Bento Feature Request – No Lock

2015/12/18 by Nalates Urriah

Adeon Writer has filed a Feature Request in the Second Life JIRA: BUG-10990 – [Bento] A formal method of bone-translating animations is vital for the creation of proper facial expressions.

Included in the JIRA is this quote:

[04:28:52 PM] EpicGordon Broome: I don’t like getting involved in development, JIRA’s or forums or whatever. But disallowing bone translation in animations is ignoring some very basic fundamentals of animation theory, dating back decades. I’ve scrapped multiple projects because of the lack of squash/stretch in walk cycles (Toony characters). This update is also going to break features in an upcoming avatar of mine, regarding facial animation. Which is funny, because they give us so many new facial bones – that we just can’t use properly. Raise eyebrows, pull up mouthcorners for a smile, extend a tongue, using only rotations? I cannot for the life of me see a GOOD REASON for this limitation.

I have this feature – http://imgs.moyloon.com/i/05d71e3d26.png – almost done for a new avatar of mine, a pose-able tongue. The new rig has two bones for this explicit purpose. But they are useless, as I cannot pull the tongue out of the mouth in any good fashion. I cannot pull the mouth corners around without arbitrarily locking them to rotating around a bone.

Not to mention non-humanoid avatars. We’re getting so many new bones – and yet we’ll be limiting the design freedom so much, since anything non-humanoid will be unable to avoid issues caused by inheriting rotations, since locations cannot be transformed.

Allowing animations to do this is a trivial change, as I’m fairly certain that limitations were put in place to prohibit this (Hence why .anim’s were able to do things .bvh cannot), rather than requiring lots of labor on the engine.

It doesn’t affect me personally, too much. If this is the way it ends up being, I’ll just hog more resources by alpha swapping meshes, and using more animations for each of these different states. However, it’s unnecessarily clunky, and will ruin a lot of content creator’s livelihoods in its current implementation.

Visit the JIRA and click WATCH. You’ll get update emails as this ticket proceeds. DO NOT voice opinions in the JIRA! Opinions and ‘me too’ is for the forum: Project Bento Feedback Thread. The discussion there is growing quickly. Continue reading →

Second Life: More Project Bento Information

2015/12/18 by Nalates Urriah

AvaStar 2.0 is out and supports the new Bento Avatar, or maybe we can call it Avatar 2.0. After all we have been talking about it long enough.

Where’s Dim Sum? #348 – Moonhouse (Telrunya photo contest – Opal Lei)

Actually, Bento doesn’t have all the changes we have been asking for in Avatar 2.0. Also, if we call it a number it should probably be 3 or 4 or something higher as there have apparently been other significant changes to the avatar over the years, before my time. But, this change does make it possible to get all the things we have been asking for or at least comes close. Continue reading →

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Second Life: NEW BONES, New AvaStar 2.0

2015/12/16 by Nalates Urriah

This is a big deal. I’ll get into what it means and what some of the possibilities are.

For years Second Life™ users have been asking for more bones. That would let users make avatars with tails that are easily animated. Or with more than 4 arm-leg appendages. We will be able to have a centaur with 4 legs, two arms, and a tail, something that is way complicated now and pretty lame. Or a spider with 8 legs. Continue reading →

ALERT: Second Life Avatar Changes!

2015/12/16 by Nalates Urriah

Today we have a post from the Lab about changes to the SL Avatar. See: Introducing Project Bento – New Bones Added to Second Life Avatar Skeleton.

What are the changes?

Ever wish you could incorporate a tail, wings, or second set of arms into your avatar? How about having animations for facial expressions and finger movements? Yes, we know that there are some incredibly creative workarounds that give you some of these, but they can’t leverage skeletal animation, so they have been very complex, often fragile, and very expensive in performance and resources both in your Viewer and the Simulator.

Second Life Has New Avatars?

2015/11/07 by Nalates Urriah

Did you know Linden Lab has new avatars for the noobies? I had not realized it. But, Cerise @ SLUniverse posted about the new avatars and I noticed that post. Want to see some of the new avatars and mesh clothes?

Linden Lab’s New Starter Avatars – Classic is now the default.

This image shows the first page one lands on after clicking JOIN. By default they now have ‘Classic’ avatars selected. It is still possible to select Vampires and People. Those are mesh body avatars. But, the Classic Avatars look to be all new. The older avatars are still in the Library. I just don’t see them on sign-up process. Continue reading →

Wayward Peaks Halloween

2015/10/29 by Nalates Urriah

There are a lot of interesting places in Second Life™. Dolls and Demons, love the pictures, has an article up about a Gotcha Event: Hanging With The Bad Boys. Checking out the regions mentioned I came across Wayward Peaks. It is an awesome Gotcha event. There are Gotcha vendors are all over the region. So, you’ll be exploring.

Do you believe in Angels? *FGC Nov 2015*

Go to AllesIst Klaar’s photostream – Image by AllesIst – Outfit @ her blog

The region is full of mesh. Much of it has poor LoD modeling. If you have set your RenderVolumeLODFactor set to 4, a bad move, you won’t notice. Using 1.125 I noticed. At 1.125 you have to be close to things for them to look right. But, in general the place is interesting. Continue reading →

Are Second Life’s Jelly Babies Breaking SL?

2015/10/25 by Nalates Urriah

As I have pointed out more people are talking about Jelly Babies and the coming RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.6.305942 movement toward being the main viewer. Of course some know what they are talking about and others don’t.

erratic / ava sweater & meg leggings
High or low ACI?

I think – Jelly babies will take over SL soon (AKA how linden lab is planning to break second life) – falls in the ‘doesn’t’ category. utilizator404, the author, believes the Lab is breaking SL by introducing the Avatar Complexity Information (ACI) feature. I disagree, but I can see how some may consider the appearance of Jelly Babies as a problem. The opinion that Jelly Babies breaks SL is as valid an opinion as any. I just don’t agree with it. So, I’ll rebut it.

In the article an assumption is expressed that the Lab is not fixing the root causes of lag; failure to optimize the viewer, not changing how the viewer uses video memory, failure to use all the features of new video cards, and no use of Direct3D (a Windows only graphics render engine).

Most of 2014 and 2015 has been spent optimizing features of the viewer and SL servers. If you follow Inara’s or my blog you already know that. If you have only read the release notes of the Linden and third party viewers as they are released, you know that numerous fixes for how the viewer use memory have been made. From the Third Party Dev’s meeting we know more are in progress.

Continue reading →

Second Life: Business & Drama

2015/10/20 by Nalates Urriah

Second Life™ is so much like real life. All the same problems, challenges, and drama present in RL are seen in SL too. Now we have the Maitreya Monopoly… First the drama story then the tech that makes this all so silly.

One Reason

It seems blogger Sophee Mojo is unhappy with Maitreya or more accurately Onyx LeShelle the creator of Maitreya. The unhappiness has its root in the limited selection of clothes currently available for the Maitreya Mesh body or more accurately the limited set of designers. Sophee points to the developer’s kit for Maitreya that lacks ‘weighting’ information as a deliberate move on Maitreya’s part to control the clothes market. So, the unhappiness is expressed as complaints and accusations. Continue reading →