Project Bento: Avatar skeleton improvements

Avatars are about to get even more realistic as Linden Lab announces Project Bento.

The avatar skeleton will now support:

• 30 bones in the hands 
• 6 tail bones
• 30 bones for facial expressions
• 11 extra limb bones for wings, additional arms, or extra legs.
• 2 other new bones in the head for animating ears or antennae
• 13 new attachment points associated with the new bones

Initially you will need the Project Viewer as it is still a work in progress, but hopefully this will be adopted by 3rd party viewers as soon as the new enhancement is proven.

For full information about this new enhancement see the Knowledge Base

We know how much work, value, personalization and emotional investment goes into a Second Life avatar, so we have always been careful when considering avatar changes. 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.

We are introducing extensions to the standard Second Life Avatar Skeleton that give you dozens of new bones to support both rigging and animation, and accompanying new attachment points! This extended skeleton, which is fully backward compatible with existing avatars, rigging and animation, gives creators the power to build more sophisticated avatars than ever before.