– M4 Chibi head dummy –

Heres the rigging/animation dummy for the M4 Chibi head: http://www.mediafire.com/file/7ba09a9bww6kovz/M4+Chibi+Dummy.zip

You can also find this in the downloads section.

– Minor M4 updates –

M4 Anime head update version 1.2b
Head
*Fixed – A potential memory leak.

 

M4 Chibi head update version 1.2b
Head
*Fixed – An oversight in the animation system causing the animations to be spam played every few seconds.
*Fixed – A potential memory leak.

– GameBoy DMG Backlight + bivert mod –

Heres another RL project of mine, my last project probably flew over everyone’s heads (i was customizing my minibike) so im going to explain this one.

This one was really fun to do, its a back light mod together with a bivert chip. Adding a backlight to the gameboy screen makes the image kinda dim and difficult to see (the second pic) but theres a trick, rotating the polarizing screen filter 90 degrees makes the image much more clear, but it also inverts the colors (third picture) so i used a chip that inverts the signal to the screen (fourth and fifth pic) and thats why its called a bivert mod, so you get a clear image and correct colors.

– M4 Chibi head and updates for the M4 Anime head –

And its done! The M2 Chibi head was one of my personal favorites and something i always wanted to redo in mesh all the way back when i was redoing the venus head in mesh for the M3 system.

– Things to know –

The M4 Chibi head is functionally identical to M4 Anime head, that means it has the same broken appearance editor sliders and all the shit some of you hated about the M4, if that is an issue to you, please do not buy this head.

This head works with the same skins that are made for the M4 Anime head. As with M4 Anime, M3 eyes, lashes, and blush textures will work too (for older appliers, use the M3 Retro loader that comes with the M3 head)

– Known problems –

Problem with joint offsets on some of the non standard tiny avatars, on some kid avatar bodies the neck will get extended due to a conflict with joint positions, i have no idea why only some though, or how to fix this, so i made a work around for it using animation joint offsets, you can find a version of the head that uses this work around in the bonus item box, the M4 Anime head should have this bug as well and i will make this workaround on the next update.

There is a problem with the game itself that makes the eyelashes clip through a little through the eye socket if you are very high up in the sky, like 3000-4000 meter high, its weird but that can be fixed by adjusting the eye opening or eye size setting by -1 or -2  (already done in the default shape that comes with it) also this same bug applies to the M4 Anime.

 

– M4 Anime head update version 1.2 –

M4 Head
*FIxed – Script error caused from repeatedly clicking an AO option from the hud.

M4 Neck [Avatar 2] [Kemono] [LL/Normie]
*Nothing – Changed version to 1.2 to make things less confusing

M4 Hud
*Fixed – Reset textures now fixes blush texture
*Fixed – The changed 1.1 HUD graphics somehow didn’t get implemented into the 1.1 release, this update fixes it.
*Changed – Script optimizations, turning the menu pages is now a lot faster.

– Summer projects –

Things and stuff.

 

– M4 Update, ABC boobs and the M4 Dummy –

The first big update for the M4 head is out, this update includes the following changes.

Update Version 1.1

– M4 Head –
*Fixed – Blush textures added from HUD or Applier would reset to default
*Changed – Made the tongue texture look less bland looking
*New – Added support for asymmetrical skin textures
*New – Added an extra non bento rigged tongue mesh, more about that in the HUD portion of this changelog

– M4 Neck [Avatar 2] [Kemono] [LL/Normie] –
*Changed – Restructured the scripts to work with the updated appliers
*Changed – The necks now do some math to match the user adjusted specular texture density with the head

– M4 HUD –
*New – The skin [ADD] box now also functions as a master texture box, you can now specify what textures you want to add using commands.
*New – Load asymmetrical skin textures through the skin [ADD] box using head*UUID*UUID (Left*Right)
*New – Load neck texture through Skin [ADD] box using neck*UUID
*New – Load mouth texture through Skin [ADD] box using mouth*UUID
*New – Load blush texture through Skin [ADD] box using blush*UUID
*New – Load asymmetrical specular textures through Specular [ADD] box using UUID*UUID (Left*Right)
*New – Load asymmetrical normal textures through Normal [ADD] box using UUID*UUID (Left*Right)
*New – Display error messages if texture add commands & UUID are used incorrectly
*Changed – Replaced the pointless tongue hide feature with a selection between bento rigged and static tongues for situations like a third party AO HUDs making your tongue stick out through your teeth, and other tongue compatibility issues.

