This week we find animators are having problems with the new sliders and bones when making animations. This problem is just being encountered. So, the extent and possible fixes are complete unknowns.

Vir Linden discusses some of the known problems at the beginning of the video. One of those is the bounce we often see the avatar make when adding attachments. The Lindens may have found a fix.

Cathy Foil update us on MayaStar. Seems there is a free BVH exporter for Maya. My understanding is it will be part of MayaStar. An .anim exported is in the works for Maya.

Medhue and Coyot discuss a problem with eyes that is new in this release of the Project Viewer.

You may notice the Avatar Impostor problem where parts of Bento avatars (meaning those with weighting and use of new bones in animations) were disappearing from the render is gone. At least I couldn’t replicate it. You’ll see me try. I pull the camera way back from the group. The horses that were the most visible case remained rendered. Whirly was wearing what I call the Torley horse (pink and green).

My take is that we may see some basic change in the Bento avatar to deal with the facial sliders and animations. The Lindens appear to have moved into ‘no change mentality’. That is an important step in moving the feature out to a larger audience of animators and rolling the final feature out. So, any decision to change the avatar is going to be made only on the basis of users demonstrating serious need for a change.

If you make animations, this is probably something you should be playing with and providing feedback on.

AvaStar is still saying their AvaStar 2.0 is not ready for production work. I’m assuming the same is true for Mayastar. Bento is still an experimental project and subject to change. That means the Stars are still figuring out how to deal with what we have today.