How does your avatar look today ?

[Zeta Vandyke]

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Another BD experiment -- and again, an almost straight-up shot from the viewer (I made an almost imperceptible adjustment to brightness and contrast).

I'm really kinda flummoxed by this viewer. Sometimes it just doesn't seem to work well for me -- like in my home sim, where textures load terribly slowly. And then, I'll go to a place where I expect it to perform terribly, crank up all the sliders . . . and it works without a hitch.

Weird.

Edited January 23, 2020 by Scylla Rhiadra

[LexxiXhan]

51 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I'm really kinda flummoxed by this viewer. Sometimes it just doesn't seem to work well for me -- like in my home sim, where textures load terribly slowly. And then, I'll go to a place where I expect it to perform terribly, crank up all the sliders . . . and it works without a hitch.

No.Expect

[Angelina String]

I am now so cool that I wear shades in the rain! I also brought the big knife

[SunnySunnyson]

[TatianaNikolay]

If I workout, might as well be comfy! Lol. 

 

[Stela Foxtrot]

Here's what i look like

[Cristiano Midnight]

[NiranV Dean]

3 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Another BD experiment -- and again, an almost straight-up shot from the viewer (I made an almost imperceptible adjustment to brightness and contrast).

I'm really kinda flummoxed by this viewer. Sometimes it just doesn't seem to work well for me -- like in my home sim, where textures load terribly slowly. And then, I'll go to a place where I expect it to perform terribly, crank up all the sliders . . . and it works without a hitch.

Weird.

Not weird at all, your expectations are simply wrong.

Other Viewers (with the exception of the LL Viewer which BD is based on) spoiled you. While generally Firestorm for instance is the slowest out of all Viewers, they have done a lot to hide all the ugliness of SL under a rug never for you to see again, this includes crashfixes, clientside optimizations for missing content optimization, hacks to prevent bad things and so on. I don't remember ever touching anything to "fancy up" missing content optimization, if your place is bad, BD will run bad and BD won't ignore any of it.

Many things in SL give a false impression of what is good and what isn't in Second Life. Linden Labs plays a big part in that too, their avatar complexity system in its current form (and their upcoming revamp) is simply bad, outright trash and doesn't even try to show you bad content at all, i can even guarantee you that a perfectly low poly, low memory avatar with less everything, proper UV mapping and no hacks whatsoever is portrayed equally or worse than your typical 2 million polygon 400mb texture memory lag machines. I had to take a lot of flak (and i still am) for changing the complexity calculation (theres still this big notification hanging on LL's Third Party Viewer page informing everyone that something is off with my complexity calculation) but i do believe that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself and someone needs to go ahead with an example how complexity should act. Complexity is such a icky topic that LL has specifically written into code that no one shall touch the complexity code, which i wholeheartedly ignored for the sake of doing it better. If you check complexity in BD you'll notice that most of your avatars (yourself and everyone around you) are incredibly unoptimized, the Viewer even gives you a rundown why and looking at the numbers you will quickly notice that all the avatars you have previously thought were good are actually the worst and some of the avatars you may have been derendering this whole time are actually not that bad at all. I think that after over a year of having this changed complexity in the wild and both from user and my own experience i can tell that my complexity calculation is a vast improvement over the original system (although its numbers are huge and thus harder to read but make up for that with much more accurate numbers) it does what its intended to do and what the user would expect using it, isolating users with big impact and jellydolling them reducing their impact to a minimum.

There's probably more i'm not thinking of right now but generally you can toggle Wireframe mode and/or texture console and look around, generally things that look bad with high numbers of anything can be assume are bad but of course every Viewer will react a bit differently as well as every hardware configuration will be impacted differently by the many factors that make up our client performance. Just try it, run around with Wireframe (Ctrl + Shift + R) and the texture console (Ctrl + Shift + 3) open and you might things that will spoil your perception of "good" forever.

 

Digging out some old pictures for the sake of this thread.

[Saravendi]

Totally bored with this film... thank God they allow smoking in the theater!

Edited January 24, 2020 by Saravendi

[Angelina String]

...and then we went dancing

And I have now become soo cool that I wear shades indoors, even at the cinema... Lost the big knife though!

Edited January 24, 2020 by Angelina String

[Nalates Urriah]

On 1/21/2020 at 10:27 PM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Ok, this is a first experiment (using Gabby) with Black Dragon. This is cropped and resized for the forum, but otherwise entirely unedited. I used the poser a bit too.

