 38:30 – Leave face bones in place for humans so that animations are interchangeable. Animations using rotations are more universally useable. But, animations using translation will distort the avatar unless it is a custom avatar made for the animation, they have to match.
Here we start to hear of some of the animation and matching to avatar problems that are coming.
TM 42:00 – Animation export capabilities. Cathy talks about that work for BVH and ANIM files and Maya.
TM 44:00± – Why things appear in AvaStar first… Basically it is easier for Matrice to write the code for Blender AvatStar and adapt it to Maya-MayaStar. He’s the one doing the work, so whatever is good for him.