Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Penny Patton has a post in the SL Forum titled, Why No Mod? She is finding a lot of the stuff being sold these days is no mod. She apparently finds it as annoying as I do. But, Penny does a good job of explaining why mesh things should be Mod-OK.
There is a good discussion in the thread, still short. Most are in support of Mod-OK items. No-Mod demos are understandable and most have no problems with demos being No-Mod.
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.
Daria of Mesh Body Addicts blog has a video explaining Bento. It is great for the person that is just interested in knowing enough to understand what it is about and what the difference between the classic skeleton we have not and the new Bento Skeleton,
Daria promises to provide more information in a future animation.
The people working with mesh clothes will notice Daria’s ideas about collision bones is a bit off, not as precise as one would need for a tutorial. But, for a light weight explanation she is accurate.
Awesome. Thanks.
RL has kept me away from recent meetings I wanted to attend. The Bento meeting being the more interesting one in my mind. Fortunately Inara Pey made it to the Bento meeting. See: Project Bento User Group update 34 with audio.
Word from the meeting is the recent Project Bento viewer release fixes some of the tenacious problems. It adds a Reset Skeleton and Animation selection in addition to just the Reset Skeleton into the avatar’s right-click drop down menu. This is an attempt to handle most of the problems a few older animations have when run on a Project Bento viewer without changing how Project Bento’s animations handle bone/joint position. Think compromise.
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.
Well… this week. There is no Bento meeting this Thursday. So, for a Bento fix, check some of the past announcements. These are a couple of videos I missed when initially released.
And Aki has a wyvern in development. If you watch the Bento Meeting videos you have seen the wyvern. And the avatar wings she has/is made/making.