– Avatar 2.0 v1.14 is out! –

This is the long overdue fitted mesh update as well as bento face and hand rigging. You can now adjust the shape of your ass, belly, legs and feet, to make your shape more juicy. You can also adjust some of the face sliders but not all of them work (not all bento features are supported due to the way the game treats custom joint positions)

– Whats else is New in 1.14 –

In general this was a huge update, avatar 2.0 now partially supports fitted mesh (the whole lower body bellow the waist) as well as bento rigging for the face and hands.
Huge improvements to render weight from 32K to just 4.8K (the render weight randomly fluctuates between higher and lower numbers because the whole render weight system is garbage) as well as script optimizations.
There are now 2 versions of the body, A and B. Version A is the normal version witch is 4.8k render weight, and the experimental version B with 2k render weight witch will not work for people running the game on ghetto graphics settings.
A bunch of new features implemented such as normal/specular map support, head customization options and other neat things.

Rez or wear your Avatar 2.0 update cards to get it.

All the existing clothing have been updated to work with this new version, rez your update cards.

                 

The old versions of following items did not come with all the textures, scripting and update cards, there for they are not eligible for a free update.

    

Next stop on the to do list is updating the avatar 2.0 appliers to make use of the new texture layers and specular/normal maps, as well as new dummies for content creators.

– Bento talk animation –

This is for typing/voice chat

– Make Avatar 2.0 great again –

 

– Bento fingernails for Kemono by Haro –

Haro has Released finger nails that work with the Kemono bento hands.

– Avatar 2.0 and Kemono bento dummies –

Was going to wait till the bento version of Avastar gets all the bugs worked out (like ruining your rigs) and goes out of beta to release proper dummies but it doesnt look like thats going to ever happen and people just cant keep their pants on, nagging me to release the dummies, so here they are.

Kemono bento dummy http://www.mediafire.com/file/977xf08xuwvwn9u/Kemono+Dummy+bento.zip

Avatar 2.0 bento dummy http://www.mediafire.com/file/0cahr6jhngzd20f/av2+bento+dummy.zip

– Avatar 2.0 bento bug fix –

I fixed a bug in the Avatar 2.0 bento hands causing eyes to derp out.

– Bento update now live –

Rez your update cards cuz the following items are now bento compatible.

The avatar 2.0 now uses bento finger bones, to use other bento hand animations, set the hands to neutral position through the hud.
Kemono now uses bento finger and tail bones, for hand animations its the same deal as avatar 2.0, i have not tested the tail with other bento tail animations so i cant guarantee it wont look wonky, since i only rigged the tail to deform right using kemono tail animations.

The O.CA armor hands for avatar 2.0 and kemono and the modular arm glove kit for avatar 2.0 will work with this update too.

Also, haro is working on fingernails for kemono bento hands so keep an eye on their store.

 

– Bento2 and kemono wip –

So the hands and tail are pretty much done, just needs to be scripted now, but i ran into a road block with the avatar 2.0 face so that wont be coming out till march.

The joint position and bone translation problem

Not getting too much into technical detail, second life has one serious technical limitation that cannot be fixed without fundamentally rewriting the game code, and breaking a million other things when doing so.

Bento face bones allow you to not only animate the face of your mesh avatar, but also adjust the features of the face using the LL appearance editor sliders, creating your own unique faces. But in order to make full use of the bento face bones, mesh faces have to match the proportions of the LL avatar face(the whole derpy looking wide apart eyes and everything), but since the avatar 2.0 face has completely different proportions, it needs to use joint offsets to match the the face bones to its proportions.

But the problem with joint positions is that The way Appearance editor sliders work, is not compatible with joint offsets, not all of them but the big majority of the sliders dont work with it.

Now one way around it would be offsetting the joints using a bone translation animation, same thing that the kemono body uses for custom joint positions, but that creates new problem.

If i use a translation animation to offset the joints once, you will be able to edit your face in appearance editor, but playing any kind of other face animation that has bone translations or reloging will reset those changes, while people who just teleported into the sim wont be able to see the face correctly either without the translation animation playing constantly, but playing that constantly would also reset those changes, so its a non solution in the end and we are back where we have started.

Someone in the Avastar blender group mentioned that Avastar will have new feature soon that does some attaching thing thats supposed to be an alternative to joint positions, so i gotta wait till the march release and try again, if that fails than im afraid the Avatar 2 wont be able to use all the sliders, witch is a huge shame but i already got a plan on how to make alternative face features by using bone translation animations.

So anyway, i will just focus on updating the avatar 2.0 hands for now, we already managed to reduce the render weight by 25k by just using bento hands.

– bento kemono tail –

– WIP kemono bento implementation –

So yeah bento is now part of the official firestorm release and the bento development tools are nearing completion so i started poking at it myself and heres what i got so far.

My goal is to make full use of the bento bones for avatar 2.0 and kemono to drastically cut down on the rendering weight, first im going to make use of the finger and tail bones so that we wouldnt need to use 89475984 invisible tails and hands, one will be enough! and than will see what i can do with the avatar 2.0 face. I might also re release bento versions of the M3 heads since those have a 9384658347598 polygons too that also eat up a lot of the render complexity thing but im not sure how well those rigged heads will align with different avatars since you wont be able to move them around anymore.