– M4 Applier –
/!\Important, skin creators need to update their appliers to 1.1 for them to work with necks for 1.1 and up/!\
*New – Added Asymmetrical texture support in form of a “Pick a side” menu after choosing a texture
*Changed – You will now be asked to pick which side of the head you want to apply the Head, Normal, Specular, and Eye textures.

That is all for this update,  the next big update will come after the chibi head is released, the update will include the restructuring of the face and other goodies, there may or may not be some small bug fix updates in between.

– ABC stuff –

ABC has also released an update making the M4 kemono neck compatible with her boobs, also a version of the bikini that works with the her flat chest because that was requested a lot.

– M4 dummy –

Heres the rigging/animation dummy for the M4 anime head: http://www.mediafire.com/file/gtb9stiwe9agko0/M4+Dummy.zip
You can also find this in the downloads section.

that is all

– Bento for Dummies –

To clear up all the confusion and misinformation about the appearance editor sliders, heres a list of sliders that work and slider that dont work.

– head –
head size ———– works
head streach —– works
head shape ——– works
egg head ———– works
head length ——- works
forehead angle — doesnt work
brow size ———- works
upper cheeks —– Works with M4 Venus, doesnt work with M4 Anime and Chibi
lower cheeks —– works
cheek bones —— doesnt work

7/10

– eyes –
eye size —————- works with M4 Venus (only vertically for M4 Anime and Chibi)
eye opening ——— works
eye spacing ———- doesnt work
outer eye corner — doesnt work (HUD has a setting for it)
inner eye corner — doesnt work (HUD has a setting for it)
eye depth ————- doesnt work
upper eyelid fold — doesnt work
eyebags —————- work
puffy eyelids ——— work

4/9

– nose –
nose size ———– works
nose width ——– works
nostril width —– doesnt work
nostril division — doesnt work
nose thickness — works
upper bridge —– works
lower bridge —– works
bridge width —– works
nose tip angle — doesnt work
nose tip shape — works but effects the whole nose

7/10

– mouth –
lip width ———– doesnt work
lip fullness ——– works
lip thickness —— works
lip ratio ————- works
mouth position — doesnt work
mouth corner —- doesnt work
lip cleft ————– works
lip cleft depth —– works

5/8

– chin –
chin angl —- doesnt work
jaw shape — works (but adjusts chin shape instead)
chin depth — doesnt work
jaw angle —- works (but doesnt effect the whole jaw, does the same thing as chin-neck)
jaw jut ——– doesnt work
chin-neck —- works

3/6

I did not include sliders that are not supposed to do anything on bento heads, these would be eyelash length, both chin cleft sliders, eye pop and jowls, these sliders not supported by bento in general.

I also didnt include these useless face deforming sliders: face sheer, shift mouth and crooked nose.

 

Now lets talk about why these sliders dont work

 

I mentioned that there are technical limitations that are preventing the head from using all the sliders, but what are these technical limitations? after all the ASR head can use all its sliders…
An anime head is not a standard human face, therefore for an anime head to work with bento, it needs to have joint offsets for all the face bones (custom bone positions), and Bento uses bone scale and bone position to manipulate the face in the appearance editor. Now the problem is, due to the way the second life skeleton is set up, second life cannot tell the difference between an joint offset made by an appearance editor slider and an offset made by the creator, meaning your face shape will be overridden every time you log in or another person comes into the sim and looks at your face, therefore LL has disabled sliders from adjusting bone positions. Bone positions are used for things like mouth width, eye corner position, cheek bone position, etc so you are only left with scale adjustment for things like head shape, nose size, cheek size, lip size and so on.

