Black Dragon Comes With Highly Detailed In-Viewer Poser for SL Avatars

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans, has a relatively unknown feature with a lot of potential uses: In-viewer avatar poser, editing poses with an extremely high and subtle detail, available in the menu via Dragon > My Useful Features > Poser.

"It all started with people wanting a way to synchronize animations like in Firestorm," lead developer NiranV tells me. "I didn't want to implement this as a separate feature. Instead, I made it part of my previous plan of adding a whole animation manipulation suite, which was inspired by my previous 'adjustable slow motion' animation feature."

Niran, by the way, has a Patreon for developing Black Dragon, and donations sure seem well-deserved. I mean, just look at what he's doing in his viewer:

"I wanted every animation, every avatar to be configurable, allow greater control over animations, so the idea of the Animation Manipulation window was born. I dug into the animation code and tried a few things to get a feeling what i can do with this.

"That's when the Animation Manipulation window was done and when you reported about the possibility of allowing everyone to be animated to dance on command. While digging into animations I also found some quite interesting things in the already present default animations, how they work, and this got me the idea to make an editable animation.

"That was the basic idea of the Poser. I made a new animation and got to work to implement a way in the new animation that allows directly communicating with it and altering a specific set of bones via the UI. That's when the very first iteration of the Poser was made."

The Poser comes with Bento bone support, saving and loading poses, animating between poses, rotation improvements, collision volume support, attachment bone support, positioning support, scaling support, an animesh support. However (and this makes it invaluable for SL content creators), only the viewer user can see the changes being made to the avatars they control:

"The Poser's only downside is that it is only local, not visible to anyone but you." He was hoping that Linden Lab would enable server-side support, but "they want an animation exporter first. I'm currently working on [that]." He can update the Power and make it part of his official viewer until he's done with that. "[So] for now the implementation of the Poser for everyone is hanging on a very thin thread." In other words, start using it now!

Image and video by legendary content creator Polyester Partridge.

Comments

[YsabelleStewart]

This looks interesting!

[vwfan]

This is really something that should have been built into the SL viewer a long time ago. There's just so many avatar shapes and sizes to cater poses for and this tool is so useful.

There are tools on the marketplace but they will be limited in what they can do unless LL adds more capabilities. The only benefit for having those MP poser tools is so other people can see how you're posed as well as pose your avatar for you.

It's just more intuitive to see how the avatar looks when posed within SL as opposed to rigging it in a 3D app and then importing it to verify it. In 3D app, you don't know how your clothes or hair is shaped or even how your environment looks (unless you're the creator of those items) to get the right posture and it becomes a trial and error process. That's just unproductive.

Here's hoping server-side support comes through so I can share poses and maybe even give others temp permissions to pose me as well.

[Clara Seller]

This is really amazing, exciting, uplifting, and relevant to a popular use of SL these days.

Niran certainly deserves Patreon support, but I hope his work is justly compensated if it's adapted into the main. I'd say any development that actually works is worth a lot more than what developers were paid for such jewels as non-terraforming terrain.

[9xmovies]

Pretty blog, so many ideas in a single site, thanks for the informative article, keep updating more article.