Poser

[Rowan Amore]

Are there any plans to add a poser to Firestorm?  I'm not comfortable AT ALL with Blackdragon and am happy with every other aspect of Firestorm.  Just wondering if adding something comparable is in the works or even considered.   Shout out to @Beq Janus

Edited February 24, 2022 by Rowan Amore

[Beq Janus]

I've 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?

[Rowan Amore]

7 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

I've 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!  🤞🏾

 

[Aishagain]

Sorry to be the idiot at the feast here, but what is a "poser" and what does/would it do, please?

[Rowan Amore]

27 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

Sorry to be the idiot at the feast here, but what is a "poser" and what does/would it do, please?

It's for posing your avatar on the fly instead of using a pose and having to adjust it.  It's a built in feature of the black dragon viewer.  

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 2/24/2022 at 10:41 PM, Beq Janus said:

What we really need is a click and drag type pose control.

Wishful thinking here, but being able to edit the avatar's bones with the exact same tools we use to manipulate prims would be neat. Instead of "Edit Linked", there would be "Edit Bone".

On 2/24/2022 at 10:41 PM, Beq Janus said:

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?

Wasn't it from the 2022 roadmap? - Avatar “expressiveness” that brings camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness.

[Beq Janus]

2 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Wasn't it from the 2022 roadmap? - Avatar “expressiveness” that brings camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness.

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.

[Lucia Nightfire]

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.

We still need animation reform in general and IK support.

No one at the lab is treating animation reform with any sense or priority/urgency. It is nowhere on their roadmap.

57 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

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.

Sadly, there is a culture of glory seeking when it comes to feature implementation at LL.

Despite developers claims of engaging with the community, this still does not happen nearly enough as it should.

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.

[Coffee Pancake]

The only purpose of a poser is to tweak / set your own avatar for taking pictures. Sounds fine so far.

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.

Well 💩.

DOA

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The only purpose of a poser is to tweak / set your own avatar for taking pictures. Sounds fine so far.

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.

Well 💩.

DOA

That's all I want or need.  A poser to pose my avatar.  Simple?

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The only purpose of a poser is to tweak / set your own avatar for taking pictures. Sounds fine so far.

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.

Well 💩.

DOA

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.

[Coffee Pancake]

52 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

That's all I want or need.  A poser to pose my avatar.  Simple?

 .. till someone else uses their poser to edit themselves up close and personal. You would be none the wiser and vulnerable to a damming screenshot.

43 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

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.

Any pose is different, it's a shared experience. So everyone is fully aware of what's going on.

BD's poser is local to the person doing the edits, no one knows what's happening. Add in BD's ability to derender clothing and it's a party.

[Rowan Amore]

6 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

 .. till someone else uses their poser to edit themselves up close and personal. You would be none the wiser and vulnerable to a damming screenshot.

Any pose is different, it's a shared experience. So everyone is fully aware of what's going on.

BD's poser is local to the person doing the edits, no one knows what's happening. Add in BD's ability to derender clothing and it's a party.

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.  

[Coffee Pancake]

It's a big enough problem that Niran's poser contribution got tossed into the long grass ... probably not helped by him explicitly stated what he could get people banned for by using it.

[Rowan Amore]

33 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It's a big enough problem that Niran's poser contribution got tossed into the long grass ... probably not helped by him explicitly stated what he could get people banned for by using it.

But I can do the same thing using almost any animation.  Use in local, derender someone's clothes and take a pic.  That can't be the main reason others don't include a poser.  

I also have no idea what Niran said but to me, the reason you gave previously just doesn't cut it for me when the ability already exists in FS and LL viewers.

[Madelaine McMasters]

I came late to the thread and should have read the entire thing. If I understand Coffee correctly, the scenario she envisions is...

• I approach an innovent avi I wish to compromise, and assume an innocent posture.
• I derender their clothing.
• I use a built in pose editor to do TWO things:

1. I assume a pose that, mated with the innocent avatar, shreds any semblance of innocence.
2. I mate my avatar with the victim's by using the pose editor to move my newly posed self into intimate proximity.
    

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.

Edited February 26, 2022 by Madelaine McMasters

[Mollymews]

the local view grief vector already exists in all viewers

the presence of a BD-like local poser tool doesn't change this

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Mollymews said:

the local view grief vector already exists in all viewers

the presence of a BD-like local poser tool doesn't change this

It does when LL treat the screenshot included with abuse reports as sacrosanct.

