Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans, has a new update that will likely make it a favorite among machinima makers and screenshot photogrpahers who want to create group shots: Full support for animated mesh avatars, i.e. animesh. Being the brainchild of NiranV, Black Dragon’s version of animesh is unique among other SL viewers — direct control of animesh via a control UI he’s created:
“Any viewer with animesh can do it via scripts,” as Niran tells me, “but Black Dragon can also simply copy all animations playing on yourself to any animesh.” This is viewable only via the user’s perceptive, but that’s all you need when shooting machinima or screenshots. “I’m planning to use this for music videos,” he adds. “Who needs other people if you can just do it with yourself, a few times making copies of myself is possible now kinda.”
More about the Animation Control from Niranv’s blog, and future update plans:
Yes you can stop, freeze, slow-down, speed-up and copy and paste animations from and onto them. Since they are just objects I see no reason LL would not allow me to allow you to do whatever the heck you want with them.
The poser however does not support animated mesh YET. This is the next thing I’m going to work on in addition to some nice extra features for animated mesh, such as copying your shape and attachments to them.
Animated mesh as it is right now does not support neither, they won’t have attachments and their shape cannot be changed, I plan on changing that.
Here’s a video of what this looks like in action, featuring Niran dancing with a copy of himself:
You’ll see some attachments moving from the user to the controlled animesh avatar — another Niran addition:
“Animesh objects work like normal avatars, so while Linden Lab does not allow you to do it normally, I added a little something to move your attachments over. Attachments lag a bit behind but thats probably because animesh objects were never meant to have attachments and are updated slower in that regards, if I can fix this too we got full NPC avatars with attachments, at least locally.”
Group video! Yes, with furries. It’s an otherkin thing a furry thing, you wouldn’t understand.
Much more on Niran’s blog where there’s a link to download the viewer. He also has a Discord server with an active community of Black Dragon users. And if you’re using his viewer, consider going over to his Patreon page and putting in some donations.