Why Black Dragon's In-Viewer Poser is Better Than Any HUD for Taking SL Avatar Photos

This is a fun livestream of beloved SL YouTuber Cassie posing her avatar through Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following for its high end graphics features. Among those features is what Cassie is showing here -- an ability to pose and photograph your avatar with an extremely high degree of complexity. The end result is only viewable (and photographable) by the end user, but seeing as most SL fashion shoots are already a solo avatar affair, that's a minor consideration. (It can also be used for couple poses if you launch it in a couple animation -- though again, only viewable/photographable by the individual user.)

Black Dragon creator NiranV tells me his poser enables adjustments over 300 avatar points with 1000 adjustment options each. His motivation for creating such a complex viewer-only poser? As he puts it to me in his usual blunt way:

"Get rid of people selling shitty, overpriced HUDs to people to pose themselves."

And then explains what he means by that:

"HUDs use animations. They are limited by how many animations you can squeeze into the HUD, or how much money you are willing to pay for uploading tiny-change animations. Let's say 300 animations that move the upper arm 1 degree up. You stack them 1 degree, another degree, another degree [etc]. or you internally count how much degrees you want and play animation with X amount degrees so you are basically limited by how many animations you have. Totally unnecessary
and bloaty. But the only way to do it [in SL].

"The [Black Dragon] poser because it's a UI feature doesn't need this. It can simply rotate any of the over 300 available bones in any direction at a precision of 0.001 steps. Meaning there are 1000 rotation steps possible before you do a whole rotation. That alone is three times more accurate."

Above is an old but still relevant demo of the posing feature. But the proof of the pose is in the screenshot pudding, and so here's what Cassie made through Black Dragon:

Many more of Cassie's BlackDragon-made pics here.

Hat tip: Casja!

Comments

[Amanda Magick]

I am going to play with Black Dragon now that I am a new windows user. :)

[Cassie Middles]

I honestly an so nooby still with the viewer but it is absolutely amazing. I can't wait to learn more about it and it definitely converted me to using bd for every photo, including vlogs when i can handle them.
I feel like its a learning curve just like how firestorm was for for people always using sl viewer. It takes time and patience to figure out , but the owner covers so so so much in their blogs too. I'm beyond impressed. Thank you for featuring me , and then thank you Niran for putting so much time and effort into something so well done.

[vwfan]

I love the detailed control of the Poser in Black Dragon. If all you care about is seeing yourself, you're game then. If you wanna do animations, it has that, too. Animesh? Check. But, where it falls short is group related stuff. It needs:

- The abilitiy for your pose to be seen by others
- A way to pose other people via permissions system

Both of these features can already be accomplished in SL with the HUDs. So, surely there must be some way to accomplish both without it becoming bloaty. Let's remember that SL was built on community and creative collaboration from its early days. Why not build those ideas into the tools? Linden Lab?

On a side note, there seems to be a matter where if you create a pose on one shape, stop your pose, load an entirely different shape and load previously made pose, your shape will be altered to the previous shape. You can only get your newly loaded shape back by stopping the pose and doing a Reset Skeleton and Animations. Is there a way to load a pose (rotations only) without affecting the shape?

[NiranV]

The ability for your pose to be seen by others. Not possible thanks to LL denying me the needed server sync, i dont know of any way to synchronize this between servers.

A way to pose other people via permissions system. Not allowed. LL clearly said i am not allowed to enable posing others, regardless of permissions (which i suggested). Their reason for this is other people not being able to see them being posed could be abused which... is because LL denies me server side sync, see first part.

Neither of these features were not implemented due to being bloaty, in fact my local build allows posing others... but Linden Labs.

Good thing you remind me, i was going to add a way to load rotations, position and/or scales seperately. Will most likely be in the next update.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

vwfan: The poser DID have those capabilites initially. The poser technically is capable of doing those things, since it is capable of not differentiating between animeshes, your avatar, and other avatars. The reason the Black Dragon Viewer doesn't fully push that envelope is a policy reason, not a technical reason. It may be something the viewer needs, but it is not something the viewer will be allowed to have.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

NiranV: am aware of the constraints you are innovating under. Appreciate you're trying your best to get us what you and other folks would appreciate in a graphics-specced viewer. Hopefully one day those responsible for saying no to potential improvements to the viewer simply because it means a little more upfront work are replaced mentally or totally by people who are actually capable of saying yes in early-era wonderment instead of no in conservative fear.

[vwfan]

@Niran - Thanks. I appreciate you looking into the separate loading of transformations matter. In regards to the Poser capabilities, I figured it was a Lab matter, which is why I asked "Linden Lab?". Maybe (err) the Lab can work with you on this one day (err). *shrugs*

@camilia - I agree that there should be more people who are more willing to say yes to improvements. It just seems hopeless at times. :(

[KT]

What about exporting the pose as a bvh? Then you could upload it into SL

[NiranV]

@KT

An export to bvh is what Linden Labs wants instead of direct live posing "so people have at least something to share them" by doing so however they basically delayed the poser over a year now and there is no end in sight, also i'm against a BVH export, if anything i want an ANIM export and even that i'm against because discussions with LL have shown that if i added an export i'd have to gimp the poser even more by forcing it into T pose which essentially ruins the purpose of the Poser, that or i allow you to change a pose but you cannot save it at all (not even locally as XML file like it is right now unless i'd prevent export when importing XML files since there is no way to differentiate between modded and custom created poses) which is essentially worse than what we have right now.

@camilla @vwfan

I doubt its going to change, Oz has made his reasoning very clear, we are not going to get posing others unless others can see and stop you from doing it at any time. I cannot do so without server support which LL denies, essentially they are cornering me and gimping the Poser because they fear that without the ability to see and stop others from posing you, people would run rampant and abuse the Poser to make you show certain poses that could be offensive or bannable, this could potentially be abused to use the Report Abuse feature.

In short they are saying "With human's nature we can't have nice things"

----

I'm honestly thinking of giving a shit about what LL says and simply do what i think is right and enable posing others, regardless of what LL does i don't want the poser to be held back anymore and gimped because of LL's stupid fears.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

@NiranV:

Propose altering the viewer so that users can either file abuse reports alleging offensive/bannable poses, or use the Poser, but not both at the same time (i.e. if the Report Abuse panel is brought up the Poser temporarily disables all client-side posing, allowing only inworld animations to play during the screencap as collected by the Report Abuse panel, until the report is fully delivered to LL. But I would say that it would be better if this too was done on the down-low - there's no pleasing some people.)

[NiranV]

@camilia

I already brought this idea up, it was denied as well. No matter what i bring up, no matter how much locks and safety guards i put into this, LL won't allow me to pose others unless they can see it and have full control over it, including stopping you from doing so at any given time.

Even if i were to add a "request posing permission" dialog only people on Black Dragon would be able to receive it and only people on BD would be able to decline/stop it. This could be abused as "Viewer detection" feature to see who's using BD and who isn't, its something that in the past has caused a lot of drama and had to be removed and put a stop to by LL.