The Emerald Viewer and Animations

I'm new to the Emerald viewer so please excuse me if everyone already knows this, but it isn't included in the viewer features tables that someone posted a link to a few days ago.

An excellent feature of the Emerald viewer is that textures can be temporarily 'uploaded' without cost - great for trying them out in the main grid before paying for the upload. What I've just discovered is that animations are pretty much the same. The preview for them is performed on your avatar and not in a little window in the upload box. It's exactly the same as uploading the animation (for 10L) and trying it out on yourself. In fact, it's better because animations can cost a *lot* of money in uploading for tests, so the Beta grid needs to be used and there's nowhere private on that grid. With the Emerald viewer, all the testing can be done in the main grid, in private, and for free. Not only that, but it's quicker to test each animation tweak than going through the process of uploading it, etc. each time. Brilliant!

That does sound like a nice feature! I've gotten too lazy to test animations on the beta grid, and as you say there's no privacy there anyway, so this feature would indeed save me many upload fees. Tempted to try it.

I don't think it is the same.
It is likely the preview is played locally without uploading anything to the server.

In the case of textures, Emerald exploits the fact that the client is allowed to upload its own baked avatar textures. As these textures receive a temporary UUID, this UUID can be used like that of any texture in your inventory.

That trick is AFAIK impossible for animations.

I use the emerald viewer, and also i am builder and make textures, this feature of emerald has saved me quite a few lindens in the last few months. Brilliant feature as are so many of emealds features.

This does sound like a terrific feature.

There are so many things I wish were different about how the *server* handles animations--so much information it throws away or makes opaque and unchangeable at upload. But that's a whole different rant.

A couple of caveats: Until the animation is uploaded, you can't use it in scripts; that's not a big deal for most folks testing animations, I'm sure, but since I only animate (and then only under extreme duress) as "ornamentation" to scripts, I'd still upload a lot of failures first.

Also, Aditi is private enough if you only play the animation in your own viewer for preview purposes. (Of course that also defeats any testing of scripted stuff that should trigger the animation.)

Finally, just a completely tangential tip for anybody who hasn't discovered it yet: Advanced / Character / Animation Info can be a huge help for debugging why an animation isn't behaving as expected when actually played on the avatar, if it's interacting with other built-in animations that aren't being stopped, for example.

Open your inventory and find an animation. Double click it to open the little window. Hit "Play Local" on that window. That is the effect you will get with the viewers previewer. The animation is playing from cache and not in world.

New to Emerald? You have been busy with something?

and the new Emerald that came out today....

You can load your AO into the viewer. yes, Seriously. Straight into the viewer, and no more attached scripted HUD.


AND... you can turn on physics on avatars, and if your video card will support it, well, lets say the avatars suddenly seem MUCH more.. lifelike.

Lots of nifty new features on their update today.

LL should take notes.

~Brie

Absolutely! And don't forget the new option to turn off unwanted group chat.

yes you can say it, the new Emerald Viewer has bounce to boobies.

I have a question about Emerald and textures.

When I have a prim that has top shear applied, the texture on the side becomes distorted, with a "kink" in it.

Is this just a bug in Emerald, or is it a generic SL thing?

Tapering will do that on any viewer, it the taper as anything between 0 or 1 (the limits show no kink). To work around it, you can play with planar mapping in the texture tab.

I have tried to use the Emerald AO but it doesn't seem to be working.

I took a default notecard from a ZHAO II hud and added the name of one animation to the line that has [ Walking ], producing:

[ Walking ]Walk: Sexy Slow

I left all the other lines unchanged.

I saved the notecard to inventory.

I dragged the notecard from inventory to the Emerald AO dialog and dropped it in the the box that allows dropping.

The Emerald AO displays the name of the notcard below where I dropped it.

My walk remains the same.

The dropdown box for Default Walk under the Default Anims tab on the Emerald AO dialog doesn't show anything.

At this point I don't know what to do.

Aha!

You create a folder to hold your ZHAO II style notecard along with the animations you want to use. Then drag the notecard to the drop box in the Emerald AO dialog.

Neato.

Now to find some decent animations.

Try copying/moving the animation into the #EMERALD folder.

I don't have a #Emerald folder, at least not in the regular inventory.

I just made a folder and called it Emerald Animations and put the notecard and animations in there.

Make sure the notecard and animations are in the same folder before dropping it in the AO. If not, do that and then drop the notecard again and then click the Reload button. And be sure the box labeled Override Animations is actually checked.

Regarding the Emerald AO: does anyone know of a quick way to disable it, other than going into menus (Emerald=> AO) and unticking the 'Override Animations' box?

Well, there is a keyboard shortcut for bringing that AO window up, but you still have to untick the check box.

I was also wondering if there might be any way for an in-world scripted object to trigger turning on and off that AO. Maybe some RLV kludge? Some furniture "sit scripts" now use a protocol (part of Lockmeister, IIRC) that automatically controls compliant AOs (including ZHAO II, I think). That's kind of a nice feature, but if lots of people are going to start using a viewer-based AO that doesn't comply, it may not be worth adding that scripting to items anymore.

It's not that I've forgotten it, just that I never knew it existed in the first place.

Where is this option, please?

Edit Preferences / Emerald tab / Chat tab -- last two check boxes.

Wow. I'd look through all those tabs (or so I thought) and somehow missed that one - thanks!

to turn it off say "cao off" in open chat or "cao on" to turn it bakc on you can customize those commands in the CMD tab in the emerlad menu,,,,

If you mean being able to turn it on or off on-the-fly...

type cao off in chat to turn the AO off; and
type cao on in chat to turn it back on.