Second Life: Moving/Positioning Avatars

In 2013 Strawberry Singh posted a couple of articles (here & here) about positioning and moving avatars when setting up snapshots. This was needed for those areas where you do NOT have rez rights. Over time viewer upgrades broke those processes.

Avatar Positioning with Black Dragon

Every so often I would check to see if the problems with those processes had been fixed. With Firestorm 6.3.9 (May 2020 release date) I can move the avatar again sort of with her process.

Strawberry explained the process for moving your avatar. (Ref)

  • Open the Develop menu. Top menu, press Ctrl-Alt-Q to reveal it.
  • Then enable Develop->Avatar->Character Tests->Allow select avatar.
  • Press Ctrl-3 to open the Build Panel.
  • Right-click the avatar. Move arrows appear. Move.

Here is a video showing how it used to work. If you have a mesh avatar, right-clicking the avatar likely is not going to work. Instead, you have to right-click on your name tag. Then it works.

In the Firestorm viewer the circles for rotation do not appear when you select Rotate or press Ctrl. But it didn’t rotate in 2013 when the video was made and it doesn’t rotate now in 2020. The only difference now is the rotation controls do NOT appear.

Also, the Hover adjust mentioned in the video has been enhanced. Rather than use the Shape Panel’s hover we use right-click-on-avatar-Hover-Height. It is easier to use if all one needs is to adjust the vertical position. It works well for sitting and other poses/animations that need to be adjusted vertically.

Moving Others

Back in 2013 Strawberry made a video and wrote how to move other avatars. As best I can tell that method is simply no longer possible. I’ve tried all the tricks I can think of to get my Alt into a prim-like-edit-mode. No luck.

An Alternative

The Black Dragon Viewer has a Poser. It can be used to both position and pose the avatar. But, only your avatar. AFAIK at this time there is no way to manipulate another avatar in an area without rez rights.

There are lots of tutorials on the Black Dragon viewer and Poser available via Google. A bunch of threads in the SL Forum deal with aspects and how-tos of the viewer. SL Forum Black Dragon.

Black Dragon in Action

Summary

There are various ways to pose our own avatar and even apply poses-animations to other avatars. Try PoseAnywhere, Animare, and Anypose Expression HUDs for ways to pose another avatar and your avatar. Note: you may have to wear two HUDs to pose two avatars. HUDs only do one avatar at a time, AFAIK.

But unless you can get an avatar on a pose ball or stand to which you have edit rights, there is no good way to position another avatar. That ability has been lost.

There are JIRA Bug Reports regarding the problem. The Lindens fixed the problem for selecting your own avatar in early 2019. I am not sure when the fix made it into third-party viewers. See BUG-225999. Also, see FIRE-BUG-23399. But, the ability to select other avatars that have granted permissions has not been fixed. Nor does it appear it will be. But we can hope.

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