Why do so many poseballs swing your camera into bad positions?

This was (possibly) touched on within another posting but I felt I'd like to ask this one a-fresh.

What I've noticed a lot in SL (and perhaps you have to) is the odd way that (and I dunno if it's planned this way) that poseballs so often seem to swing your camera around into the most pain in the butt position when you use them

(and I don't suppose you can do anything about them)

Not only poseballs but (shall we say, intimate) beds also.

You put these things against the wall of your house and so many times you suggenly find your camera viewpoint swung outside your house, having to cursor around to get back to a "normal" looking at yourself viewpoint.

The very worse ones sem to throw your viewpoint outside ever time you change an animation.

I guess when the poseball is made, the maker desides where the viewpoint will be?

Prime Example: The bits and bobs bath animation. Bath against wall, balls in bath, so you are LOOKING at the balls as you walk up. You click and "sit on" the poseballs and it instantly flips your camera viewpoint in 100% totally the wrong position. actually 180 degrees from the angle you were walking towards the balls, so you end up with your camera (as said before) outside the house (or in another room depending on your room layout)

Am I missing a trick in that there's a way to RESET this default viewpoint?

=====EDIT======

Actually I just looked at the contents of the bits and bobs bath anim and it LOOKS like you can alter the rotation agains the poseball which is great, but I suspect this is the exeption rather than the norm.

I don't believe there's any way to change it.

I usually lock my camera on a point near the furniture and then sit down, and it doesn't do that irritating swing around thing.

Glad you asked this...I've had the same experience.

And it doesn't seem to matter if it's pose balls, built-in animations or my favorite - Pillow Talk products. I'm wondering if it's ones that are closer to the edge of walls.

Will be interested in any answers to this.

Yeah, the trick I found is if I use the camera controls to (as it were) un -hook my viewpoint from my Avatar then it's fine, but it would just be nice if it did not happen all the time

Hi Piggie, yes this is a constant pain and as far as I know the only way around it is not to put things with poses in against the walls of your house.

The poseball maker has no influence on the camera position at all. The problem is that the default camera position is somewhere behind you looking over your shoulder, so if you are sitting against a wall the camera will tend to be in or even behind the wall.

You can change your default camera position somewhere in the advanced>debug settings menu, but this would change the camera position all the time and not just when you sat on the ball.

Thanks for the info, but that's a bit dam silly isn't it.

I mean, we all put Chairs, Beds, Baths etc etc against walls generally I'd have thought.

Yes, it's a pain.

As Piggie said, it's the default camera position that gets you. It follows a couple meters behind and above your avatar.

Now, to sit on something, you face it. So your camera, and you, are looking at the chair. You sit, and your av turns around. Of course, your camera swings around too.

You'd think this would be a fairly simple software change...after all, you have the option to choose "automatic camera movement while in Appearance mode" and "while editing". Why not, "when sitting", too?

Animation makers can, in fact, choose the camera angle you end up with if they think of it (and want to), right in the animation itself. Personally I started designing my couples' animations to give a view of both avatars from off to the side, once I discovered I could. The problem there is, even if you do that, you have to pick one side or the other and 50% of the time it's going to be the side that's buried in the wall because people put their poseballs in different places and I can't know in advance which side that wall's gonna be on

You can also do fancy things with llSetCameraParams and such, scripting a preset camera position in the poseball script. Nice thing there is it's possible to reveal some parameters in a user-editable notecard dealie so people can adjust camera settings later, but that doesn't work at all for folks who put their animations in an MLP or MAT or Intan type device. Sounds like that's the route taken by Piggie's bath balls.

In the end I decided the simplest solution is to pick one side or the other, and if that side doesn't work for you just flip the balls around to face the other way I can see where that can be a problem, though, if you're needing things to fit in a bathtub or some other place where there is most definitely a "right" and "wrong" place for your heads to be resting.

Should I be doing both? Setting the default view off to one side, and scripting in a camera control thingy so people can pick the opposite side if that works better for them? Inquiring minds want to know what the discerning poseball user prefers

That's interesting - how do you do that? I bet QAvimator won't do it!

OMG top secret animation tricks revealed!!!1

Just rotate the animation 90 degreees (or whatever) relative to the initial T-pose. Or rotate the T-pose, same difference.

Your camera by default is looking over the shoulder of your avatar, but all the SL servers know of your avatar is the invisible bounding box that is in a certain position facing a certain way. If an animation makes your avatar appear to be facing the left, the camera still thinks you're facing forward and you end up looking at your left side. This is why standard pose stands (and the "editing appearance" thingy) make your avatar turn 180 degrees, so you can see yourself from the front without camming around. It still works if you do the rotation secretly/invisibly between the T-pose frame and the first real frame of your animation.

This script has been very helpful.

https://xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=681514

Wish more animators would take advantage of using it. The price is definitely right.

If your poseball is modifiable, you can add this script into an existing poseball.

simple, but brilliant!

The sit camera position script looks great too. Why did nobody tell us before?

Nice find TexasKat76!

I am not an animator, but do build furniture. My first major annoyance was the camera swing outside the building when trying to work with adding animations to furniture.

Once I learned there were scripts to control camera positions (Torley's video on the Follower Cam), I knew there had to be a script somewhere that would work.

I was astonished to find it as a freebie. Generous SL creators like the script author are what makes SL so remarkable.

As Anti said you can force the camera to a certain offset and to look at a certain point. You can use llSetCameraAtOffset and llSetCameraEyeOffset to accomplish this as an alternative to llSetCameraParams. I do this with my pose vendors. Since they have a back, I always want you to be looking at them from the front. When I first created them, you always ended up looking from behind the vendor. It was annoying to everyone who used them, especially me, so I went and figured out how to fix them.

But, pose balls do not need that rigidity. So it is up to the creator to try to make their best guess, and then they have to do it for every animation they make, and change that pose ball for that animation. Most animators won't go to that trouble.

It would be nice if the default could be easily changed by the user, but I wouldn't know how to give them that ability.

Interesting. I got a lot of grief from one of my early products that used llSetCameraAt- and -EyeOffset()s to set the cam in tight, to avoid the "behind the wall" effect. Folks liked the cam position, but really didn't like not being able to use the unadorned arrow keys to pan the cam around. Back then, I never tried llSetCameraParams() for poses, and have since been doing more esoteric stuff with that function, never returning to try it for poses. I'm thinking that with the right parameters, it should leave the arrow keys functional and maybe make everybody happy.

For me, it is second natue to hit the ESC button twice when I get on a poseball. I get so tired of my camera going crazy when I get on a poseball, I just hit ESC to reset my camera. It is very annoying tho. I bet it is even worse for newbies who don't know how to use the camera and they sit on a poseball for the first time and "lose" themselves.

Same here, but I recall the first time this happened when I was new to SL and found myself looking outside of my skybox when I was just trying to sit on a couch I was like WHOA!!! What did I do wrong?!?!

I appreciate the input from you animators. Will just need another shot of caffeine to come back and read it again.