Coming Soon to Black Dragon SL Viewer: Full Camera Animation Editor With Keyframing (I.E. Major Feature Machinima)

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans (Discord channel here) has an upcoming features that's ideal for YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and machinima makers: Full camera animation editor with keyframing.

"It will allow you to record, edit, delete, move camera animation keyframes," Black Dragon creator NiranV tells me. "The controls will immediately preview what you are doing as shown in the [video above]. They can also be abused to precisely control position and rotation at any time for a snapshot. Later i'll also add field of view. All if which will be animated from keyframe to keyframe."

This is designed to be far superior to the existing recording options in the official Second Life viewer -- and the biggest update to Black Dragon in awhile:

"The problem with the [official] recorder is it's FPS dependent," he explains. "If you record a smooth track and get frame drops, you'll skip keyframes and the playback will show the framedrops with bad camera movement. With a full camera editor I can circumvent that and create complete custom animation tracks. I've just recently improved many parts of the UI everywhere, fixed lots of bugs and added some nice things. It's time I do something big again."

 

So expect that soon, even within a week or two. Join BD's Discord for updates!

Comments

[jackson redstar]

wish NiranV would do a couple small things first. Like put back texture refresh. Animation sync. Hide Look At target. Fly Override. and fix the texture de-rendering/re-rendering issue

[NiranV]

@Jackson

Texture Refresh was never in the Viewer, i can't put it back. It's also rarely if ever needed, see below.

Animation Sync can be done via the Animation Manipulation window found in Dragon - My Useful Features - Animation Controls. Select all people you want to sync and reset/restart their animations, this will sync them all up.

Hide Lookat Target is a thing i do not support. There are official ways of doing it, you can find the official tweaks in the Second Life wiki if you go here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Show_Look_At

Fly override is unneeded as you can override fly by enabling the Admin mode. Preferences - Viewer - Show Admin Options, then Dragon - Develop - Show Admin Menu.

Texture de-rendering/re-rendering is called texture trashing, it is a widely known issue and is infact not an issue but a feature. The Viewer drops textures out of memory because your video card memory is full otherwise your framerate would drop massively. I have already done everything necessary to allow more texture memory to be usable, you can (if your GPU has so much memory) set texture and scene memory higher, up to 8gb total, that is far more than any other Viewer and prevents the texture trashing issue. It's not a fix but it's a "throw more hardware at it" workaround. If you want a real fix, tell the texture creators to use smaller textures where possible and don't use giant textures on tiny items.

[Anonymous]

I would try to use this viewer but by the time I finished one hour in the viewer, I had 8 hours of pain in my hands from gripping the mouse and using all the keystrokes just to move. It would be nice if it was more user friendly...i.e. easier to move and so on...yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, your viewer, your way. Sorry, not sorry, but it's not user friendly at all. It's hard to move in and yes, the textures is shit. Most mesh doesn't rezz in it. Most textures remain blurry and there's no way to "refresh" it in the viewer that I could find.

Firestorm on the other hand is 1. User friendly and easy to move around in. You can set your settings in Phototools easily and don't have to deal with a complicated interface and set up. They took the time to consider their userbase before they released it to the public. 2. Textures rezz like they should. 3. It's not hard on the computer resources and finally, isn't as laggy. In the end, you basically need a powerhouse of a computer to handle the Black Dragon viewer, which about 90% of the population of SL doesn't have. I think I'll stick with Firestorm. Maybe if it was easier to use and you could move around in it easier, I would have an easier time figuring out this viewer but as of now, no.

[NiranV]

@Anonymous

Nice try but nothing of what you say holds any value. You throw in user error cases, explain them in the most generic and uninformative way and sell them as my fault.

First and foremost, if you happen to have 8 hours of pain in your hands from simply gripping the mouse and hitting keys on your keyboard, the very thing they were made for then maybe you should see a doctor, this is hardly a Viewer issue.

Secondly and more importantly you make it sound like any of this is my issue, i don't know about you but across all Viewers i can use the mouse and keyboard both to look around and to move around the same way and if for some reason i was not able to do so i could still open the camera controls and move/look with the onscreen controls, again just like in any Viewer. This is 100% Viewer independent, is nothing new and has been like this since basically forever.

