Gaia Clary announced another update of AvaStar 2 is out. This is not the production version. This is the Alpha version with Bento support. In the announcement Gaia explains the current problem people are debating. The video by Medhue shows and explains what is being talked about.
Gaia says this alpha version of AvaStar complies with the current proposed Bento model that includes rotation and translation. But, there are concerns about the Bento plan to allow rotation and translation. See the release announcement for a longer story or below the fold for the shorter version. This is an extensive document. If you are animating in SL, read the thing to understand what is coming. Continue reading →
AvaStar, the Blender add-on for Second Life animation, has released a new update. The details are here: Avastar-2.0-alpha_3_blender-2-77. This is not a version for regular use. It requires that you use the Project Bento viewer to upload the animations made with it. You can upload to either the main or preview grids.
This release has a new avatar and the latest Project Bento skeleton. I suspect that there is a free updated skeleton somewhere. But, I have not yet gone looking for it.
There are some bugs in this version. Read the article at Machinimatrix for the details. Most of the problems have work-arounds.
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. Continue reading →
May be the universe is trying to tell me something… I had a heck of a time getting to the UG meeting again this week. I was logging into ADITI early, only to find out the meeting had moved to AGNI. Logging into AGNI I got a message that my voice chat could not be connected to the voice server. O.O
After 30+ minutes of trying I finally got voice working. Still I have most of the meeting in this video. The first 30 minutes is a mix of video and stills none of which is in sync with the voice. Things come back together at about the 30 minute mark.
Fortunately Aki Shichiroji was recording voice. She was late getting to the altered meeting location and missed the first 10 minutes or so. So, maybe it’s not just me. Whatever, she gave me a copy and I used the first 20+ minutes or so that I missed. You can see Aki sitting on a dragon in the video.
The first 10 minutes or so of the meeting is missing. I am hoping Inara has it. I don’t see it posted yet.
I started noticing a viewer render problem at about the 32 minutes in (TM32). I wasn’t sure what was happening. Only Bento avatars with lots of bone displacement and weighting to the new bones are demonstrating the problem. So the horses and dragon are the prime examples in my video.
Talking to Whirly Fizzel clued me to BUG-10991 – [Bento] Mesh rigged to the new joints either partly disappears, collapses or melts when viewing that avatar as an imposter. So, if you need a work-around check the steps to reproduce the glitch and then do the opposite, which would basically be turn off avatar impostors.
They surprised me! Project Bento, server side, arrived at the main grid Tuesday. Torley Linden has posted about the Lab enabling the project on the main grid. See: Project Bento Testing Is Now Live on the Main Grid!
This is a testing release. You will need the Project Bento Viewer to upload animations and meshes, and to view them without distortion. Bento mesh weighted to the new bones looks horribly distorted in non-Bento viewers. Expect to see lots of questions in the forum about how to fix the problem.
Just send them to the Linden announcement… or here.
Here is the video of the Project Bento user group meeting. There is a POST meeting video that I am working on. It has good information. Cathy Foil was answering questions from her experience with Bento from building MayaStar Bento support.
Dan Linden, at the Server Beta UG, elaborated a bit about project Bento going live SOON, saying, “And by live, I mean the server component that will allow the upload of Bento meshes animations that have additional bones. The Bento Release viewer is still a ways off. You’ll need a Bento Project Viewer to see Bento content for now.” Continue reading →
I’ve consistently had problems getting to the Bento User Group Meetings. Today between arriving late because of RL work and ADITI acting up, I gave up trying to get there. Try again next week.
Ghost Horse – Project Bento May 2016
I couldn’t log into the Mesh Sandbox. I could log into Morris, the region where the Beta Server UG meets. But, the World Map wasn’t working, so no TP via the map. In my history was an entry for the sandbox. But, TP failed and failed and failed. After 20 minutes I gave up. Continue reading →
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. Continue reading →
