Slow Bento: New SL Avatar Development Likely Delayed by Multi-Disciplinary Nature

Why are we still waiting for Project Bento-based Second Life avatars? After two weeks on the main grid, little two none have shown up in SL social circles or media. (Besides those already developed by early beta developers, like Aki's wyvern above.) One very good reason, as SL veteran Patchouli Woollahra puts out, is developing a Bento avatar tends to require more than just one skill set:

"The main barrier here," as he puts it, "is that unlike the legacy SL avatar skeleton, the extra bones in a Bento-ified avatar need extra animations playing in order to properly animate them. So this is not a simple model/texture/rig job, but also requires help from a good animator as well. And frankly, this is stretching across multiple disciplines:

Bento development team (stock photo)

"I predict Bento-enabled avatars will be team efforts/require boilerplate animations for the extra bones," he concludes. I'm not anything like a animation/modeling expert, but this sounds right to me. A bento may seem like a simple snack box of avatar goodness, but making one right could best be a team effort -- and teams take extra time to come together.

Please share this post:

Tweet

 

Comments

[cyberserenity]

I did not know they where out. Maybe LL should tell us about new stuff.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

They've been tinkering with it on the beta grid for ages. they recently blogged on the official LL blog that this would go into trials on the main grid as a project viewer only content type. TPVs will migrate the required code into their own viewers once LL gives the green light to integrate it completely into the standard SL code base.

[Adeon Writer]

I'm pretty sure the actual reason why there's little to know Bento meshes is that Project Bento isn't technically out yet.

While you can download the Project Bento Project viewer and upload Bento meshes to maingrid, the actual official Second Life viewer can't see them yet. It hasn't been updated.

[Aki Shichiroji]

You aren't seeing more Bento stuff because it's simply not out yet. No one wants to put in considerable time on minutiae which may ultimately change, requiring small or large revisions.

A little simple digging on the forums will unlock an extensive feedback thread wherein heated discussion concerning facial bones has been ongoing all week. Bento user group meetings are also occurring every Thursday at 1pm pdt at Hippotropolis sim and anyone interested in learning more about the current goings-on for the project really owes it to themselves (and their audience) to at least drop in or read up on the meeting transcripts/notes put out regularly by both Nalates and Inara.

Also, while it is true Bento will require animation to make the best of the new bones, that doesn't mean there won't be a market for generic, rotational animations to be offered, just like how normal human avatar overrides are offered already.

[Medhue]

Yes, making a Bento avatar requires the creator to know and understand all aspects of character creation. A team might do the job, but teams require the income to pay for all those members. Not only does making a Bento avatar take skills, but they also take quite a bit of time to make. Depending on how much time a creator has, 1 month for 1 avatar would probably be pretty fast, considering the endlessness of SL creations.

All that said, once the process and workflows are set, some of us will make tutorials on every aspect of making a Bento avatar.