Aki Shichiroji demonstrates a wearable wyvern utilising Bento bones for animation. There’s also the potential for a wide range of other uses – such as Aki Shichiroji’s wyvern pictured below, or rigged attachable pets – even the potential for gowns and other clothing to move naturally with an avatar’s movement. Net result: the ability for mesh avatars to be far more expressive and customisable than before, and much, much better support for non-human avatars. To further support the new additions, new attachment points were added to the skeleton and – most recently of all – a good number of the bones (particularly those in the face) were hooked-up the viewer appearance sliders, allowing them to adjust elements of suitably rigged mesh heads, etc. It has also involved the folk from Avastar and Mayastar as well as many content creators and animatorsĪt that time, Bento introduced over 90 additional bones to the avatar skeleton, with no fewer that 30 being added to avatars hands to allow for finger manipulation, and another 30 to the head for facial expressions. The project has involved staff from Linden Lab, notably Troy Linden, Oz Linden and Vir Linden, together with assistance from Alexa Linden, Simon Linden, Rider Linden, Aura Linden and others. I was also invited to observe this initial work – my sincere thanks to Oz Linden for the opportunity – so that I could follow the project and report on its development, which I was able to start doing in December 2015, once the project had been publicly announced, and the project opened to greater input from content creators and animators. Project Bento has been in development for over a year, the initial phases of the work being carried out by the Lab behind closed doors, before a period of closed development involving a number of expert creators and tool makes – notably the Avastar team who produce the avatar plug-in for Blender, and Cathy Foil, who produces Mayastar, a similar plug-in for Maya. The news – not entirely unexpected, as the Lab has been gearing-up to make the move for the last few weeks – came via an official blog post on Tuesday, May 31st. Project Bento, the Lab-initiated, collaborative project involving Second Life content creators to bring greater capabilities to mesh avatars and – potentially – rigged attachments – is now available on Agni, the Second Life main grid.
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