Category Archives: Animation

Second Life: Project Bento goes GOLD

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This morning about 11:30 AM The Lindens announced Project Bento is now live. The main Linden viewer has updated to include Bento. Firestorm has talked about releasing their Bento capable viewer next Monday the 12th. I suspect if things go well for them they will release an update. But, FS is picky about quality, so there could be delays. Still I’ll bet on next Monday.

The Firestorm viewer is used by half to three-quarters of SL users. The Linden viewer is used by a quarter to a third of SL users. So, until Firestorm adopts something many developers and merchants consider too few people as being able to use the feature to justify releasing products using the feature. Continue reading →

Second Life Tool nPose Change

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nPose is a tool for adding animations to things. It avoids pose balls, handles multiple people and animations… generally a good useful tool. It isn’t the easiest to use but, once learned it is handy and quick. Today I saw a notice that Howard Baxton, nPose lead programmer, is stepping down. He provided this notice 11/12/2016:

FLF11112016

FLF11112016

Have no fear!  The future of nPose is solid and progressive.  The only difference is I will not be involved.  Leona has agreed to pick up the pieces and move forward.  Her scripting and organizational skills are far better than mine so expect nPose to have a new face lift.

Leona has been involved with nPose since before the 2.0 release and has made most of the contributions to what nPose has become.  I know she is working on even more exciting features which you will see in the next release.  I am very grateful for all of her hard work and feel badly I am leaving her even more.

Please give Leona all the same support you’ve given me.  She will give everyone a great and amazing nPose.

Howard

So…

The nPose headquarters are here. (Map URL) You’ll find demos and tutorials on using nPose.

Bento News w/44

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Strawberry Singh has a video out on the Catwa mesh head. It covers the features of the mesh head very well. Her article, Catwa Catya Bento Mesh Head, provides more detail. Some of the minor problems with the head are touched on. Most impressive are the facial expressions (TM 12:00).

The last half of the video is showing the sliders at work.

Bento is still in Beta and a release candidate viewer is required to see Bento mesh items correctly. So, I think it is still too early to be buy Bento products. The designers have things yet to figure out, problems to find, and labeling to establish.

Project Bento Update 2016 w43

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Not much happening Project Bento Development; bug fixes, consideration of the legacy animation incompatibility… that is about it.

We get word that the Firestorm ‘beta’ viewer now in testing by the Firestorm testers is providing more information. I suspect the Lindens are watching to see how many legacy animation problems are reported. Actual discussion gives me the impression the Lindens are not happy with any of the work arounds they and others have come up with to resolve the problem. It looks to me like they will break the legacy content as there is likely fewer defective old animations than new Bento animations. Continue reading →

Second Life: Project Bento Update 2016 w42

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We got a new Bento RC viewer this week. I was using it to video this meeting. In the first part of the meeting Vir Linden updates  us on fixes to the viewer and its remaining problems.

Index

00:00 – The first 40 seconds have no sound because no one was talking. So, I sped up the video and shrunk 3+ minutes down to 40 seconds. Later in the video you’ll see silent parts of the video speed up. Continue reading →

AvaStar Update 2016 w41

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Some of us have been wondering what all is going on with AvaStar. We know they are adding support for the new Bento avatar. I had heard people ask for Developer Kit support. So, if you have wanted to make things that fit Slink, Belleza, Maitreya, and other mesh bodies you had to figure out how to integrated the kit to the AvaStar system. Looks like that is a problem that will go away.

Gaia Clary, Machinimatrix, has a promotional video out:

devkits from The Machinimatrix on Vimeo.

Gaia keeps doing this, restricting where the video can be embedded. For a promotional video it is silly. It sucks. But, you can click and jump to the video.

The current alpha, beta, whatever version of AvaStar is: avastar-2.0-23_blender-2-77. The main production version is: avastar-1.7-2_blender-2-77.

Have you seen AvaStar.online?

Second Life: Project Bento Update 2016 w41

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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. Continue reading →