I'm getting some texture thrashing, and one place I went the textures just wouldn't load at all, which I am assuming means I need to bump up the cache.

Overall -- wow.

There are some things you can do to reduce Texture Thrashing. A viewer restart is often all you need.

Also, remove all the HUD's. Some HUDs use a huge amount of texture memory.

In Firestorm turn off the images in chat. I don't remember if FS has fixed it, but those tiny images require the full profile image be downloaded. As these images appear in the User Interface part of the viewer it holds onto them forever, which is why a restart helps as it discards all those not currently needed.

On 1/22/2020 at 7:26 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Thanks, Niran. [...snip...]

Also, I need to work out how to import some Windlight settings . . .

Windlight settings are XML files (fancy text files with a serious structure). They can be copied and moved around just like any file.

The only tricky part is finding where your viewer stores the files. You might find the location searching for CalWL.XML. My FS-64 puts them in C:\Program Files\Firestorm-Releasex64\app_settings\windlight\skies   Black Dragon uses the same folder with a name change in the path.

Close the viewer before adding or removing files.

3 hours ago, Angelina String said:

I am now so cool that I wear shades in the rain! I also brought the big knife

Well... that's one way to get a date to open up...

This is one of my PS play time images. I am not that happy with it. The muzzle flash just wasn't coming out as I wanted.

I used 3 images taken with BD. It is nice being able to use the machinima sidebar to make quick lighting changes, world lights on and off and my attached projector lights on and off. The POSER was my main reason for using BD. I really like it.

The Lab is supposedly working on including the poser in the Linden viewer. If they do, that means all the viewers will have them. What I hope is they add a way to send the pose into SL so other viewers can see it.

[ElettraZorzi]

[Seicher Rae]

Day 2, Black Dragon: In which I finally got the keybinding to work and can now navigate my avatar. In which I learned F1 is your friend. In which I'm still looking for an AO slot so I don't have to dig out an AO hud so I don't duck walk. In which I learned to upload some cloud textures. Raw screenshots:

[NewLuden]

Told ya so~

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Not weird at all, your expectations are simply wrong.

Thanks Niran! Lots of useful and interesting info here.

Yeah, "weird" was with reference to the experience of having my expectations turned upside down, as opposed to the viewer itself: I'm sure it's entirely logical that it should behave the way it does.

What's sort of clear, and reinforced a bit by what you say above, is that, despite some obvious similarities and shared attributes, BD and FS are really pretty unalike in many ways. I am so used to using Firestorm that I can pretty much gauge how well it will perform just by looking at a place. BD has been turning those expectations upside down, and performing really quite well in places that FS would not. And this is a very good thing: I like it for pics, and am looking forward to getting better at using it and all of its features.

2 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

There are some things you can do to reduce Texture Thrashing. A viewer restart is often all you need.

Also, remove all the HUD's. Some HUDs use a huge amount of texture memory.

Thanks, Nalates!

Yes, on the restart: it does seem to help, particularly if I've been traveling around. It's something I may start doing out of course when I'm about to take a pic in a place where I'm experiencing thrashing. And yes also to the HUDs: I leave too many of these on anyway. I routinely have at least two, and maybe three, that I very seldom actually use in the course of a normal photo session.

2 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

In Firestorm turn off the images in chat. I don't remember if FS has fixed it, but those tiny images require the full profile image be downloaded. As these images appear in the User Interface part of the viewer it holds onto them forever, which is why a restart helps as it discards all those not currently needed.

This I did not know. Ok, done!

2 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Windlight settings are XML files (fancy text files with a serious structure). They can be copied and moved around just like any file.

The only tricky part is finding where your viewer stores the files. You might find the location searching for CalWL.XML. My FS-64 puts them in C:\Program Files\Firestorm-Releasex64\app_settings\windlight\skies   Black Dragon uses the same folder with a name change in the path.

This is useful, thanks! Actually, XML is one of the relatively few forms of code that I am reasonably comfortable with (for reasons don't ask), so that should be pretty easy to manage! Yay!

I should also note that Taya @Angelina String has sent me her keybinding files (also XML) and some other useful hints: this is all coming together very nicely! Thanks for everyone's help!

[MoiraKathleen]

[NiranV Dean]

3 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

There are some things you can do to reduce Texture Thrashing. A viewer restart is often all you need.

Also, remove all the HUD's. Some HUDs use a huge amount of texture memory.

In Firestorm turn off the images in chat. I don't remember if FS has fixed it, but those tiny images require the full profile image be downloaded. As these images appear in the User Interface part of the viewer it holds onto them forever, which is why a restart helps as it discards all those not currently needed.

