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.