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

5 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

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.

You can locally offset avatars with basic Edit Tools in the current version of Firestorm / LL viewer. There's a debug setting to "Allow Select Avatar."

[Ardy Lay]

Just now, Wulfie Reanimator said:

You can locally offset avatars with basic Edit Tools in the current version of Firestorm / LL viewer. There's a debug setting to "Allow Select Avatar."

I have wondered why that is in there.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 minute ago, Ardy Lay said:

I have wondered why that is in there.

Now we know. 😎

[Madelaine McMasters]

10 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

You can locally offset avatars with basic Edit Tools in the current version of Firestorm / LL viewer. There's a debug setting to "Allow Select Avatar."

Yeah, while making dinner, I remembered using that ability, but can't remember why. I'm nefarious, so I must have been up to no good.

Edited February 27, 2022 by Madelaine McMasters

[NiranV Dean]

On 2/24/2022 at 9:41 PM, Beq Janus said:

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?

On 2/26/2022 at 12:34 AM, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Wishful thinking here, but being able to edit the avatar's bones with the exact same tools we use to manipulate prims would be neat. Instead of "Edit Linked", there would be "Edit Bone".

Wasn't it from the 2022 roadmap? - Avatar “expressiveness” that brings camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness.

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.

On 2/26/2022 at 5:08 AM, Lucia Nightfire said:

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.

We still need animation reform in general and IK support.

No one at the lab is treating animation reform with any sense or priority/urgency. It is nowhere on their roadmap.

Sadly, there is a culture of glory seeking when it comes to feature implementation at LL.

Despite developers claims of engaging with the community, this still does not happen nearly enough as it should.

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.

On 2/26/2022 at 5:42 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

The only purpose of a poser is to tweak / set your own avatar for taking pictures. Sounds fine so far.

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.

Well 💩.

DOA

The original purpose of the Poser as its name implies is tweaking poses, this automatically includes the ability to make them from scratch (obviously), the Poser has also been extended to allow some basic animation making and with some proper key-frame editing tools can be turned into a full animation editor (already planned). The poser has much more use than just simple pose tweaking. It's required serverside functionality alone opens the doors for a lot of functionality down the road, such as synced IK (if IK ever becomes better to begin with) which could even be extended to be used for VR body controls (yes, actual VR movement could be achieved with this). We're merely scratching the surface. Being able to pose others via scripts would be a logical extension and would immediately obselete AnyPose (which was the original goal to begin with).

On 2/26/2022 at 7:52 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

It's a big enough problem that Niran's poser contribution got tossed into the long grass ... probably not helped by him explicitly stated what he could get people banned for by using it.

That is simply not entirely true. I made a very specific comment that i find it incredibly unfair of LL to judge the Poser this hard due to potential abuse when there are other features going around being nothing but abused that includes a very extreme example of being able to derender people's clothing in places they shouldn't be naked, such as around child avatars, one of the worst and probably easiest ways to get you banned. As you already implied, someone could set up a scene and create a fake abuse report that could in theory easily get you banned, especially with a hot topic such as child pornography. I'm sure a Linden wouldn't even look twice before they hit that big red button on you.

But once again everyone seems to forget the obvious here. You can create fake abuse reports? Well block abuse report while the Poser is open and/or in effect. You can't create fake reports if you can't report at all. Everyone seems to act like the only thing coming from the Poser would be abuse and then going on and on about it how bad said abuse would be and how nothing could be done about it, when there is plenty that can be done about it (all of which i've already spent a lot of time thinking about) and there are even more features elsewhere that are being abused and we can't do anything about. But hey, the Poser, the Poser, the Poser, its always the evil Poser, it always gets the shaft, over and over. The Poser is the tool of the devil and will surely do nothing but evil.

I'm sick of hearing it, I'm sick of hearing all these stupid stories about great features that could push SL forward being gimped or downright dropped because they are judged solely by what some ill-minded people could do with it. I've been hearing this for 4 years now and its tiring and my patience has simply run out, it's the same thing over and over again. If they want to cut down on abuse why don't they start killing off derender. LookAt names. LSL take controls over your balance. RLV/a.