Windlight settings are XML files (fancy text files with a serious structure). They can be copied and moved around just like any file.

The only tricky part is finding where your viewer stores the files. You might find the location searching for CalWL.XML. My FS-64 puts them in C:\Program Files\Firestorm-Releasex64\app_settings\windlight\skies   Black Dragon uses the same folder with a name change in the path.

Close the viewer before adding or removing files.

Well... that's one way to get a date to open up...

This is one of my PS play time images. I am not that happy with it. The muzzle flash just wasn't coming out as I wanted.

I used 3 images taken with BD. It is nice being able to use the machinima sidebar to make quick lighting changes, world lights on and off and my attached projector lights on and off. The POSER was my main reason for using BD. I really like it.

The Lab is supposedly working on including the poser in the Linden viewer. If they do, that means all the viewers will have them. What I hope is they add a way to send the pose into SL so other viewers can see it.

Your information is somewhat outdated, LL has fixed UI profile icons being oversized years ago, they are downsized to 32x32 / 64x64 by default and they are no longer immune to being thrown out of memory. With 32x32 / 64x64 images you are basically counting peas here unless you are running a 1/2GB card in which you will get texture thrashing no matter what. For BD specifically i'd suggest leaving automatic memory management on (enable it, if it isn't already), it should make somewhat good use of your available VRAM. 

Also BD does not need to be restarted to make new presets appear, preset lists for Windlights are refreshed on opening the windlight editors.

2 hours ago, Seicher Rae said:

Day 2, Black Dragon: In which I finally got the keybinding to work and can now navigate my avatar. In which I learned F1 is your friend. In which I'm still looking for an AO slot so I don't have to dig out an AO hud so I don't duck walk. In which I learned to upload some cloud textures. Raw screenshots:

BD doesn't have an AO and won't unless LL finally gives us the ability to call into the server-side AO features from the Viewer directly without having to use scripts.

Edited January 24, 2020 by NiranV Dean

[Saravendi]

2 hours ago, Seicher Rae said:

 

@Seicher Rae... love this shot, the mood and awesome colors. Raw? I’m wondering what the differences would be between FS and this BD photo.

[Daniel Blakewell]

 You're The One I Crave...

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/dluvsl/
Blog: https://dluvsl.wordpress.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dluvsl
Social VR: https://socialvr.me/dluvsl
Pixel VR: https://pixelvr.me/DLUVSL
Insta: https://www.instagram.com/dluvsl/

[Angelina String]

[Amanda Dallin]

2 hours ago, Seicher Rae said:

Day 2, Black Dragon: In which I finally got the keybinding to work and can now navigate my avatar. In which I learned F1 is your friend. In which I'm still looking for an AO slot so I don't have to dig out an AO hud so I don't duck walk. In which I learned to upload some cloud textures. Raw screenshots:

 

 

Niran didn't mention it himself but I will.  He has an excellent server side AO on the marketplace.  Search for NiranV Dean and you'll find it. It's fairly easy to set it up with your animations and once it's all loaded you only have to wear it when you first login then you can take it off and the animations continue to work.  Oh yeah I almost forgot.  It's free so why not give it try.

[NiranV Dean]

39 minutes ago, Saravendi said:

@Seicher Rae... love this shot, the mood and awesome colors. Raw? I’m wondering what the differences would be between FS and this BD photo.

This is of course spectacularly re-enacted but pretty much the difference:

Firestorm

Black Dragon

Just ignore the sharp shadows on the first picture, the difference from stock is essentially this, colors are much deeper, glow is wider, softer, everywhere, godrays, different SSAO, different shadow blurring.

 

I think these show the color difference a lot better:

Firestorm

Black Dragon

Once again ignore the godrays and fancy schmancy stuff all around, concentrate on the colors. This is just one major difference, Firestorm does have the Color Correction and Tone Mapping feature as well but have fun setting that up and then you'd still be missing all the other smaller improvements all around as well as the major new features like Volumetric Lighting and Screen Space Reflections.

By default SL has this... unexplainable greyish color layer, all the colors seem washed out... desaturated but in an unnatural way, the contrast seems weak and generally colors could be a lot... brighter and/or alive.

Edited January 24, 2020 by NiranV Dean

[Saravendi]

[KamikazeLenna]

good pics sl buddies

this is my current avatar now

it's just kemono with the uchi cat head from Uchi Desmoulins, and added some of my stuff into it 😃

The cool ears and tails are from Happy Paw store