Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Saturday, February 24, 2018

Update 3.0.3 and why it is taking so long.

Long story short, i'm working on 3 bigger for this update.

One has been researching and studying the arts of rotations and how to make rotations in the poser a bit... easier to work with. I had... mediocre success. 3.0.3 will include a dropdown menu in the Poser to change the order in which you apply pitch, yaw and roll. Since quaternion rotations are heavily dependent on the order you apply each value in it makes a possibly drastic difference if you apply roll before pitch, or yaw before roll. I've switched most main bones around to use whatever rotation order i found to full fill the requirements i wanted for a "proper" rotation interface, this means most main bones should now have 2 sliders that move up/down and left/right while the third will ALWAYS roll around its own axis rather than going all nuts depending on the other two sliders. However due to how rotations work you might find yourself in the situation where one of the first two sliders will do the same as roll, this is simply due to how rotations are handled. Imagine looking forward, then looking up and down. Look forward again and then left and right on the same height, simple right? This is how the sliders work when not being used in conjunction with other sliders. The complex stuff starts when you look up a bit and then look to your right, what do you do? right, you look to the right on the same height you had before, you rotate your look on the same plane around yourself. This is how these sliders work too. Funky stuff happens when you look straight up or down and then try to look left or right, since you look left/right relative to the angle you look up you'll just turn around, basically rolling your view just like the third slider would do or as you would do when tilting your head to the side. Sadly there is nothing i can do about this. I hope to get a better fix for this when this is going to Linden Labs.

For now all old poses are detected as "legacy" poses and they will be loaded as such, meaning they will continue to look the way you saved them, all new poses saved after this update will use the new rotation orders for bones, making it easier for you to pose most of the bones, some weird bones like tail and wings do remain...weird since they are not aligned straight. :/

While we are talking about tails...


I got mine utterly smashed by a heavy metal cube while working on stuff. Yikes.


Second thing i'm currently (not) working on is the camera recorder window. The Viewer always had an avatar recorder implemented but beyond just recording and playing back there wasn't really anything you could do, i'll want to make a full camera suite that allows creating new recorded paths and edit them to make automated, animated camera paths possible. As nice bonus i saw something that might help me get camera tilting to work without controller (besides the camera recorder).


Last but not least, my current project is working on the sidebar... what is there to work on... especially for so long?



A fully customisable sidebar, it's taking quite some time (most of it was wasted on trying to find a way to delete layout panels out of stacks without crashing the Viewer but was ultimately given up on because it is simply not possible hence why it isn't done anywhere in the Viewer (probably)). I sure hope it will be worth the wait but as everything else will probably take multiple updates before its working as intended.


Also, little reminder to join the Discord chat if you need help or want to share pictures.

2 comments:

  1. Yeah another example I've across are the hips for leg rotation. If the hips are reset (straight up and down), it's easy to get the legs to spread apart. But, if I rotated the hips into a bicycle posture or even sitting in a chair, it's rather tricky getting the legs to spread apart. Kills me every time haha.

    Camera tilting without the need of a special controller would be awesome!

    The sidebar/widget thing is interesting looking. Is this something that, in the future, could lead to users being able to create their own full blown layouts and being able to script functionality into them without knowing C++?

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    Replies
    1. The sidebar thing COULD in theory be if extended extensively be used to have a whole UI creator with a few limitations due to the way stuff works. You can already modify most if not all parts of the UI without knowing C++, it's what i'm doing all day to change layouts for all kinds of windows. Though some parts still need coding, there is no way around it. It will also be extremely limited in scope, only capable of doing exactly what i tell it to with the option to extend it further down the line (possibly). It's really just a simple "set debug, set label, choose values and hit create" to automatically create either a checkbox, slider or radio button with your given inputs with a way to export and import it (automatically) to save them over sessions. Its basically just a rehash of what i've done previously with some new stuff like creating UI widgets in code dynamically and came from my idea to do something with dynamic tabs for the Poser which i ultimately dropped (for now) as it finds no use. (It could have been used to have a poser tab for each available avatar on the SIM to pose others but since i'm not allowed to do that there's no use for it sadly)

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