Ruth's head

[Fritigern]

So there is all this talk about alpha cuts, meshes for body, feet, and hands but I have yet to see anyone address possibly the biggest obstacle for adoption by a large group of people, which is the horrendously low quality of the head.
Where the body is all nice and curved all over, the head consists of angles upon angles upon angles. It reminds more of the system head than of a mesh head and it REALLY needs some proper attention by someone who knows how to create mesh and frankly, I don't even understand how this head can even be considered acceptable to anyone connected to this project when, if you compare it to any of the other mesh heads available on SL, this head does not even qualify as "good enough".

[seriesumei]

Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought I saw something somewhere that the head was the 'sample' Bento mesh head that Linden released a while back? I agree it is not in good shape to actually wear. Most of the time in SL mesh bodies and heads are separate packages. I guess I had assumed Ruth project was similar and the current head was the 'free sample'. Also, while we may be able to get by with a single-layer body for a time, I suspect a single layer head is not going to work as well for many.

Does anyone know of any other head meshes that exist similar to Ruth/Roth?

[aiaustin]

We had three sample heads with RC#1, the default one now in use and two others.

See ingen-lab/Ruth#19

I had anyway meant to mention the issue on the head with the tongue which when animated pokes straight out through the lower lips and jaw. It is a known problem I found when exploring this and needs some extra tongue “bones”/“joints” to be used to move it out and down rather than just down at an angle. Links to information on others who know about this are in the URL above if anyone with the knowledge knows how to fix things.

[Outworldz]

The default head is the default Avastar bento head. I added a comment to the Shins repo that the license for all avatars starts with CC-BY Linden Lab because all avatars like this are made from the Linden bone structure and UV map. So they have to be mentioned.

[AdaRadius]

It isn't difficult to find nice mesh faces, many of them free and open source, take them into Blender, simplify them enough for gaming, and use shape keys to give them expression. In Blender. There are even aps now that allow us to put a camera on our faces and see our expressions on our model - I haven't done it yet, but it's on my list. My granddaughter is having a blast with that Apple ap on her Mom's phone - she can assemble components to make different faces, talk, and see them move the way her own face moves, and send me messages with her cartoon face talking to me.

The big limitation is SL/OS. As far as I know we still can't use the shape keys - face movement while we talk into our mics - on a head topology other than the default mesh. The Bento head is the original default head with an armature. And not even particularly good bones, as Ai points out above.

So. We can make or acquire pretty heads, and we can run animations on them for machinima - though the movement is not very good. Otherwise we're wearing a pretty zombie face - no shape keys, no movement.
Even if if we decide that all that's OK, and for me it's not, we're still looking at UV mapping it to the legacy SL maps, so people can use their beloved old skins.

At this time, I think the default head is better, because it's more expressive than anything I can make or rig for this platform's limitations.

That's why I'm not working on one.

[seriesumei]

Thanks for sorting me out there Fred.

Ada, that sounds like Not Much Fun. I know the market for heads in SL seemed to explode with Bento, I've got friends with >5 and they keep trying new ones each month or so it seems. I have no idea what it looks like in the OpenSim world.

I think we (Ruth Project) should have a decent head to include but I also recognize that is beyond what I can do myself. At a minimum though we should maybe have a list of options for folks for other heads known to work and that might be affordable if not free (in either sense of free).

[aiaustin]

SundanceHaiku commented on 16 Jan 2018:
Ai, I haven't worked with the head, just hands. The head would be new territory for me, but here's a video specifically on the tongue which might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQMMq-WX_c