yes please custom bones not all avatars need to work with Bento

i asked geen linden about gltf custom rig import, at the March 20, 2025 creator office hours.

i was told that gltf import, including rigged meshes, was close at hand. BUT it would only support the SL bento rig and hierarchy, at this time. geen was unable to provide a vague timeline, only "not never."

which leads me to believe this will at least take years, plural.

the reasoning behind not supporting custom rigs was this: that avatars want and expect animations to work -- system animations, gestures, AOs, etc etc. and having a custom rig would not work with these animations.

i have a counterpoint:

if i need a custom rig, i am NOT making a human or humanoid creature, and therefore, the regular animations wouldn't work with them anyway. they would need to use and (in the case of addons) buy animations specifically for that avatar and its rig.

in fact, that's the way it exists now! no quadruped can use human animations, even though they currently use the SL bento skeleton.

partial humanoid rigs (centaurs, driders, nagas, etc)... can and would still use bento-compatible rigging for their human parts, and can and should work with regular animations.

as for their horse/spider/snake parts, that's obviously a no-go.

in fact, if they TRY to use regular leg animations, they will look horrible and deformed/disjointed. an argument can be made that if the non-human parts have completely different bones, this situation would cease to exist at all.

lastly, there are non-avatar, non-creature considerations especially for animesh. there are things that people want to animate smoothly, such as elevators, ski lifts, even vehicles (especially those towing trailers) that would work (or at least look) much better as a rigged item, rather than animated prims or keyframed motion.

animesh doesn't even HAVE system animations to worry about.

i don't know about the inner technical machinations of animating avatars/animesh. i would hope that an animation can and would animate bones it has keyframes for, and if those bones don't exist in the rig the animation is attempting to play on, i would HOPE simply nothing would happen, while any bones that DO exist would be animated.

thanks for looking!

This could be easily implemented through VRM.

VRM it's a successful attempt on creating a standard avatar format for virtual worlds platforms. It can contain definitions for blendshapes, phys bones, etc making it a good and easy format for a lot of different platforms.

The best of all it's that an VRM avatar isn't more than a glTF scene with a set of predefined description for how the avatar should work.

Another advantage it's that a complete full avatar including physics bones settings and blendshapes can be done entirely within Blender without even touching Unity (though, Unity it's still a possibility to be used of course).

There are different software characters editors and creators that can already export directly an avatar already fully setup. Also, the conversion between VRM and different platforms it's nearly seamless granting people the possibility to bring their favorite avatars to SL from a different platform and vice versa.