Making Avatars Look Good in Black Dragon! Share Your Hints and Advice!

[NiranV Dean]

6 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Eyes bugging out?

Catznip viewer:

Dragon Viewer:

As my head moves and eyes blink - one or both eyes will poke through.

 

If I log in using Catznip and use an alt to log into Black Dragon - then watch myself - this does NOT happen. It only seems to happen to the avatar actually logged in through Black Dragon.

If I login with Black Dragon and use Catznip on the alt. The alt watching me doesn't see this - but I see it on Black Dragon. Putting viewers side by side:

Something in BD I suppose lets me set a lower detail?

Checking debug... 'rendervolumeLOD' reports 2 for both of these. I manually set it to 2.5 and to 4 and no change.

Old issue.

I am unsure which of these is exactly causing this but here are the reasons:

Black Dragon does not have the ability to hide lookats, at all. This would explain why you can only see this behavior when logged in with BD.

Black Dragon does not have a feature to disable random eye movement (e.g making eyes static), you can however limit and completely turn off your eyes (and head) following your onscreen mouse movement. This is what you are seeing here, your avatar tracks your mouse. In BD this is by default enabled as much as it is in the Linden Viewer. All other TPV's i presume either disable eye movement or eye tracking to some degree.

Most humans disable eye tracking and random eye movement (either in-Viewer or via HUD) to prevent the eyes from clipping outside because the creators are simply bad and don't know how to make eyes that work and are centered on 0 0 0 on the eye bones, lately some furry creators seem to devolve to humans too (PAWS i heard was one example) doing the same stupid thing.

What you are seeing here is basically just another f***up of content creators being surfaced by my Viewer because i don't attempt to fix the stupidness content creators poop all over the place.

Good content creators know how to place or rig eyes to work properly with the (btw) basic animations SL gives us.

Edited February 28, 2020 by NiranV Dean

[Pussycat Catnap]

33 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

Black Dragon does not have a feature to disable random eye movement (e.g making eyes static), you can however limit and completely turn off your eyes (and head) following your onscreen mouse movement.

Most humans disable eye tracking and random eye movement (either in-Viewer or via HUD) to prevent the eyes from clipping outside because the creators are simply bad and don't know how to make eyes that work and are centered on 0 0 0 on the eye bones, lately some furry creators seem to devolve to humans too (PAWS i heard was one example) doing the same stupid thing.

Yes I believe it was the "Eyes [degree] Limit" setting that fixed this for me. Looking at the screenshots I made you can even see my eyes have moved. Oddly... before making the change to Eyes Limit if I swish my mouse all over the screen the eyes are NOT following my mouse... But I can create and fix this eye-bugging by simply sliding the "Eyes Limit" slider up and down.

Using a Catwa brand head, edited it and it was at 0,0,0 for the eyes. Catwa is one of those heads with it's own eye animations... now I know why...

Am curious now to log in with the Linden Viewer to compare.

[NiranV Dean]

20 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Yes I believe it was the "Eyes [degree] Limit" setting that fixed this for me. Looking at the screenshots I made you can even see my eyes have moved. Oddly... before making the change to Eyes Limit if I swish my mouse all over the screen the eyes are NOT following my mouse... But I can create and fix this eye-bugging by simply sliding the "Eyes Limit" slider up and down.

Using a Catwa brand head, edited it and it was at 0,0,0 for the eyes. Catwa is one of those heads with it's own eye animations... now I know why...

Am curious now to log in with the Linden Viewer to compare.

Well in addition to being centered on 0 0 0 they also need to be perfectly spherical otherwise if they are oval or any other shape they will obviously not perfectly rotate on their own axis (they do but their outer shell will wobble around).

And yes thats the reason some of them use custom animations or disable them completely. Welcome to Second Life.

Edited February 28, 2020 by NiranV Dean

[Pussycat Catnap]

On 2/6/2020 at 8:24 AM, NiranV Dean said:

1) Shame shame shame on me that i did not include this into the "UI Secrets" post.

For anyone interested:

Go here:

Go there:

Double click ANY attachment (no matter if it is yours or someone elses), it will highlight the object like this

Have edit open or open it (via Ctrl + 3 for instance) without deselecting and you now have your thingy selected.

Ah uh. Ouch. That's not what i said and neither would that be a good TL:DR and what i'm going to say now.

So.

Given that, how do I edit an offscreen or invisible HUD?