If you are interested in more detail on what bones do what to change to appearance, check this out. https://avastar.guru/knowledge/slider-mapping/

So what magic does the ASR head use than? The way their heads work, they do not have joint offsets in the head itself, so no sliders get disabled, instead they uses a deformer animation trick to move joints to custom positions, same way the kemono deformer works to put the kemono’s shoulders, hips and feet in the right position. I have thought about it at one point but theres a bunch of drawbacks with that, like for example, sometimes the animation gets stopped and your face looks deformed to anyone who enters the sim after the animation has stopped, while you see yourself fine, and if you are a kemono user, you know this problem well, when your shoulders, just break and you end up with wide, detached, or dislocated feet, or the annoying shoulder pop that happens when you detach or attach something, or your shoulder width setting having no effect on your shoulders. This was a whole new can of worms that i didnt wanna open, but looks like i opened an even bigger can of worms, and now im begining to think that creating a bento anime head was a big mistake, with all the people who have never made a thing in their life and have no idea how SL even works, talking out of their ass like they know better than me…

 

Roadmap for the future development of the M4 heads

 

So next step is an update that is coming soon, fixing problems like the blush texture bug, restructuring the faces to allow asymmetrical textures and some other things.
After that im going to be working on the dummy model, once that is done i will resume work on the chibi head and once that is done, im going to try making a version of the M4 anime head that has a smaller face, the thing that bugs me the most about it right now is how massive the face looks with some hairs, people say the eyes is too big but its not just the eyes, the rest of the face bellow the eyes is too big, so theres gonna be 2 versions because the face does look really good with other hairs. I might also try to make some sort of an animation deformer based appearance editor aid for controlling eye, nose, shin and mouth position as well as mouth width, will see. And after all that is done, im finally going to resume work on the male head.

 

– The M4 Bento Anime Head –

The long awaited M4 Bento anime head is here! and now you can be one of the cool kids are riding the bento craze wave.

– What is bento and why does it matter? –

For those of you who still dont really know what all this bento hype is about, Bento is a new set of bones that LL has recently implemented into the game, such as face bones, wing bones, tail bones, finger bones and some other bones. These bones are used to animate specific body parts such as the fingers on your hands or the expression of your face, and is what this head uses to animate its face.

The main advantage of using bento bones for anime heads is that there is no more need to have a bunch of invisible meshes for every face expression, using just one mesh to do every expression instead. This in turn greatly reduces the render weight of your avatar, on top of that, anyone can now make expressions and face animations, so you are no longer limited to what is in the HUD.

The disadvantage is that since the head is rigged, it can no longer be positioned and face expressions are sadly somewhat limited due to the way bento bones work, meaning some expressions are just not possible to make without looking really weird or deforming your face

– Features –

• Full mod – Edit it, link stuff to it, rip or replace its textures, go crazy with it but make backups before you do!
• In depth customization with lots of options – Customize your head, choose its eye styles, colors, skin color, ear and nose types, add custom textures and specular maps. 2 types of ears, noses and eye shapes to choose from.
• Full facial control – Eyebrows, eyelids, Eyes and mouth can be controlled separately, mixing and matching different positions to create your own expression.
• Smooth animations and built in AO – eyes blink, look around, the mouth moves when you type or talk on voice chat, emotes as well as 3 different face AO styles.
• And more!

The head is also compatible with existing M3 eye, eyelash and blush textures.

 

– known bugs and limitations –

Due to technical limitations, the kemono, avatar 2.0 and LL necks dont join right and you will occasionally see seams from some camera angles.
changing the head’s default attachment position will mess up the facelight, right click and choose add to attach the head.
No rikugou compatibility mode yet (will be implemented later)
No asymmetrical skin support yet (will be implemented later)

If you find any other problems not mentioned here, please report them to us.

For texture mod creators we already got appliers too.

Next is the M4 Chibi Head which if all goes right should be released this month, if not than the next one.

That is all.