UNDER THE HOOD
BENTO HEADS
ABSOLUTELY AND ONLY FROM MY PERSPECTIVE AS AN SL ANIMATOR!
Bento Heads are a brilliant addition to SL, no doubt about that. But at the same time, they are a strange mixture somewhere between a nightmare and the wild, wild west. Mind you, I am talking from an animator’s point of view (should I keep repeating that?).
What happened?
Somewhere at the very start, something went wrong. It is easy, from this distance in time, to see all the mistakes that were made, but I guess it was not easy to predict them at the time. On the other hand, I am stunned that LL, having set up the body system so beautifully, missed doing the same for Bento heads.
When mesh bodies were introduced, they were rigged to the existing set of bones: a well-established system with clear rules. Not heads. It seems that LL left the head rig out in the wild without the same standardization and simply allowed it to develop freely. As a result, head creators each developed their own approach, with different rigs, bone sizes, and positions. From that process, animators were cut out of face animation creation.
The second problem occurred very quickly as a consequence of the lack of default/system head animations, which - again - was LL’s job. Without them (even one would have been enough), there was nothing to hold the rig in place or reset it to a default position. So we ended up with stuck faces, stuck tongues, etc.
There was only one creator at the time who understood the problem from the very beginning (no, I am not advertising any particular brand here) and added a default animation to their head. Being lucky to have a head from that brand, it took me some time to see the problem.
Others followed over time, but if you weren’t wearing their HUD, you would end up with the same problem.
I’ll be honest: I have no clue what the situation is nowadays (spring 2026), as I’ve honestly lost interest. If I am creating face animations, they will fit few brands only, and that’s it.
The problems created
Animator’s problem: As an animator, I don’t have any other head rig to work with except the default one. So, to fit animations, I have to make tweaks and run thousands of tests. It is like walking in complete darkness.
Creator’s problem: If you want to have face animations in your creations, you would have to layer them with the body using scripts, with a setup that very quickly gets out of control.
Users’ problem: They are cut out of the experience beyond animations inside the brand’s HUD and are required to click a lot for basic user experience. If they are lucky enough to come across a face animation that fits the body action - made by some crazy animator willing to spend who knows how many hours on it, and a creator willing to tear their hair out setting it up for multiple heads - they might get the experience they deserve. If not, they are on their own.
Current situation
An ecosystem where mesh head creators locked their heads on custom rigs was established years ago, and at this point it feels unlikely that anything will change. Animators were cut out from this process from the very beginning. What was meant to serve as an expansion of the world we are living in ended up developing in a more fragmented way. At this stage, it is simply the current state of things.