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.