beta is closed and 3.2 is released today

I just cant thank beta testers enough.  Beyond little bugs and what not, they see things that I just miss in therms of thier user experience and by telling me know where they struggle many times we can make a better product together.  Thank you again!

LUMIPro 3.2 Beta2

First of all i want to thank everyone who has given very positive feedback to the 3.2 beta.  The sit ball feature has been very well received as well as the work with the machinima eye gazing feature.

Beta2 is being released with the feedback from Beta1

• Glow removed from sitball
• Text on sitball never shows while sitting
• Some little math adjustments in the height of a sit ball to give a better chance of having the AVI's feet on the ground based on AVI height.
• Sitball "spars" have been made a little wider for easier clicking
• Falloff menu has is now recursive (like the others)
• /43 <animation filter> now automatically brings up a dialog of those new animation

Beta2 is release candidate and unless someone finds a problem this is what i'll be releasing.  Wear your beta1 to receive the beta2 update.  Please let me know ASAP if you find something!

Thanks again everyone!  Couldn't do it without you!

Time for Beta5!

New features for LUMIPro in beta!

Here are the new features for LUMPro 3.2 Beta

• Integrated pose stool.   A pose stool that keeps the same design concepts of lumipro.  After studying other products, talking with several people, and making 9 months of prototypes I think I finally have what i think is a good solution.  Get the beta hud and give it a try
• Revised HUD minimize.  I've heard many customers discuss that the minimized hud still consumes desktop space (textures were just taken transparent but were still there) vs the new hud as a full blown hide that frees up the screen area.
• Revised pose backup/restore system.  The pose backup "server" was a prim that prior capture the animation catalogs just in case SL lost itsmind or the hud needed to be reset.  The new solution provides this plus actually copies backup copies of animations to the server.  Thus if for either SL just crashing or even future upgrades, you can just recover everything from animations to animation classificaitons to presets with a single "restore" operation.
• Machinimast's eye gazer.  The eye gazer released in 3.1 has had great feedback but as me and others experiments with machinima we realized that status eye position isn't what we want.  This new system allows typing /45 <time in seconds>|<eye movement left in right in degrees>  (example /45 2|40 would move the eyes in a full range of random positions between -40 deg and +40 deg every 2 seconds.  This gives great eye movement needed for interesting things like avatars dancing. 

Are you an existing LUMIPro owner and want the HUD?  Since i'll be traveling RL contact colleen Criss. 

The purpose of a beta release is to have the most avid LUMIPro users get an early look at new features and actually comment on the development and direction of those features.  It helps me frankly in finding bugs and keeps the product quality high.


Please give me your feedback by 12/8 with a goal of a production release 12/15.  The HUD will update if i release follow-on beta releases.  If you receive an updated beta hud, please check this blog for details.

Please apologize again for the video below crapping out at 7:30.

beta4 released into production

I'm happy to announce that we released beta4 into production!  thank all of you so much for your feedback.  If it wasn't for you lumipro would be no where near as good as the collective feedback everyone gives me.  xo

Beta4

Guys

i'm releasing a beta4 with a goal of getting this to production before the 3 day US holiday.

After shooting a couple of videos with the new AG i found that resetting the eye position was frustrating so now the hud "sticks" the eye position as you change poses.  It was messy in script code and i was avoiding it, but between my own experience and customer feedback it made sense.

I also made a minor tweak based on one beta users feedback that i needed to make the rez/derez buttons obviously buttons, so i made one minor change to the HUD's top level artwork.

Get me your feedback asap if you are finding permission problems or bugs.

Thank you everyone!

multi avi eye animations

thought I'd share a quick one where i was posing two avi's eyes.

First Serious Shoot with LUMIPro Beta3's Interface and Animation Eye Gazer

I did a shoot last night after getting beta3 out the door to give it a first solid spin as a photographer vs a script developer.  Just to show off, the model and I TP'd to a zero rez and zero script sim with her wearing both point lights and a projector and running animations and eye gazing from the hud.  Thought I'd share with you a study of eye positions possible with the new gazer.  Personally i love shooting mocap animations and i'm realzing that i can put my left hand on crtl-~ to shot and my right hand on the mouse running the eye gazer controls and i can set eye position real time.  I'm excited.  This seems to be a game changer!  (This is just the cover page to the shoot and the rest of the images are in my personal blog.)

(click the image to see it bigger).

Animation Gazer 3.1 Beta3

So the strongest feedback i got from Beta1 is the animation based eye gazing is awesome but the interface was lacking.  I couldn't agree more.  I've spent the last 4 weeks trying several different interfaces and finally last week I got an interface I really like.

So today i'm releasing beta3.  If you were on Beta1 just wear the LumiPro HUD V3.1 Beta1 HUD and it will update to LumiPro HUD V3.1 Beta3.

The video below explains the new interface.  If you watched the beta1 video you can jump to the middle of the video to see the new interface.  I'm looking forward to your feedback and bugs associated with this.  I'm excited to get this into production!

Please post your feedback to the blog entry here or drop me a note in SL. 

3.1 beta1 is ready for feedback

I'm releasing LUMIPro 3.1 beta1 for testing.  This beta will run for 2-3 weeks based on feedback before releasing 3.1 to production.

Beyond a minor bug i identified wearing two huds and posing, this release is all about the animation gazer.

See the video in the prior post for details, but this release has a full 121 animations (11 left right by 11 up down for a total of 121 animations). I've ran testing now for a couple shoots and am thinking it is close.

