Project Bento Update w22

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.

Second Life: Jelly Babies Grow Up

That little baby girl grew up into the cutest DOLL… that is sort of what has happened with Second Life™ Jelly Babies. Earlier I wrote about the name Jelly Babies being trademarked. So, the Lab is not going to use that term for muted avatars. And I certainly am not going to call muted avatars muted avatars… ugh. That give no one an intuitive sense of what is being talked about.

JellyDoll and Fully Rendered Avatar.

JellyDoll and Fully Rendered Avatar.

I follow Mesh Body Addicts, a blog by LilDaria resident, Daria for short, which is all about mesh bodies and clothes. Love it. Daria is using the term JellyDolls in place of the trademarked Jelly Babies, which I like. So, we may have a new name for them.  Continue reading

Project Bento AFTER the Meeting Discussion Secrets

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

Second Life: Project Bento 2016 Week 16

This week I made it to the whole meeting. There is a request for merchants with products using the new Bento skeleton to join the Torley in make the feature announcement. This an opportunity for those helping with the Project’s development to get recognition and early promotion of their goods. Tentatively they plan to start shooting the video in a week or two. So, be at next Thursday’s meeting.

Also, there was a good conversation after the meeting. I have it in another video, which will be up later. I learned a lot in that conversation. If you are planning on working with Bento, you’ll want to listen to it.

Why There Will Be No Jelly Babies in Second Life

For some time I’ve been writing about Jelly Babies or by a more geeky name, muted avatars. They are a major part of the RC Quick Graphics viewer. The muted avatars are still going to be part of the viewer, we just won’t be calling them Jelly Babies.

Render Auto Muting

Render Auto Muting

Jelly Babies is a trademarked name. So, the Lab won’t use it officially. Nor is it to appear in the SL Wiki or Knowledge Base. So, if we continue to call Jelly Babies Jelly Babies the new SL users won’t be able to find them in any of the SL reference material and documentation. Google won’t lead them to the right place and that is a real problem. If you can’t find it in Google, it doesn’t exist… Continue reading

What will Character Creation be like in Project Sansar?

First, I don’t know. Second, AFAIK no one has said anything to give us a substantial clue. But, I am curious. So, when I see Massively Overpowered writing about character creation I check it out. Following is a video showing the state of character creation in Black Desert as of September 2015.

You don’t start to see the creation tool until about TM 4:00.

I can speculate that some of the adjustment tools could be similar for Project Sansar. But, I wonder about whether we will have that much control over hair and make up. We have quite an industry making hair and make up. If all that is moved to the character editor, it will definitely change the fashion industry in Sansar.

One thing I think would be great to add to the character creation tool is the ability to play animations as they do toward the end of the video. I doubt that how animations are used in Black Desert and Sansar will be similar.

Black Desert is allowed more freedom as they only dealing with a limited set of appearance parameters in that they are dealing with humanoid forms. As Bento is showing us people are far more creative. There is a desire to have wildly bizarre characters. Have you thought what Halloween 2016 will be like after Bento is completed?

Second Life News Week 2 – #2

This past week a Third Pary Develpoers’ meeting was held. Not much in the way of NEW news, but lots of updates… except for one big block buster.

Cyborg

Cyborg

Viewers

The Maintenance RC got prompted Friday morning and is now the main SL viewer: 4.0.1-310054. If you have been having problems and low FPS this release should help. This version is the second main viewer with the CEF. It also has lots of fixes.  Continue reading