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NiranV Dean

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Everything posted by NiranV Dean

  1. Intended. PBR is a whole new way of lighting things, you cannot expect anything to look even remotely the same. Everything that has ever been made before PBR was made for what we had, PBR does everything completely different, things will look different now and PBR requires a completely different workflow and new assets and textures to be created to look the same way as before.
  2. It's here! It's there! It's finally released! Let's see how people break it.
  3. In order to read any file a program needs to have some sort of reading function to interpret the data its getting. Blender and Avastar both lack these as the XML file is custom formatted. The XML (and the ANIM file) can be transmitted to anyone freely but since the poser itself does not allow you to import ANIM file in Live or XML in Create mode they can only be used to "continue" working on original data that you (or someone else) created and shared. Live mode is completely local so importing said XML files wont do anything other than giving you a locally viewable copy of the pose that cannot be exported.
  4. The XML format is completely custom you cannot use it for anything outside the poser in BD unless someone writes a converter. Which the creator of BentoBuddy actually wanted to do... which kinda prompted me to take another shot at an official exporter and BAM now here we are. To explain what the Viewer does to prevent stealing: Technically not much, it will simply not enable the export as ANIM option (infact i'll split them anyway) as long as you are in Live Edit mode and will not allow XML export while in Create-A-Pose. That means XML is solely for local saving and ANIM is for the intent to make poses. Very simple, so simple in fact that LL completely and totally failed to acknowledge this when i brought it up.
  5. The Poser will currently start into what i call the "Live Edit" mode, it will continue to function as normal. There is a button at the top left that allows you to switch to the "Create-A-Pose" mode. Doing so will put you into T Pose (aka it will reset all bone rotations). This is to prevent "stealing" poses that are currently running on your avatar, sadly this is something i have to do as Coffee explained it would be against the TPV ToS otherwise. Personally speaking i do not care about "stealing" poses, if it was for me i would not add this limitation at all, i firmly believe that giving out this export tool for free is the entry way to allowing every single user to make their own poses at any given time, for any reason, with any avatar, for any furniture, FOR FREE (minus the 10L$ upload cost). You are essentially getting the ultimate posing tool (and with further updates i'll make it able to export entire animations, making it a decent animation tool too). Right now the Poser can export your pose as XML file (if you are in Live Edit mode) and as ANIM file (if you are in Create-A-Pose mode), it can also import both XML (again only in Live) and ANIM (only in Create) and continue editing these. Any animation you created outside of SL, as long as it is saved as .anim can be loaded by the poser although it will only load the first keyframe right now. Multikeyframe support is planned for when i have the UI to support editing them. The poser has always been coded in very open terms, meaning that it is made in such a way that it has as much freedom as possible, anyone with very little coding skills could take out the very few and simple limitations that i put in place. Here's a more current picture of the Poser right now. I'll probably be splitting it in two windows eventually, its getting... quite clogged.
  6. Exactly. It will export as .anim file, can import said .anim files and will feature a whole host of other changes and improvements.
  7. I am positively sure this is a GPU issue. AMD is known for these kind of issues. I'd suggest trying older drivers, try multiple, many many versions older. This might be an issue for several many versions. It might also be your GPU itself (i doubt but not impossible, again AMD is.... having issues with OpenGL). This issue cropped up in the past already.
  8. Sadly you most likely won't see much Themes or Skins here. Most users don't know you can even skin the Viewer without touching the code, let alone have the (arguably simple) text editing skills nor patience to do so. But in case you haven't figured this out yet, (something Firestorm hadn't figured out in years in their classic V1 skin and possibly still haven't) you can set scaling rectangles for your textures. Textures that are meant to scale without stretching unique parts of the texture (such as corners for instance, or the rounded ending of a line such as in your tabs and filter editors) can have a scaling rectangle set, the Viewer will only use the defined area of said texture for scaling purposes and use the rest of the texture as is to match the total width and height. Say your line edges are 5 pixels wide and the total texture is 100 pixel, you could set the scaling rectangle to start left="6" and end right="94" this would make the "inner" repeating part scale and stretch while the outer rounded edges stay intact and don't stretch. To prevent the texture weirdly squishing in the scaling rectangle part i'd recommend keeping the textures as small as possible, squeezing everything between 6 and 94 to say 2 pixels can cause the stretched part to look weird, so instead i'd use a texture that is only 16 pixels wide, 10 for the edges (5 start and end each) and 6 pixel inbetween to stretch properly, that way the texture can scale all the way down to 16 pixel (and usually even lower all the way to 10 pixels) without looking weird. Scaling rectangles can be set in the textures.xml (skins/SKINNAME/textures) where you define all textures you want to call via names. <texture name="ScrollArrow_Down" file_name="widgets/ScrollArrow_Down.png" preload="true" scale.left="2" scale.top="13" scale.right="13" scale.bottom="2" /> The file even explains it at the top:
  9. alright i'll try explaining whats happening here to my best ability: Shadows are prepared and rendered on the CPU into the shadow map, the shadow map acts as sort of a "depth" map for shadows, there are 4 of them (+2 for projectors) which are used for the sun, the GPU checks against these shadow maps in a shader, shaders solely run on the GPU alone. Shaders work by going through every single pixel from top to bottom, checking if this pixel needs some work and then goes to the next one, what the GPU does for shadows is checking every pixel on screen against one (sometimes two on overlaps) of them to see what area should be shadowed, it simply skips out if its safe to assume there cant be any shadows or if all primary checks whether we should use a shadow map to begin with fail, this safes a lot of cycles but highly depends on the shadow amount in the scene, this means as more and more of the shadow maps are filled with shadows, the more pixels the shader wont skip and will have to do some expensive checks and calculations to paint said pixel to be shadowed, low angle lighting such as sunset/sunrise have long shadows across the entire area and the sun is potentially at such an angle that we can't assume any pixels to be skipped simply due to the light angle, this means each and every pixel needs to be checked, the GPU quickly ramps up as it now has to check millions of pixels, do millions of checks and calculations, this is why the more shadows you see on screen the higher the GPU usage, since the shader simply skips out of less iterations. The way shadows work in SL are not constant, they are dynamic and their GPU usage depends solely on the amount being shadowed. The CPU part (and thus your baseline performance) depends on the amount and complexity rendered into the shadowmaps, the CPU effectively renders every object a second time into the shadow map, think of that maitreya body, how bad it is to render, now do that a second time into the shadow map (potentially two times if overlapping). In short CPU shadow performance is based on shadow resolution, shadow map count, amount and complexity of the objects being rendered into the shadow maps and can potentially spike into infinity. GPU shadow performance is solely based on amount of pixels being altered with a minimum of "none" and a maximum of whatever your screen resolution resolution is. EDIT: To give some context and statistics: The common screen resolution "Full HD" is 1920 * 1080, that's 2073600 pixels. The GPU effectively has to scan through all 2073600 pixels and every time determine whether this pixel lies in shadow or not by comparing against the 4 shadow maps that we have depending on where the point we are checking against is situated in the scene. Does the light angle permit this pixel to be in shadow? No -> Skip || Yes -> Determine whether it is and how much (expensive).
