How does your avatar look today ?

[SlammedSam]

So .. anyone ever get seriously obsessed with a song, like repeat at least 10 times in a row obsessed?

I get that way sometimes, and it influenced the mood of the pic. Cheers?

[Toumie]

[DrayPrescott]

Just having a coffee at a nice little café at Small Town Green24. 

[Rowan Amore]

 

[ValKalAstra]

3 hours ago, SlammedSam said:

So .. anyone ever get seriously obsessed with a song, like repeat at least 10 times in a row obsessed?

I get that way sometimes, and it influenced the mood of the pic. Cheers?

All the time. They get stuck on repeat until hours later I am suddenly fed up with it

Worth it for the picture though!

[VictoriaGrwd]

[Dorientje Woller]

[Lorelie Whitfield]

[HatsuneMiku Akina]

 

[Cristiano Midnight]

satisfied

[Scylla Rhiadra]

A little less messy than has been usual of late.

But still a little messy.

Also: Fameshed is going to bankrupt me this month.

Edited April 2 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Ice Luv]

[Kathlen Onyx]

[Kathlen Onyx]

On 4/1/2024 at 5:12 AM, ValKalAstra said:

I blame @Orwar for showing me the Animation Preview in Firestorm.

I need to know how to do this!

[EmmaAsht0n]

 

[ValKalAstra]

49 minutes ago, Kathlen Onyx said:

I need to know how to do this!

Oh snap, I probably should have been more clear when I wrote that. I assume you refer to the pose? The pose was sadly made in Blender/Avastar, although I hear that Qavimator works well too but someone else could probably write more about that. Either way, I made the pose in Blender, then exported it into BVH format.

The preview allows me to essentially "demo" the pose on my end, without a need to upload it. Basically Upload -> Animation -> select BVH and you get the preview window. Set to loop, increase priority if needed and iterate away. That way I can tweak and iterate quickly, simply hitting reload in Firestorm with every change and almost getting a live preview in Firestorm. All without a need to actually upload. Saves time and money and yah, allows quick modifications.

It's a bit of pain to setup Blender but once done, having tools like inverse kinematics greatly eases the difficulty of posing. Kind of cuts my posing efforts down from hours to fiddling and playing around to 30 minutes or so. I can't say much about qavimator but I am sure others here can chime in.

Now if you were asking about the background, that's just some basic masking done in any image editing tool and using a CC0 stock image for the galaxy background. If you're lazy like me, you can use a Segment Anything AI model to automate the task of seperating the avatar from the background, so you don't have to mask things manually, or you use a flat background and let the depth picture version of your scene do the work for you.

Hope this helps, even though I feel like that wasn't quite what you hoped to hear.

(The day Firestorm gets an integrated posing tool... one can dream! And I feel like a dream it shall remain most likely).

[Sprout Evergarden]

[ValKalAstra]

4 minutes ago, Sprout Evergarden said:

Woaaah - that's a cool look!

[Cristiano Midnight]

2 hours ago, ValKalAstra said:

Oh snap, I probably should have been more clear when I wrote that. I assume you refer to the pose? The pose was sadly made in Blender/Avastar, although I hear that Qavimator works well too but someone else could probably write more about that. Either way, I made the pose in Blender, then exported it into BVH format.

The preview allows me to essentially "demo" the pose on my end, without a need to upload it. Basically Upload -> Animation -> select BVH and you get the preview window. Set to loop, increase priority if needed and iterate away. That way I can tweak and iterate quickly, simply hitting reload in Firestorm with every change and almost getting a live preview in Firestorm. All without a need to actually upload. Saves time and money and yah, allows quick modifications.

It's a bit of pain to setup Blender but once done, having tools like inverse kinematics greatly eases the difficulty of posing. Kind of cuts my posing efforts down from hours to fiddling and playing around to 30 minutes or so. I can't say much about qavimator but I am sure others here can chime in.

Now if you were asking about the background, that's just some basic masking done in any image editing tool and using a CC0 stock image for the galaxy background. If you're lazy like me, you can use a Segment Anything AI model to automate the task of seperating the avatar from the background, so you don't have to mask things manually, or you use a flat background and let the depth picture version of your scene do the work for you.

Hope this helps, even though I feel like that wasn't quite what you hoped to hear.

(The day Firestorm gets an integrated posing tool... one can dream! And I feel like a dream it shall remain most likely).

Black Dragon has an integrated posing tool, and you can use it to create poses from scratch that can be imported back into SL as animations. No better way to iterate than using your own avatar.

