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
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
The Project is months old. But, it has a history already. Cathy Foil was one of the developers aske into the project and under NDA. Now the NDA has been lifted and she has made a 52 minute video relating her experience in the project. I have an index of the video below.
0-11:00 – Mostly audio talking about the people involved in the project. Cathy talks about her MayaStar and cooperating with the Machinimatrix AvaStar people to solve various problems. Continue reading
Gaia Clary, of Machinimatrix, has an excellent post in the Project Bento feedback thread.
See: Gaia – Project Bento Feedback Thread.
…OK, this is probably my shortest post…
For those making animations this is an important issue. While I haven’t been sure which side of the debate to take because I am pretty much an amateur when it comes to making animation. Medhue, of Medhue Animations, made a video that explains the problem. I’m not sure it depicts the problem as well as it could.
I think because Medhue does so much animation he can see the problem in ways those of not as familiar with animating can’t see it. So, if this still doesn’t explain the problem for you, read on. Continue reading
This is a pretty good example of what is possible with Project Bento avatars.
Notice the fingers…
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
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