Thirdly, user friendliness. I think i waste enough time into the UI to make it user friendly, starting from the very design to make it usable, to all kinds of quality of life features and little bits and bobs such as writing extensive tooltips for each and every option in preferences. If what you said was even remotely true you wouldn't have any of this, there would be no tips, no icons, no help, everything would be labeled non-informative, the movement controls wouldn't exist at all (since you can bind them yourself), no camera presets except one basic one would exist (because once again you can create them yourself), i wouldn't even think that keybinding was a thing since that is userfriendly too, you know, allowing each and every user to customize the controls the way they need them (for different keyboards as example). The only reason my updates take longer than i'd like to is because i take the time to consider the users. This very NWN post here shows a feature that i'm currently working on and struggling to get out because of the user friendliness. Creating an interface that allows both super advanced controls over an extremely complex and deep system is one thing, making it easy to understand and simple to use is a whole different world. Just because you are too ignorant and stupid to be open enough for new things and not act like a complete moron when you see something slightly different doesn't make an entire application not user friendly.

Further, you come here and spew your random bullshit about your problems but it is obvious that you have made no attempts to find the underlying issue. There are thousands of users using my Viewer who are happy and can see mesh fine, it could be YOU who is the problem, maybe you are running an outdated version, maybe you're running a bad GPU driver, maybe your GPU or CPU is simply trash, maybe another application is hammering your hard drive, maybe you put your cache into the same folder as Firestorm in expectations to improve performance or save space, maybe you've copied Firestorm settings over, maybe you did something other incredibly stupid and are now trying to make it my problem. Second Life is a complex system. Sometimes it works for weeks better than it did ever before and then there's a day it just doesn't work, shit doesn't load fast enough, disconnects, random crashes. A good example is your "most textures stay blurry and there is no way to refresh". This one single sentence alone tells me that you have simply no idea what you are talking about and have completely wrong expectations. "Texture Refresh" does not fix textures staying blurry. Textures stay blurry because your texture memory is full, how about you CHANGE the texture memory settings, ah i forgot, you expected the Viewer to do this automatically for you... oh wait... it does already! To take the math off the user and don't bug him with texture memory stuff i added a feature that is enabled by default which automatically increases/decreases the texture memory settings to allow the Viewer to take whatever it needs while at the same time never taking more than it must, that is given you have enough texture memory to give. So once again you are either on an outdated version that doesn't have this feature or your GPU is simply not capable handling as much textures as required by the scene you are currently looking at. Refresh wouldn't help here as explained in my previous answer to Jackson, refresh just reloads the texture which would just get trashed again when the next texture cleanup cycle comes due to low texture memory.

Lastly, Firestorm is not 1. User Friendly, its simply a dumbed down interface made specifically for people who need help finding the way to the bathroom. The way they word their tooltips, the way they label their options, the way crucial settings are named. It's made so even total retards at least have a general idea what they are doing, that's not user friendly, that's lowering everything to the lowest common denominator, which is the intellect of each and every individual person. Firestorm is not lighter on your hardware either, it's a massive memory hog in comparison to any other Viewer, besides how "hard" it is on hardware solely depends on your settings. If you turn on shadows and set 512m draw distance and expect anything usable then once again that is your own issue.

Also a note: In my Viewer you can always find me at the very top of your friend list, guess what that could be used for? Right, you can ask me if you need help, i suppose you didn't figure that one out either.

Some people.

[Nah]

You don't take criticism very well.

[raphael kutenai]

Niran, don't listen to them. I can tell that you put time into the interface, especially with the tool tips. These people couldn't even script in java, let alone what you do. ALL I had to do was change some settings and get used to the different layout of the buttons which is all customizable anyway. Who doesn't use the keyboard and mouse to move and look around? What did Mr. AnOnYmOuS use to interface with whatever viewer he was using?

[Robert Lombardo]

Hi,
In Firestorm you can clear the screen of all UI by using CTRL/ALT/F1 and SHIFT/ALT/H .... can someone tell me how this is done in Black Dragon

[laroxa]

Why don't you support "hide lookat"? You tealize that the link you provided to the official instruction explains how to hide other people's "lookats", but others still will be able to see yours? It's a shame Black Dragon doesn't support it. Other than that it's an amazing viewer, but I'll stick to Firestorm then.

[Anonymous2021]

Just agreeing with Laroxa. I had just installed Black Dragon and discovered that the line in the FAQ about "How to hide my Lookat" was nonsense, I don't need to know how to show mine (when it was hidden by default), I want a way to prevent others from seeing it.
How can you hope to compete with Firestorm when you won't offer basic features? I'm annoyed that I might have to go back to it now, because Black Dragon offers a lot of other wonderful features I do like.