Gadgets N’ Gear: Practically Perfect Pose Stand

Imagine a screwdriver that never strips the screw, doesn’t wear its tip into iron filings, doesn’t bend or slip in your hand and always gets the job done. Great tools are the ones you use all the time and they never let you down – so practically perfect they make the work fun just ‘cause you get to use them.

Like this shot. It demonstrates how a good, solid tool is flexible and yes, even fun…

Choosing and tweaking poses and positioning is easily 50% of the job in SL photography. Enter the Tillie Posing Stand (version 2.0). This simple, attractive posing stand packs a whack of functionality that hobbyist and hardcore photographers can all appreciate. This stand has a ton of features:

• strong navigation through poses and the ability to organize poses into sets and define chat shortcuts for specific poses
• adjust visibility, position and rotation of the pose stand
• configure communications channels so more than one stand can be in use at the same time.
• save camera positions as presets
• a stand alone hud version for those pesky no-build areas.

Movement through pose selections, adjusting visibility, rotation and location of the stand and knowing what pose you’re on is easy as pie. Load the stand up with poses, mount a hud and get someone to sit on the stand, and it just works.

I love that the current pose name and number is displayed on the hud. That means I know where I am when I have the stand hidden for shooting.

Multiple Stands and Huds

The above shot of Isle and I didn’t use a couple pose. It used two stands – male poses (green) and female poses (red) and two huds, configured to use different channels. By wearing both huds at the same time, I have two independently controlled and moveable stands for extremely flexible couple shoots using single person poses.

Packaged Right

The stands are copy so I can have as many stands as I want for different purposes. I recently picked up two gun pose fatpacks for a shoot, which I have in a “gun” stand.

When a model is not on the stand, it doesn’t listen for commands. This reduces lag, but also means 3 different stands off to the side won’t interfere with the one you’re actually using. You can switch any of them in fast without needing to change huds because they are all on the same channel.

The hud however is copy/trans, unlike many photo equipment vendors who charge extra for their huds. That means I can provide huds to other photographers that use my studio without any additional cost consideration.

Pose Sets

There are very few hard and fast rules in the universe. Peanut butter’d bread will land face down. A new SL viewer release will break something. A lean forward pose will stab a model with long hair in the boobs.

When long hair is in play there are a ton of poses in the stand that drop out of consideration. This pose stand enables me to group shots into sets, so with some renaming of poses I might have config entries like:

[set1]good for long hair (omits boob stab poses)
lhair*
[set2]good for short hair (includes long as well)
lhair*
shair*

I can then select the pose set I want to use and I’m not wasting time looking at poses I know aren’t suitable. My mainstay “fashion blog” stand has the poses subdivided into categories to enable quick location of front, back, 3/4 and side shots.

Saved Camera Locations

The hud allows you to save nine preset camera locations. This is darned handy when you’re shooting in a standard studio setup, and most of your shots use reasonably standard angles on the model.

Go Mobile

The above shot was taken at Tempura Island, one of my favorite sims. They don’t let you build there so you can’t rez the pose stand. To get a pose struck and held I used the standalone version of the hud. It currently only works to pose the person wearing the hud, but for location self portrait work, it’s great.

Hint: When doing self portraits, double log in with an alt, who will be the photographer. That way you can move your eyes to suit the pose, and your alt can take the shot.

Practically Perfect

Sure there’s a wish list. Talking to Tillie about future plans, my wish list is already on the books for a future version. It would be great, for example, if the standalone version could animate someone other than yourself. Camera locks that moved and rotated with the stand. More extensive wild carding and string matching for defining sets.

This pose stand isn’t perfect, but it sure is practical.

Pose Stand: Tillie’s Shop, Tillie’s Posing Stand v2.01

Closing Tip: If you lose a hud offscreen, edit a visible hud and use your mousewheel to scroll the hud space back. More on this in Torley Linden’s video “How to Retrieve a HUD that’s gone offscreen”