  10. In that case the UI is probably very static and doesn't contain any moving or dynamic parts (other than the toolbar drop area) i assume unless you can tell individual buttons to be aligned top or bottom the 4 split side toolbars for instance seem impossible to do without adding them statically (simply buttons rather than toolbars)
  11. Seeing that these move the entire main UI around completely and knowing how painful it can be to make fully custom UI's i can tell that this wasn't easy.
  12. LL has completely reworked how the mouse works, several people have already told me that my right-click drag for camera now works without issue, i assume this means the alt-cam issue is fixed too as it is very much related.
  13. This sounds like there is some misconception of how hardware and heat works in conjunction with what BD really does and doesn't. Black Dragon is simply capable of using more of your GPU (it uses roughly the same amount of CPU as all Viewers as they are all quite limited in that regard) due to an extended feature set that are almost exclusively ran on the GPU (via shaders), most commonly some sort of screen space or post processing effects. A GPU is meant to run hot, all the way to ~60-90°C is completely normal depending on its usage %, manufacturer and brand. BD by far doesn't use as much ressources as it could, let alone as any normal game would... not to mention an actual optimized game being able to utilize close to 100% of both CPU and GPU. By default BD does not much more resources than any other Viewer unless other Viewers have made some changes to cut on GPU resource usage, which BD has not. BD may use higher default settings because it doesn't utilize the Hardware probing on startup nor does it "try" to enforce a preset based on your hardware (other than some basic things), it will simply start up in expected default settings, whether your hardware is capable of them or not (in the latter case they will simply fail and drop down to lower settings automatically)
  14. Now if only we could use it... and it would play on top of animations (or alters them).... mhhh. Who could do something like this?
  15. Are they these boring stories that end in a massive redeeming happy end? I hate those.
  16. I like this story. Mama Coffee can you tell me another bedtime story?
  17. You do not "purchase" a new driver. Graphics drivers are free and can be downloaded and installed from your major GPU vendor's website, that is usually NVIDIA or AMD. Also that link doesn't work.
  18. The issue is well known (and there have been several instances here in the Forum reporting this issue), its a graphics driver issue, you will need to update your graphics drivers to fix this.
  19. No. You can however select Object View from the Camera floater but you will have to do this every time after relog and it needs to be turned off when trying to interact with things
  20. Just another thing i just noticed while reading through the OP. The FPS display (at least in FS as far as i recall) does not show you your actual FPS. It shows you your average FPS. 30 FPS average doesn't mean you have smooth 30 FPS, it means you can be jumping between 15 and 45 FPS periodically if these jumps happen in the measured timeframe and then averaged. This is why in BD i chose to show the actual current FPS (hence why it jumps around a lot and seems super unstable). Most games i know show you either your current framerate or at least some very very tight average to which usually catches smaller FPS instabilities but shows you framespikes. It's called camera smoothing and can be configured in Preferences - Camera. Its set higher compared to other Viewers by default. I do not like the jerky direct camera in third person, that's something for Mouselook or Build mode.
  21. That's amazing news, now lets just get everyone on AMD to update their GPU drivers and hope they didn't introduce a million new issues (again again again again again again)
  22. You could 7zip/gzip the UI to make it "compacter". Jokes aside i've been told already that my UI is too small/compact... despite my best efforts to make widgets and layouts have clear layouts and groupings while keeping empty space to a minimum but people also complain that my UI is too complex, the same people who didn't complain when i simply dropped the Firestorm skin into my Viewer (for the lols) and showed them the exact same Viewer UI except with the Firestorm skin (grey on grey with some touches of orange)... I learned a valuable lesson: Not using Firestorm's skin makes everything more complicated! I mean come on whats not to understand here? It even has the Low-Medium-High thing everyone loves so much.
  23. There is no option, this needs to be done in code. Black Dragon Viewer has a fix for this implemented.
  24. Actually on further inspection, my Lowest Quality setting is 0.8 (unlike what the tooltip says -> 0.25) hence why everything remains high quality, i did see very handful of objects reducing their LOD very slightly, so i tested further and on dropping the object quality all the way down to 0.2 they do immediately update and drop LODs completely. As seen here: Also yes, size seems to play a role, as i gradually increase the quality more and more objects cycle through their 4 LODs, until all of them arrive at 4. Although only smaller objects seem to update immediately, the big tree doesn't at all unless i move my camera.
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