Project Bento Update 2016 w39

I’ve had problems with the previous two meetings. Changing computers, recording software, and a couple of air-head mistakes resulted in some messes I wasn’t willing to upload or spend the time to fix. This week I got things together and have a recording.

I have sped up parts of the video. So, you won’t have to manually skip through as many pauses in the discussion. But, only by 50%. I slow down to normal speed when people talk.

Following is a summary with time marks. Summaries are always my take on what I heard. Put some salt with what I write. 

Index

0:00 – Awesome mermaid – Pre-meeting, I was testing video and audio recording.

4:15 – Meeting starts. Vir Linden comments we are still on Bento RC 5.0.0.319893. A couple of changes are coming for the viewer, probably next week.

Scale locking was a topic of discussion and the ability was added to a Bento test viewer. Vir Linden has seen enough interest and feedback he feels it justifies adding it to the next Bento build.

5:00 – A new checkbox in the mesh/animation upload section is being added. If checked you get the new behavior and left unchecked the old behavior. I’ve forgotten what the changed behavior is… seems I recall it has to do with which files are or aren’t used with the upload. – I should have asked a question and got Vir to define the change he was talking about. 🙁

5:21 – Some performance enhancements are coming. These improve mesh handling for better FPS.

6:00 – Investigation into render cost calculations are in progress.

7:00 – Floor open for discussion – end of Linden news.

10:00 – Slider locking – Behavior is joints in defined joint position cannot be changed by a slider. If you move a joint, the slider sees it ‘locked’ into position. Scale can be changed by the slider. The Lindens are open to feedback on how this is or isn’t working. I have yet to play with it, so I don’t really understand how locking, animation, and shape sliders interact.

Latest Firestorm Bento viewer build has the ‘joint lock’ feature built in. Whirly Fizzel is building the viewer version and handing out copies to developers.

11:30 – Animations are supposed to be mix and match. Animations no longer require we include all the bones in an animation. We can animate just the bones we want to animate.

14:00 – Icon for Bento Animations for use in marketplace and promotional material.

15:15 – Animation priority

16:45 – Different priority per bone discussed. BVH format, no. ANIM format, yes.

19:34 – Distorted Bento avatar.

20:00 – Difference between BVH and ANIM discussed by VIR.

21:40 – Maya ANIM will not upload to SL.

22:45 – In world checkbox for bone position locking… no.

25:20 – Distorted avatar

27:00 – Asking when Bento will go to main viewer. No ETA. Soaking up use hours to assure viewer is good. No bug reports since RC release. There was a bump up in crash rate. Working to bring that down. Otherwise signs are good.

Discussion on when designers may release Bento products. Some will be releasing in week 40.

Vir sees Bento release as ‘weeks’ not months away.

30:30 – Can Firestorm viewer release Bento before Linden Lab releases theirs? The official word is thought to be that once code is in a Linden RC viewer then third parties can use the code and release their viewers with it. That does NOT guarantee the Lindens won’t make additional changes that break what the third party viewers are doing.

33:30 – No Bento meeting next week. Linden company meeting takes Vir away.

37:00 – Linden part of meeting over. Post meeting start.

38:00 – MayaStar update – all sliders working now. Not ALL work correctly. Fixing those now. An exporter for ANIM files is being built for Maya. To be clear, the exporter is for Maya and is not part of MayaStar. You’ll be able to get the exporter without purchasing MayaStar.

40:00 – Reaching max number of sliders. A ‘scale’ slider is being considered. My understanding is this different than the avatar height slider/setting. A scale slider would scale the WHOLE avatar up or down.

42:30 – Discussion what scaling an avatar does to animation speed. Walk speed and the distance covered per step becomes a problem.

43:00 – Cathy talks about making your home really small and having a script that scales your avatar down so you fit.

Discussion ranges over building your own avatar shape builder and abandoning the SL system. Medhue is talking about adding scale into the animation. Cathy was in closed Bento development and the idea came up. But, Vir was doubtful he could get funding to make the changes needed.

47:30 – Cathy brings up the possibility of animating the appearance sliders. Avatar physics work by animating the shape sliders.

50:00± – Casual varied discussion…

60:00 – End

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *