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. :)