LilithServil

Might seem like a bit of an odd question at first glance when it's BOM, so let me clarify! I've been working on an overlay for scales, which I need unique materials for and don't want to put directly on the skin. To achieve this, I need to use the built-in onion skin layers the body naturally has. So I've got my texture, I've got my specular... I don't know how to properly apply them. If it's Omega-based, the Omega relay for Jake doesn't work. With the body being modify, of course I can just right click -> sift through all of the layers until I hit the one I want, but then I run into another problem immediately after: Hiding parts of the body and unhiding them revert the layers entirely. Omega apparently still works with the no-mod/no BOM body but I need both of those things as well. So... How am I supposed to accomplish this? Is it just not possible with the relay dead? There are reviews on the kit dating back two, almost three years talking about how it doesn't function properly.

I know about BD's poser (I've used it in the past for myself!) and I've been keeping a close eye on its improvements to its animator. I'm DEFINITELY interested in that system, I think that's more along the lines of what I'm looking for. I'll check it out, thanks!

I 100% know SL doesn't have IK support and animations have been made, more or less, to fit the most typical or generic shapes either by hand or via mocap. Mostly I was curious if there are in fact any somewhat known animators/designers that have taken mismatched sizes into consideration or not. I've definitely seen plenty of people several heads shorter than the other individual posed/animated together before with minimal clipping or floating going on (obviously there's *some* as that's just the nature of SL, but not floating to the degree where you could fit an entire other person between them) so I wasn't sure if all of the poses/furniture I have is just sub optimal-- it's a couple years old as I've been more or less on hiatus due to burnout.

I'll preface this by saying I hope I'm in the right section! This is equally about furniture and animations as it is about avatar size differences so I wasn't entirely sure where to put it. ^^; Even before having a more drastic difference in avatar scale I noticed furniture anims involving more than a single person was, more often than not, meant for "same size" individuals but was more or less able to adjust things to somewhat work... But how does one navigate a multiple ft height difference where more often than not, arms will be floating well away from the other person's body, hands will be nowhere near meeting, etc? Anyone else suffering a similar issue? Are there any animators who cater to more "specialty" size scales or is that a fool's errand? For those curious, my partner has his avatar scaled to more or less his normal height, around 5'6. My avatar, however, is based on a character that's closer to 8ft and so far it's been almost impossible to use any of our existing furniture with one another-- and that's with me taking the "masc" poses and him ending up on the "fem" poses for a vague attempt to height match LMAO.

https://i.gyazo.com/0e8ff32de5bd69daaabb0438405bfe3a.mp4 This .mp4 above best shows what I mean. I've been on a hiatus for months-- did something happen? Is this some setting I can tweak or something more? I don't think it's my settings causing it as nothing has changed, I run SL at a comfortable 60 fps on the upper end of High but I've also noticed strange things like flexiprims "stuttering" instead of moving smoothly. Any ideas? This is causing some awkward issues while building or even retexturing things.

Even if the only option is a super long scroll bar that's still miles better than no timeline at all, though, so long as everything more or less functions. Hopefully it's not too difficult of a thing to implement, but I highly appreciate you looking into it either way.

I see no issues with a scrollbar tbh. It's better than nothing, and there's always the possibility something like that can be improved upon with later iterations if such QoL features become more feasible.

I'm nowhere near BD right now but I made a quick janky mockup-- of course, you know far better than I how this could work in a less clunky fashion! The general idea would be moving the clickable body parts down to free up more space for a visual timeline for each part. To edit the keyframes you'd still need to click the part (as normal) and select the desired keyframe in the area to the right where you'd mess with them normally. Ideally, if it's at all doable, clicking on a keyframe in the current rightmost panel would highlight the correlating keyframe in the timeline so you know exactly what you're messing with. Then if you wanted to move the 5th head keyframe to, say, 30 instead of 24ish where it is in the mockup, you'd just input the value 30. Otherwise, just any kind of collapsible or expandable window to see all of the keyframes would be a perfect start and make things a lot more intuitive! Thanks for looking into possibly implementing a timeline.