It seems like, to do this, I would have to wear another HUD... edit that one, use the mouse scroll wheel to see beyond the window pane, and then try to pick my offscreen HUD.

[NiranV Dean]

25 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

So.

Given that, how do I edit an offscreen or invisible HUD?

It seems like, to do this, I would have to wear another HUD... edit that one, use the mouse scroll wheel to see beyond the window pane, and then try to pick my offscreen HUD.

Pretty much, HUDs were not included in the complexity window on purpose as their complexity doesn't really matter that much to everyone else but on hindsight it would probably be a good idea to include those as well to see texture memory usage.

Edited February 29, 2020 by NiranV Dean

[Pussycat Catnap]

... NVM: this was was a server issue ...

 

Edited February 29, 2020 by Pussycat Catnap

[Pussycat Catnap]

I believe I've dramatically misconfigured something in BD.

When I go into BD, my avatar is usually the very last thing to have it's textures download. Even if I set camera distance down to 8, and even if I'm holding part of my avatar in 'edit' - it will load last of all things visible.

But I have noticed in testing this something that might give a clue to what I did and can't find: if I have a larger camera distance - like 48, enough to 'see outside somewhat' and in Linden Homes often to the walls of a neighbor - the first things to rez in will be the furthest things out, and it seems to go in order from there, but this is slightly a guess as I have not managed to test it deeply yet.

 

 

[NiranV Dean]

3 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

I believe I've dramatically misconfigured something in BD.

When I go into BD, my avatar is usually the very last thing to have it's textures download. Even if I set camera distance down to 8, and even if I'm holding part of my avatar in 'edit' - it will load last of all things visible.

But I have noticed in testing this something that might give a clue to what I did and can't find: if I have a larger camera distance - like 48, enough to 'see outside somewhat' and in Linden Homes often to the walls of a neighbor - the first things to rez in will be the furthest things out, and it seems to go in order from there, but this is slightly a guess as I have not managed to test it deeply yet.

I'm not aware of the possibility to configure this in any way.

It's either A: how the interest list gives the Viewer everything it needs or B: Just how the Viewer rezzes stuff.

But as far as i can tell from the memeworthy joke that has been SL rezzing in the past decade i'd assume that loading everything you want to see (including your own avatar) last is completely normal, you always get to see the stuff you don't want to see first, like that guys giant dickeridoo that's going to start doing the helicopter any second now and propels him upwards into the sky, meanwhile your own dickeridoo is being scattered around like a jigsaw puzzle, some of them hidden inside other people, just the 60 second timer is missing.

Edited March 2, 2020 by NiranV Dean

[Pussycat Catnap]

Is this new, I don't remember it always being there, or is it something I somehow managed to turn on:

 

Local chat, hours of this:

Apparently this has happened to people before Dragon Viewer's time:

 

Edited March 20, 2020 by Pussycat Catnap

[Pussycat Catnap]

Time to edit last post has passed, so... issue solved. Niran answered it in the topic linked above.

 

Now, I have a feature request:

It's be really nice if in this initial view, 'Rear View' could be present.

I get that it and the other views are all present a second time if you scroll down - but the panel always opens to this view, so the scroll down is just added work.

It seems like the most common options to use would be front and rear - so they should be super easy / fast to get to.

 

[NiranV Dean]

2 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Time to edit last post has passed, so... issue solved. Niran answered it in the topic linked above.

 

Now, I have a feature request:

It's be really nice if in this initial view, 'Rear View' could be present.

I get that it and the other views are all present a second time if you scroll down - but the panel always opens to this view, so the scroll down is just added work.

It seems like the most common options to use would be front and rear - so they should be super easy / fast to get to.

 

This is just the order how presets are loaded, they are loaded alphabetically which puts Rear View near the end. The only fix without doing a lot of unnecessary extra work and making loading these more complex than necessary is renaming the presets but... then people will look for Rear View and will not find it...

Loading is completely dynamic (and it has to otherwise new ones wouldn't appear) so i have little control over what gets where unless i manually intervene which requires stupid workarounds and/or unnecessary code that just bloats a simple list load. I'm already doing this in the Poser (to put group titles inbetween bone groups, i was lucky they are grouped together in the avatar_skeleton.xml like that otherwise that wouldn't have worked at all)

I don't see why scrolling would be a problem, its not like you constantly change your camera preset and even if you did, its not like saving a bit scrolling rectifies implementing a fixed loading order

Edited March 21, 2020 by NiranV Dean