On Wednesday December 16th Linden Lab announced; Introducing Project Bento – New Bones Added to Second Life Avatar Skeleton. The project is designed to add extensions to the Second Life skeleton in terms of bones, these bones :
- 11 extra limb bones for wings, additional arms, or extra legs.
- 6 tail bones.
- 30 bones in the hands (all 10 fingers!).
- 30 bones for facial expressions.
- 2 other new bones in the head for animating ears or antennae.
- 13 new attachment points associated with the new bones.
The blog post describes this as :
While we want to make improvements, we also want to maximize backward compatibility. Get ready for the biggest thing that’s happened to avatars in years …
Ever wish you could incorporate a tail, wings, or second set of arms into your avatar? How about having animations for facial expressions and finger movements? Yes, we know that there are some incredibly creative workarounds that give you some of these, but they can’t leverage skeletal animation, so they have been very complex, often fragile, and very expensive in performance and resources both in your Viewer and the Simulator.
The biggest thing that has happened to Second Life avatars in years is a bold claim but looking at the reaction from Second Life content creators, it seems that this bold claim has some merit.
A post over at SLUniverse by Cerise generated a hell of a lot of positive feedback, quotes include “Wow“, “This is amazing news“, “I’m so excited about this announcement!!” and much more.
There’s talk about the sort of avatars that can be created, better Centaurs is a potential area of growth, although you should always be wary around a Centaur in my experience.
However, before we all get too excited, it should be pointed out that Project Bento is still very much in the project stage, as the blog post points out :
The avatar skeleton changes introduced by Project Bento are not yet final because we want your feedback, either in the Creation Forum or in JIRA. To experience the changes, you’ll need to download the Project Viewer and upload any content using the new skeleton extensions to the Aditi Beta Test Grid (most regions on the Beta Test Grid will allow this; some may be in use for other testing and not yet have these updates). Once we have finalized the skeleton extensions, we will enable uploads using them to the main Second Life grid and the real fun can begin!
This means that it will be a while before it lands on the main grid but that’s ok because it gives people time to test the new skeleton, make sure it’s fine and if required, make improvements before it finally lands.
For a sneak peek of what may be possible, Gaia Clary has posted a video on youTube, which I’ll embed here.