The reason I haven't started working on the pose exporter is exactly the above mentioned bull****. LL wants me to implement an exporter but then they complain that this would open the doors for stealing poses via the Poser so their solution is gimping the Poser and putting you into T pose so you'd have to recreate the entire pose, essentially defeating the purpose of tweaking one, this will make the Poser just harder and slower to use, especially with the finicky controls.

The reason I haven't started working on the animation editor? Same goddamn reason. LL will immediately tackle me "oh no abuse abuse abuse" because people could essentially steal animations, heck they could even take an animation and edit, turn it into something else, mod permissions on animations would finally make sense.

The reason I haven't been working on any of my big plans lately? Because I'm wasting my goddamn time doing so, they will get rejected or some shortsighted uncreative individual will say something that LL doesn't like hearing, red-flagging the entire project and putting it at risk of being shelved just like everything else I've tried offering to LL so far. And I have plenty of awesome ideas aside from a full animation editor, server side posing (including VR motion, free motion, IK syncing), animation/bone remapping on upload and dynamic bones (jiggly/flexi ears, tail... anything really).

Edited February 28, 2022 by NiranV Dean

[Beq Janus]

3 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

The reason I haven't started working on the pose exporter is exactly the above mentioned bull****. LL wants me to implement an exporter but then they complain that this would open the doors for stealing poses via the Poser so their solution is gimping the Poser and putting you into T pose so you'd have to recreate the entire pose, essentially defeating the purpose of tweaking one, this will make the Poser just harder and slower to use, especially with the finicky controls.

That's a bizarre suggestion, though it underlines the typical "don't understand how users actually use SL" issue we face. The pose export restriction is not that tough a problem to crack. It is exactly the same as the solution used by @Phate Shepherdin AnyPose. The restriction is effectively enforced for lsl solutions because there is no way to "read " the current pose position. As aa result the AnyPose (and similar solutions) export a new animaiotn that you play at the same time as the pose that is being modified. this allows you to protect the original creator and support the "tweak". 

The restriction actually required to get to this would be:

store the starting animation state (A) 
change the pose (B)
save the delta between A and B 

This would then be aligned to existing capabilities.

If the creator of the poses for A was the current user then in theory you could relax that, but actually, given the complexity of animations today (heads, and hands and bodies all running various layers) it is unlikely that you'll find a case where you are running all of them. 

(Actually, that probably blows the T-Pose idea out of the water too, you'd literally have to stop all the animations in all the attachments)

Ironically, the lack of "read" from the LSL side made the problem more readily addressable to the LSL based solutions. as those problems never arose. Though IIRC, Phate used to have to a disclaimer in the notecards to tell people that there was not way to steal poses using the tool, presumably to stop the whining by people who had not investigated it.

Another advantage of the server side solutions is that they avoid all the "OMG someone might make my pixels do silly things" fears as any changes to another avatar's pose has to go through the permission system. 

@Rowan AmoreI should have asked this in the first place. What are the main advantages that you have found using the BD poser versus the HUD based posers?

[NiranV Dean]

1 hour ago, Beq Janus said:

That's a bizarre suggestion, though it underlines the typical "don't understand how users actually use SL" issue we face. The pose export restriction is not that tough a problem to crack. It is exactly the same as the solution used by @Phate Shepherdin AnyPose. The restriction is effectively enforced for lsl solutions because there is no way to "read " the current pose position. As aa result the AnyPose (and similar solutions) export a new animaiotn that you play at the same time as the pose that is being modified. this allows you to protect the original creator and support the "tweak". 

The restriction actually required to get to this would be:

store the starting animation state (A) 
change the pose (B)
save the delta between A and B 

This would then be aligned to existing capabilities.

If the creator of the poses for A was the current user then in theory you could relax that, but actually, given the complexity of animations today (heads, and hands and bodies all running various layers) it is unlikely that you'll find a case where you are running all of them. 

(Actually, that probably blows the T-Pose idea out of the water too, you'd literally have to stop all the animations in all the attachments)

Ironically, the lack of "read" from the LSL side made the problem more readily addressable to the LSL based solutions. as those problems never arose. Though IIRC, Phate used to have to a disclaimer in the notecards to tell people that there was not way to steal poses using the tool, presumably to stop the whining by people who had not investigated it.

Another advantage of the server side solutions is that they avoid all the "OMG someone might make my pixels do silly things" fears as any changes to another avatar's pose has to go through the permission system. 

