Second Life: Project Bento Update 2016 w41

I found this to be an interesting meeting. As the final parts of Project Bento get nailed down and it nears release my excitement grows. I am starting to work on setting up my Blender-AvaStar for Bento style projects. Plus tutorials are starting to come out.

I’m writing an outline/index as I clean up the video, mostly speeding up the no-talking parts and smoothing out the audio. So, you’ll see parts of the video run at 200% to 500% faster than real time. Hopefully the pre-YouTube-in-Adobe-Premier time marks will match the final YouTube time marks. If they don’t… sorry. I’ll have learned.

The First part of the video (about 2:05 minutes) was recorded with the main Linden Viewer (4.0.2). You’ll notice the avatars using Bento weighting and animation look messed up. These strange looking beasts are loose on the main grid. So, if you are seeing these strangely twisted avatars in Second Life™, you are seeing Bento avatars without a Bento capable viewer. It’s not you, it’s the viewer. Close your eyes, they’ll eventually go away.

Index

0:00 – Start with default viewer, non-Bento capable. See those funny looking avatars?

02:20 – Bento Bugs – One is scale locking sometimes fails intermittently. Another is the feature add along with the Include Skin Weights checkbox a new box is to prevent sliders from affecting moved joints, scale lock. Apparently that isn’t working quite right.

04:00 – Breaking Existing Content – There are reports of Bento Viewers breaking ‘some’ old content.

04:19 – Tail and hand animation problems. Not clear on what is happening. But, if you are trying to animates tails and hands and having problem report it via JIRA along with steps to reproduce the problem.

04:30 – Back to old content breaking – Apparently what is happening is some older (like in pre-Bento) animations are breaking when run in a Bento viewer because of some bad joint position information. It looks like the problem is in how the animations were made, not being to animation specifications. I’m not clear if the problem is poorly made animations or they deliberately used a work-around to achieve something. Whichever, the animations work OK in pre-Bento viewers as those viewers ignore the bad joint positions. For Bento animations to work well they depend on the animation being built with precise joint positions. So, the Bento viewers enforce the joint position. There is more explanation in the video.

To fix the problem, the Lindens would have to break Bento and there is the problem. There doesn’t appear to be a way to preserve the old animations and have the new Bento animations work well.

Fortunately, there does not appear to be many existing animations that have the problem. So, few people will notice a problem. Plus the fix for the maker of the animation is simple, correctly set the joint position and upload a new copy.

The Lindens have not quite decided what to do. (07:30) I suspect since the problem animations are not built in a way the Lab supports, they will break them and keep Bento unchanged. They discuss the issue in the video. You can watch-listen and decide.

11:00 – End of Linden Topics – Vir asks if anyone has used the latest Bento RC to make models?

12:30 – Some odd shape problems discussed.

15:00 – Cathy Foil Talking about animating hands and some of Second Life’s peculiarities. Discussion.

17:30 – Cathy Talks about video. Long video, 1hr 49min.

18:32 – Medhue talking about using AvaStar to make and animations.

19:19 – Vir talking about mesh feet being animated.

20:30 – Toes not in avatar height calculation.

22:00 – Bento Crash Rate – Higher than main viewer, but pretty good. Vir hasn’t checked latest stats.

23:45 – Bento Clipping bounding box issue. Discussion gets into LoD and Avatar Impostors. (25:00) Turn avatar impostors off to eliminate the bounding box on avatars.

24:08 – Release Date and two remaining bugs. ETA: soon.

25:45 – Discussing LoD problems and other aspects of avatar LoD. Some interesting visual experiences when changing the viewer’s LoD settings.

27:32 – Medhue talks about the new Decimator Tool in Blender 2.78. Apparently works much better than previously.

34:20 – Setting viewer’s LoD to ZERO.

This section has to do with why Medhue’s elephant was clipping and behaving oddly at different LoD’s.

44:00 – Cathy describes how to check LoD changes and be zoomed in.

48:20 – Hover height

52:50 – Cathy on second skeleton used to animate main skeleton.

57:00 – About Mesh Hands

1:03:00 – Animated Heads and mesh head makers…

1:07:00 – Animated heads to have their own slider system…

There is speculation in the discussion about what mesh hands and head developers will do with their products.

Community

There is some discussion in the SL Forum about the coming Project Bento. See my coverage of that here: Is Second Life getting too complex?

Wearing

In the video, not the cover photo.

  • eXxEsS : SENUNA A (Materials) [head]
  • Eyelashes -35- CornerPointed *REDGRAVE* [nose]
  • Triquetra Necklace [chest]
  • [PPD] Someone Like Me Lace Cami {Slink Physique} [R pectoral]
  • Izzie’s – *resize* Braid Bracelet brown r [R lower arm]
  • Slink Avatar Enhancement Hands V2.5 – L – Relaxed [L lower arm]
  • Slink Avatar Enhancement Hands V2.5 – R – Relaxed [R lower arm]
  • !Rebel Hope – Courtney Fringe Mesh Skirt_Physique [L upper leg]
  • N-core ALEXANDRA “Camel” for Slink Physique [R foot]
  • Slink Physique Mesh Body V2.8 (ADD ME) [avatar center]
  • ACI: about 55k

 

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