This video is loaded with meaty good information. A lot of how things are working is explained. Well worth the time to listen if you are trying to work with Bento or non-Bento animations.

Index

0:00 – Troy Linden talks about fixing mesh uploader’s LoD generator.

3:30 – Vir Starts meeting. Notices new avatar models.

4:00 – New version Bento Vuewer released Thursday morning (8/25). Talks about fixes and change in how SLM files are handled. Now by default the SLM files will not be used. A debug setting will allow users to turn the prior function of SLM files back on.

Still working on mesh distortion problem. Right-clicking a mesh reveals mesh and shows it distorted. Vir thinks it is a precision problem.

5:50 – Update on Body size. Bobbing avatars. Best solution is work-around.

Changed viewer to calc avatar position at start and stop of an animation. This means we can see a jerk at Start and Stop of an animation as the avatar height is recalc’d. A loop shouldn’t jerk, trigger the recalc.

Previous to this change in the Bento viewer the height was recalc’d every frame.

The viewer uses a calculation that uses the left foot, left ankle, left knee, left hip, pelvis, torso, chest, neck, head, and skull to come up with height. How we animate the left side affects how that calculation works and the position for the pelvis. Changing position or scale will cause the calc to decide avatar height has changed and that moves the avatar.

10:30 – Matrice starts talking about AvaStar. He believes he has most of the problems fixed. One problem remains. He was able to get a Bledner/AvaStar mesh to behave the same in AvaStar ind SL, He thinks a couple more days and the last bug should be fixed.

12:30 – Vir thinks they have all the known Bento bugs fixed. So, the viewer may promote to RC status in the next week or two.

14:30 – Troy Linden talks about how he thinks this development process has worked. He is impressed and feels it has worked well. He thinks this approach is a first time. New people are so cute. He wasn’t around for mesh development, which was the first project I saw the Lindens do in open cooperation with users.

I do think this time around that the Lab and users did work better together.

17:36 – Vir talks about getting Bento out soon.

18:00 – Vir talks about the mesh development project.

19:30 – Cathy Foil updates Maya users on what she has learned in the last week. If you are using Maya or Blender this is something you’ll want to listen to. Some of the Blender stuff comes a bit later. There is X-Y orientation information.

This is an explanation rich section of the video. Several gatcha problems are explained and work-around processes give.

31:50 – Vir and Cathy talking about designing sliders in Maya.

41:00 – Discussion about position information and slider values. Vir warns that it is never going to be perfect because the animation works at one precision level and the servers convert that precision to 8-bit (?) for transmitting.

43:45 – Matrice talks about sliders, default positions, and default shape gotcha’s. The viewer generates a default shape using floating point values. Opening the shape editor converts then to integers and they are saved as integers after that. Listen to the video for more details.

50:40 – Matrice talks about bone with position but no weighting assigned to it. Matrice is getting that problem in AvaStar fixed.

END MEETING

53:00 – Matrice and Cathy talking about which bones get exported with position and no assigned weights and differences between Maya and Blender.

56:00 – Matrice talking about AvaStar having its own Collada exporter for Second Life. It is a Y vs X orientation thing.