Poser Pro

[Georgeanna Abson]

Ive wanted to do something like that, I use AnyPose a lot for tweaking poses and it would be nice to have something like that natively. I'm not a fan of the slider setup that Niran uses though. That's not a criticism of the UI per se, more that I don't think it is a very intuitive solution. Niran contributed it to the Lab, but they have managed to swallow it into their blackhole for at least 3 years now, perhaps more. If they were to pick that up then we'd automatically acquire it.

I did try taking another approach and I asked the Lab for access to the legacy ragdoll code (from the 2009-ish avatar puppeteering project) but the request was denied. What we really need is a click and drag type pose control. There was a commit made to the LL git repo a few months ago that looked like someone was perhaps playing around with the code that I had asked for 12 months earlier, it might not be related to a poser function, we have heard vague references to "avatar expression" cited by the Lindens a few times now, so perhaps they have something up their sleeves?

Thank you for your response, Beq. I think more people would be interested in a poser than would care for "avatar expression". It's probably the only reason I'm even considering downloading BD again. Hopefully, those references to expression WILL include a poser. Keeping my fingers crossed! ??

There was a commit made to the LL git repo a few months ago that looked like someone was perhaps playing around with the code that I had asked for 12 months earlier, it might not be related to a poser function, we have heard vague references to "avatar expression" cited by the Lindens a few times now, so perhaps they have something up their sleeves?

Indeed, that was the most explicit, but with little further context. One of the limitations of posing and animation in SL today is that short of sending an animation to everyone and telling their viewer "Wulfie is now playing animation X" we have no way to explicitly describe skeletal movements. Consider the inworld posers (AnyPose being probably the best known), they effectively work by playing lots of small animation files depending on the various states you click through. A brilliant example of the ingenuity of Second Life creators/coders but far from how you'd ideally want things to work.

If we do get these new interaction tools then they would (one would hope and pray) come with a new "API" to stream those updates in a more efficient manner, this would truly open the doors for better AO and posing tools. There has been no concrete news of this shared with the TPVs or through the Content Creator User Group. I do hope that the Lab don't try to present such a potentially powerful new tool before consulting the users and tells us it's too late to change things or incorporate our ideas once they do. We've seen them do this in the past and it inevitably tarnishes what should be a great opportunity.

Poser only has one purpose, static pose creation. Creating a viewer UI and sending updates to all agents in FoV and vice versa might sound nice, but it is a lot of work to only satisfy one niche use case.

If we had procedural animation creation capability by script, similar to how we can construct keyframe motion protocols for objects by script, there would be many use cases that could be created and benefit from it, including posers of various scripted interface. Yes, a viewer based, limb dragging method would still yield the highest workflow.

I do hope that the Lab don't try to present such a potentially powerful new tool before consulting the users and tells us it's too late to change things or incorporate our ideas once they do. We've seen them do this in the past and it inevitably tarnishes what should be a great opportunity.

We still are only made aware of how features work when they are dropped in our lap in rough draft form with no acceptance of suggestions/changes unless there are security concerns which have happened many times in the last few years with surprise features that had no input from the community until the last second when they already were slated to go out with a server release.

The moment you add the ability to tweak someone else's avatar, you open a whole can of super abuse worms ........ which now you're thinking about it, only requires a little extra creativity even if the feature was limited to only your own avatar.

I routinely use AnyPose to pose multiple avatars (Snugs and me) together. All avatars (up to ten) have to sit on their respective pose stands, so it's fairly abuse proof. It's also handy and a great deal of fun.

Guessing this isn't a huge problem or we'd have heard something about it already since a lot of people use BD for taking pics. You can already use an animation locally in FS and the LL viewer so it's not something new.

The result is a compromising view seen only by me. I don't think this can be done by playing an animation locally, because there's no way to dynamically offset the avatar from their base position. The existing avatar movement controls are very crude, and the collision envelope is likely to interfere. Any attempt to move your local only avatar pose into position will be apparent to everyone else. If posing and positioning can be done entirely covertly, there's your vector for abuse.

I'm not a fan of the slider setup that Niran uses though. That's not a criticism of the UI per se, more that I don't think it is a very intuitive solution. Niran contributed it to the Lab, but they have managed to swallow it into their blackhole for at least 3 years now, perhaps more. If they were to pick that up then we'd automatically acquire it.

I'm not a fan of the slider controls either but i'd have made bones editable via the Build/Edit tools already if I knew how. I'm still thinking of and exploring alternative ways of adding better or at least faster (or more precise) controls for the Poser. If it was that easy it would have been done 2 years ago already. It was a major pain to even get the slider controls where they are now.

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