Tbh, even if the UI for a keyframe timeline was mostly just a visual aid and not interactive/functional, that would still help a lot. While being able to mousedrag them around would be nice, I view that as more of a luxury than a necessity. At the moment you can set something's "place" in the timeline by inputting a number value-- if it would be easier, you could keep that type of system (replacing "time" values with frames instead) for dictating where on the timeline the keyframe would sit. More than anything I just want to be able to look at a barebones/basic timeline to get a rough overview of what bones I've moved at what point in the anim cycle instead of trying to deduce it by manually hunting down different bones and clicking them one by one in the menu just to know if I've keyframed them at all or not. ^^;

I'll have to keep messing with it, but until further UI improvements are made I cannot see this being a tool usable for any complex animations. Unless there is somehow a way to have a separate window/UI that looks akin to these, allowing you to see the keyframe timeline, it's going to be a constant struggle: Another big issue that I had is that simply moving a part does not create a keyframe like it would in more "typical" animators, making the Mirror tool functionally useless. Too many times did I mirror both arms while trying to pose the left arm, only to find that the right arm (despite moving while posing) would snap back into a tpose upon previewing the animation. This actually happened a lot regardless of whether or not I hand keyframed things; more complicated parts like hands/feet would snap at weird angles when transitioning from preview back to posing, which I'd need to then go back and repose all over again. An example of what I was trying to make was a stand animation with a couple different complex idles-- moving the head around, blinking, shifting the legs, etc. and the animation very quickly turned into a mess upon the realization that the keyframes work the way they do, sadly. I can only hope this tool is able to evolve further because the concept is incredible and I'd love to be able to animate with at least the same fidelity that QAvimator can, only in-world instead of using a generic model.

I've figured out some things but I'm still at a loss. 1: It seems you need to go through and keyframe every single part with no easy way to view them all? I don't see a way to rearrange or copy/paste frames either, making seamless looping an exercise in frustration with needing to copy and paste each individual value. I may be mistaken and hope I am. 2. Because I can't view every keyframe at once this means if I do multiple keyframes for certain body parts but forget to keyframe other body parts, the entire animation quickly becomes a mess-- I'll have 5 keyframes for the head but because I can't just have 1----->5 keyframes for the neck, it ends up being 1->2 for the neck and 1->2->3->4->5 for the head and I can't tell during what part of the timeline these actually happen? ^ Didn't actually "animate" anything above, just added keyframes to emphasize what I'm confused about.

I've been able to keyframe the very first pose, but I'm at a loss when it comes to figuring out how to actually animate. The keyframe section seems pretty barebones with no way to extend the length between frames as far as I can tell, previewing the animation just shows the very first keyframe and not the animation tests that follow, there's no visual difference between "step", "linear", and "spline", etc. Has anyone else been able to make anything with this? I was super excited to be able to animate in-world because QAvimator falls incredibly short when trying to animate for anything remotely nonhuman, and I haven't had much luck with blender either for various technical reasons. ; ;

Even PS2 and Gamecube games have proper physics engines with jigglebones and flexible pieces. LL really, really needs to prioritize figuring out some way to allow users to give mesh wearables proper physics instead of shying away from it. Even if it doesn't have good collision and just functions like a fancier looking flexiprim, it'd be a hell of a lot better than wearing items that should naturally flow with your body only for them to be taped down to SL's skeleton due to the limitations.

Really wish the topic of flexible mesh would crop up again. I know it was talked about... forever ago and was canned (I think). Comparing SL to something like VRChat as far as quality goes, you can immediately tell VRChat avatars tend to look better in motion. Modelled hair, ears, tails, capes, etc that actually move with physics look infinitely better than multi-segmented prim hair/tails that constantly freak out and separate into their individual pieces when they move too fast. I don't even care if it's similar to Animesh where you're restricted from having more than a couple flexi-mesh pieces attached to keep lag down, just... Please. Bento is nice and all but some things look so inexplicably off about rigged hair being incapable of moving away from the shoulders/chest, tails remaining in the same rigid sway animation while doing a high-energy activity like dancing/jumping, dresses stretching and warping when you walk/sit/jump, etc etc. Not sure how much of a performance hit mesh with jiggle physics would cause, but I feel like in the long run it'd be better than people running around with 16+ segments on a flexi tail each with a different high res texture, or flexi hair, or whatever else people still would rather use flexies for to simulate more natural movement than mesh allows for.

Yeah I don't really understand the issue, it's bizarre. I know how Alpha Blending works (i.e alphas fighting, eyelashes with alpha clipping hair with alpha, etc etc) but an ENTIRE object turning semi-transparent because of a single face having alpha is abnormal. In Firestorm, hair would only have a couple alpha strands that'd have normal disappearing and alpha fighting issues. In Black Dragon though, even the parts set to None normally that SHOULD be solid are see-through because the item has other pieces that DO have alpha. It's fine with stuff you can just set to None that shouldn't have alpha anyway, but something like these eyes that need the outer layer set to Alpha Blending or hair that needs Alpha Blending on some pieces can't just be set to None. xwx