@Rowan AmoreI should have asked this in the first place. What are the main advantages that you have found using the BD poser versus the HUD based posers?

See that's the whole point i want the Poser to get server side sync, it would immediately and fully solve all issues and add functionality that can be reused by other functions too. Serverside would also allow as you rightly suggest using the permission system to "ask" people to animate/pose them.

Like I said, all of the issues and abuse cases I am fully aware of already and all of them I already have a solution for, yet everyone insists on the Poser being evil and must be stopped or at the very least changed drastically.

My particular solutions for the pose "stealing" thing aside from my opinion that at this point single-frame poses would simply become worthless presets and no longer eligible for full blown IP items (which we know LL really doesn't give a crap about seeing that graphic presets and shape presets are IP protected still) are:

A) A mode split. There is an "Edit" mode which is the default mode, it does what the Poser does currently, take a snapshot of your exact current pose and allows you to edit them, exporting them only as local files to be reloaded to be used for private stuff (and in the case of server side sync would also allow you to keep poses around for when you are sitting on objects and make tweaks to those. You could then simply reload those and there would be no way of "stealing" poses, they can only be exported locally. The second mode being "Create" mode, starting you from T pose and allowing you to create a pose from scratch and export it as item, this mode does not allow you to load local poses as it would allow "stealing" poses. It is solely there to make new poses from scratch for people to export and sell/share. It has to be specifically switched to and the "Edit" mode will also warn you beforehand that you cannot export your tweaked pose unless you are in "Create" mode. Both modes use the server side sync to be visible to others, both modes can use it to ask others for permissions to animate them, both can animate others. The difference is solely that one allows you to export, the other only tweaking and saving as local file for personal use while one starts you in T pose, the other in your current pose. Pretty simple. This would keep full functionality of the Poser, with server side sync it would fulfill all my goals for the Poser and it would be capable of replacing HUD based implementations completely. This is definitely my personal choice.

B) As you already suggested an offset based export. HOWEVER an offset based export would be largely unintuitive and useless, it would often require almost exact conditions/poses to be played beneath in order for the offsets to achieve the desired pose. Option A would be a much better implementation of this and would work regardless of your initial pose or animations playing beneath.

As I see it currently, all possible problems anyone has brought up so far, including missing things (like not being able to see poses) and abuse cases can all be fixed with 3 simple words that I keep repeating to LL like it is some mantra: Server Side Synchronization. That's why I bring it up every single meeting, everything literally hinges on this one thing, the entire Poser rises and falls with this very request and so far LL hasn't been very cooperative and I am NOT going to allow bringing a gimped Poser into official just to meet some artificial "first implementation" goals, I'm not taking compromises again. Look at my snapshot floater improvements, they still have NOT been implemented, even now after 360 snapshots are in which they were supposedly stuck in. See: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/STORM-2118 it has now been 6 long goddamn years. 6!!! For something that was done a mere week after! I AM NOT going to implement a gimped Poser just to have it sit there in its sorry state for 6 more years before it gets forgotten as just another one of Niran's *****ty little failed experiments. I will either deliver the Poser in FULL with all its features and MORE or not at all.

 

Also cutting off Rowan here: The main advantages from a technical level are:

• No HUDs needed (this frees up an attachment slot, script count and script memory as well as texture memory)
• No artificial limitations (script memory, bone targets, usage speed)
• No lag
• No precision limits - the Poser can be as precise as you want it to be given I don't clamp the values.
• No angle and rotation limits - the Poser can rotate any direction as much or as little as you want thanks to the theoretically infinite precision
• No cost - the Poser is completely free, always will be and any improvements or extensions do not require uploading anything anywhere
• No build requirements - the Poser does not need to rez anything and does not need scripts to function, it can work anywhere, any time on anything, anyone and as many as you want, you can create entire 60 man group poses if you wish.
• Potential future improvements - the Poser UI is completely client side, can be completely customized per Viewer or skin and anyone could make minor or major improvements to any part of it, this includes proper bone rotation widgets.
• Availability - the Poser is available to anyone, not just people who make pictures and pay thousands of Linden Dollars for a HUD.

In short the Poser has everything posing HUDs have except more, better, more precise, faster and more reliable at less cost and less requirements. If it wasn't for the missing server side sync it would be a straight up AnyPose on steroids. The Posers goal is to replace posing HUDs completely.