If you would like to be on the beta please drop me a note and i'll get it to you. As i fix bugs and get feedback from people the beta1 hud will update to beta2, beta3, etc. After the beta concludes this and 3.0.9 will update to 3.1 once it releases. between now and beta2 i'm going to make an automated way of allowing people to try the betas. If you wear your production hud and click the terminal it will authenticate and deliver the beta hud. (cool for me at least :) )

This is cool as it runs in zero rez and zero script and is much easier for self gazing and self shooting.  I'm asking people to try it in many sims. As always permissions are a nigthmare, please confirm the hud is copy and you can add your animations.

Here are a couple quick examples of using the animation gazer during a test shoot.
 

Preview of New L3 Animation Gazer

 This is a beta prototype and not currently part of the current selling product. 

Current LUMIPro requires a rezzed "gazer" (already part of L3) to set eye position.  The problem is that this requires rezzing and any chance I can to find a solution that frees photographers into ANY sim (scripted or not) I'm all about it.

I've seen existing huds that use built in animations to force eyes 100% left/Right or 100% up/down, but found them to be restrictive.

With some deep dive into animation specs, I discovered that animation eyes is possible.  My vision was to allow many left/right/up/down animations and with some discovery believe that 5 left/right/up/down (121 total animation) is about right.  These animations run priority 4 (highest priority) and looped.  Early testing shows this is perfect as almost no existing animation tends to animate eyes (poorly documented frankly). 

So this is a beta integration of this concept into L3.  I want to get people's feedback on the concept of how it works. This demo only uses only a 5x5 matrix (25 animations) for testing for now.

Hoping to hear your feedback!

It uses animations to set eye position and thus keeps to the goals of L3 to run in ANY sim rez or not. 

(hint: watch in HD full screen)

3.0.9 WIP "D"

Special thank goes to Aida Lundquist and KirstenSmith for beta feedback. I've been trying my best to push aggressively to push the number of available poses per hud. This release gets very close to the 400 mark (based on size of the pose name) as well as puts a circuit breaker into the code to prevent script crashed by not allowing it to run itself out of memory.

With luck i'll release this publicly as early as tomorrow.

Thanks again everyone!

3.0.9 WIP "A"

so based on beta feedback i am needing to do another release. This has to do with optimization of script memory for the pose system.

With this change we went from about 180 maximum poses per hud in WIP9 to about 400+ (tested, maybe more like 600) . It wasn't an easy fix and i had to tear apart the most complicated script into two scripts that remain synchronized. Its risky enough change i want to get some beta feedback before i release it.

If the feedback from this is solid, i'll be ready to release 0.9 publicly this weekend. If you guys can try loading 200-300 additional animations into the hud and then take it to a busy sim, i'd really appreciate it.

3.0.9 WIP9

Ok this is the release candidate. Only bug fixes here.
- The grid of buttons will now always show correctly
- two bugs in zero rez sims releated to wearable projectors fixed
- lock shows properly in zero rez

Sorry i was slow getting this out. check out my flickr, i've been shooting RL again on vacation and loving it. :)

3.0.9 WIP7 and 8

I wanted to give a quick update to the beta testers on the most recent release

WIP7 fixed a problem with the pose filter /43 work in that missed a script change on owner change and wasn't listening to any /43 chatter except me. Thanks Kym!

WIP8 fixes attached projector dialog brought up by clicking from the hud. It only brings up dialog now for the correct projector(s).

WIP8 adds an idle projector killer that kills projectors that have had no interaction in 4 days. Its easy to leave them hidden, finish a shoot, and forget they are there. It sends an IM to the owner letting them know.

So question, any thoughts on how and if in need to make a light never timeout?

animation filters

So i wanted to run this by you guys for feedback. the 3.0.9 BETA WIP6 and beyond includes a way to filter animation selections by local chat.

just type /43 where the string is part of the name of the animations you want to see

so for example /43Cout would only show the 6 Couture poses.

typing /43all or reseting the filters from the options menu resets the filter.

check it out and give me your feedback

wearable projectors for machinima

ok guys i have a 3.0.9 WIP1 which is in beta. This is a first try at supporting the machinimaists as well as allow projectors in no rez sims. Its really a good solution!

This has had very very little testing, but before i clean it up i wanted feedback.

Menus are likley really rough, especially if you have have both rezzed and wearable projectors
the presets are going to support the wearable projector but is not there yet
the backup server doesn't support it yet (never did actually)
Also this beta does not auto update. I'll get that going next time.

This is being sent to Toran/Colleen/Rysan and thats it for now. Next beta will be broader distribution.

Lots to do, but i wanted to see if this is heading in the right direction.

(watch this video in HD full screen)

---Stefan

Training Video on L3 Projectors

(be sure to watch full screen in HD mode)

Another L3 Projector Shakedown Shoot

getting better. This was done with 2 projectors on a white wall along with lumipro balls projecting on each of them. That makes this an 8 light shoot. :))

And no i didn't spent more than 2 minutes dealing with the stupid black line. :)

(click the image to see it larger)

Shakeout shoot with Projectors

A quick shoot while testing Projectors on 0.82 Beta
All images are camera raw (as measured by the stupid black lines)
(Click the images to see full screen)

Results from Beta and Beta2

Thanks to my beta testers for feedback. I've probably thrown 15 different ideas into the recycle bin getting to the point that I am today. I'm about 80% happy with the projector and is light years ahead of what i put to beta1 two weeks ago. Over the next couple days i'll get this new beta out for feedback. Our thoughts are to roll a first revision of projectors into L3 hopefully by end of January and then we'll roll the rest out as part of L4 and a separate lighting products.

I always want to remind people that what LUMIPro's goal is to shoot in ways that are quite a bit more productive than just manually rezzing lighting prim or just using windlight. My hope is the productivity and capability that LUMIPro offers offers you twice as many shoots a month and thus twice the fun and twice the revenue. :)

Please leave me your comments! I'll try to incorporate the changes.

---Stefan Buscaylet

(be sure to watch full screen in HD mode)