[Rowan Amore]

That is my WTF face...the things you find in SL sometimes

 

[Orwar]

4 hours ago, ValKalAstra said:

I can't say much about qavimator but I am sure others here can chime in.

   Aside from that there's no option to get your avatar's individual shape, it's extremely simple to use. Particularly by 'demoing' the animation, it's easy enough to tab back and forth to adjust it until it looks right in-world. Also the bento version not being finished is too bad, the bento beta has worked fine the times I've tried it, but it also only has a male model in it and I more often find myself posing female avis. 

1 hour ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

Black Dragon has an integrated posing tool, and you can use it to create poses from scratch that can be imported back into SL as animations. No better way to iterate than using your own avatar.

   Yes, but I also immediately feel like gauging my own eyes out when I see the UI. Switching from FS to BDW is almost as bad as switching from FS to Blender. 

   I think it's a huge miss on LL's part that they haven't given us more in-world creation tools over the years, and that their efforts to tell people what third party software works for making SL assets are pretty minimal. Animating your avi through the viewer and uploading poses/animations directly should have been a thing 16 years ago, at least.

[Cristiano Midnight]

22 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   Aside from that there's no option to get your avatar's individual shape, it's extremely simple to use. Particularly by 'demoing' the animation, it's easy enough to tab back and forth to adjust it until it looks right in-world. Also the bento version not being finished is too bad, the bento beta has worked fine the times I've tried it, but it also only has a male model in it and I more often find myself posing female avis. 

   Yes, but I also immediately feel like gauging my own eyes out when I see the UI. Switching from FS to BDW is almost as bad as switching from FS to Blender. 

   I think it's a huge miss on LL's part that they haven't given us more in-world creation tools over the years, and that their efforts to tell people what third party software works for making SL assets are pretty minimal. Animating your avi through the viewer and uploading poses/animations directly should have been a thing 16 years ago, at least.

Black Dragon is not ideal as a general purpose viewer, but it is fantastic for photography. Part of that is the pose tool, which lets you precisely pose every single bone to the smallest of degrees. I use it all the time to tweak existing poses for pictures, and to make my own. Once you learn the pose tool, it is not that complicated, even if the UI is awful. It is getting a QoL update eventually, though Niran is very specific in his ways.  It is by far the most comprehensive posing tool available, and it works directly on the avatar.

I agree that LL needs to remove the restrictions that do not allow avatar bones to be scripted. In world tools like Anypose and Animare have to use ridiculous workarounds with microanimations that make them incredibly imprecise. They are good for slightly adjusting poses, but far too imprecise for real work with them.

[Orwar]

4 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

Black Dragon is not ideal as a general purpose viewer, but it is fantastic for photography. Part of that is the pose tool, which lets you precisely pose every single bone to the smallest of degrees. I use it all the time to tweak existing poses for pictures, and to make my own. Once you learn the pose tool, it is not that complicated, even if the UI is awful.

   I don't disagree at all, I think BDW has some amazing features. But the time it takes me to set up a shot in it is a lot longer than it would be for me to just throw together a pose, do a shoot in Firestorm, and run it through Gimp to tinker with it (having post-process things like noise in-viewer is nifty, but it's also a 5 second process in Gimp, so, eh, lol). 

   If I were wanting to do Machinima, however, I'd probably force myself to wrap my head around BDW. I'm curious to see what those QoL changes might bring though. 

[Cristiano Midnight]

1 hour ago, Orwar said:

   I don't disagree at all, I think BDW has some amazing features. But the time it takes me to set up a shot in it is a lot longer than it would be for me to just throw together a pose, do a shoot in Firestorm, and run it through Gimp to tinker with it (having post-process things like noise in-viewer is nifty, but it's also a 5 second process in Gimp, so, eh, lol). 

   If I were wanting to do Machinima, however, I'd probably force myself to wrap my head around BDW. I'm curious to see what those QoL changes might bring though. 

I guess I am used to it. I set up most of the shot in Firestorm, and then I switch over to BD and adjust the pose and lighting as needed. I can do it very quickly, but I know that pose editor inside and out.

[ValKalAstra]

1 hour ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

I guess I am used to it. I set up most of the shot in Firestorm, and then I switch over to BD and adjust the pose and lighting as needed. I can do it very quickly, but I know that pose editor inside and out.

Honestly, after using inverse kinematics to pose, I just can't go back anymore. But I think we're derailing the picture thread