FIRESTORM VIEW AVATAR PHYSICS

Firestorm Avatar Physics

What is it?

Firestorm Avatar Physics lets you customise how your Avatar's breasts, belly, and butt move in response to your movements.
This new feature in Firestorm is the same feature that is in Linden Lab Viewer 2 and allows personal customisation and the ability to easily share your settings with friends by passing each other physics layers.
You can see a video of this feature in action here.
Note: This was filmed on an early development version of Viewer 2, but the effect is the same. Will update with a Firestorm Vid soon!

Who Can See It?

If you choose to use this feature, your Avatar Physics movement will be visible to anyone using Firestorm Preview 3 or later, Phoenix 1102 or later and Viewer 2.6.3 or later as well as up to date versions of Kirsten's Viewer, Singularity Viewer & other Third Party Viewers who also update to add this feature. Snowglobe and SL 1.23 will be unable to see your Avatar Physics.

How Do I Use It?

Note: Make sure you have the Avatar Physics Detail option in Avatar → Preferences → Graphics
up high enough before you begin to edit
To add Avatar Physics to your avatar you must first make a Physics layer
Open inventory
Click the + button at the bottom left → New Clothes → New Physics
Wear this New Physics layer
Right click the Physics layer → Edit
Now you are ready to choose your settings

Note: If your avatar is male, you can only modify your belly and butt.
Playing a stationary walking animation or similar is a good way to test what your settings look like as you edit.
Choose your settings then click “Save” top left to save to the same layer you are wearing, “Save As” bottom left to save to a new layer which will automatically be worn or “Undo Changes” to roll back anything changed since the last save.
Exit Appearance.
You are now wearing an Avatar Physics item. As you dance or move around, your Avatar's breasts, belly, and butt will move around in the way you specified.
You can wear, take off, edit, and create physics items just like any other clothing item.

What Does Each Slider Do?

Bounce: Shaking vertically in response to your Avatar moving vertically.

Cleavage: Shaking side to side, but to the inside rather than to the outside, in response to your avatar moving forward and backwards.

Sway: Shaking side to side, but to the outside rather than to the inside, in response to your avatar moving side to side.

Max effect: Controls the maximum range of movement. If set to 0, the feature is off.
Think of this as a general amplifier of the “bounce” effect. The higher this slider, the higher the initial bounce impulse.
Firm when it's low, saggy when it's high.

Spring: Controls the speed of vibration.
A higher number means your body part will vibrate more quickly.
Think of this as a “centre spring”, it pulls the body part in question back to its neutral position.
If this value is low, the body part “swings” around the centre more. If it's high, there's not much bounce, rather a fast vibration.

Gain: Controls the size of the effect when movement is triggered.
A higher number causes a larger effect.

Damping: Controls how long it takes for movement to stop after it's triggered.
A higher number causes the movement to stop sooner. This works directly against any bounce.
A good analogy here is High Damping: Corset, Medium Damping: Swimwear, No Damping: bare breasts.

Advanced Parameters

Breast/Belly/Butt Mass: Controls the modeled mass of the body part.
A higher number makes the body part look heavier. This parameter affects all the other parameters.

Breast/Belly/Butt Gravity: Controls the strength of the pull toward the ground.
A higher number means the pull is stronger.

Breast/Belly/Butt Drag: Controls the effect of air resistance.
A higher number increases the air resistance.
With drag turned to 100%, if you jump up, your butt will sag tremendously.
With drag turned to 0%, if you jump up, your butt may move down slightly.
Turning drag up is sort of like pretending that you're moving through jello, so as you move forward, your body parts refuse to come along with you (i.e. they 'drag behind'). ”

Turning Avatar Physics Movement On And Off

If you don't want to see any Avatar Physics movement, including your own, you can disable it in your Viewer.
You can also lower the setting so it is less taxing on your computer.
The settings to control this are under Avatar → Preferences → Graphics.
Avatar Physics Slider

This controls the frequency of display updates for Avatar Physics:

To make Avatar Physics movement smooth, move the slider to a high setting.
To make Avatar Physics less taxing for your computer, move the slider to a lower setting.
Avatar physics movement will be less smooth, and you will not see Avatar Physics movement of avatars who are far away.
A lower setting decreases the update frequency, so Avatar Physics movement will be jerkier.
A higher setting makes movement smoother but may decrease performance.
To turn off Avatar Physics completely, put the Avatar Physics Detail slider at its lowest setting.
This only prevents your Viewer from showing you Avatar Physics movement. If you disable Avatar Physics in your Viewer but your Avatar is wearing a physics item, others can still see your Avatar Physics movement in their Viewers.
If you don't want others to see your Avatar Physics movement:
Don't wear a physics item, or
Wear a physics item, but set the slider for every Max Effect setting to 0.
If you don't want others to see your Avatar Physics movement but wish to see it on yourself and others:
Go to Avatar → Preferences → Firestorm → General → Tick “Dont send Avatar Physics to server”.

Help! I can't get my Avatar to look the way I want. Can you suggest some settings?

Yes we can!

Check out the MarketPlace for avatar physics. There are freebies there

Known Issues

Attachments don't move with my breasts, belly, or butt: This is a technical limitation. There is currently no way to create an attachment point that moves with your breasts, belly, or butt, so attachments can only move with your internal avatar skeleton.
See VWR-25446.
When laggy, Physics do strange things: Unfortunately this can happen but the strange effects you see are totally client side. Only you see this. You will still look correct to others. If your FPS drops low, your Physics may start to behave in an “interesting” way. Similarly, extremely high FPS (over 100) can give strange client side effects. The fact that Avatar Physics can bug out at very low or high FPS is a known issue to LL and they are working on improvements to address this. The main factor here seems to be the gain setting. If gain is high, it'll get “wiggly” when FPS drops too low. Details can be found on these LL JIRA issues: VWR-25545, VWR-25585, VWR-25584.
I've heard others on Viewers that don't support Avatar Physics will see me as Ruthed, is this true? This is possible. Please see VWR-25479 on the LL JIRA for details on this issue. There can be no 100% fix for this as its an inherent incompatibility between LL's Avatar Physics code and older V1 based viewers. LL refuse to fix this issue server-side, since SL 1.23 and Snowglobe are the only viewers unable to be fixed to work around this issue. All other Third Party Viewers can be patched to eliminate this “bug”. No Viewer 2 based Viewer will see you as Ruthed. Other users on Firestorm and Phoenix 1102 & above wont see you as Ruthed. Singularity Viewer already has Avatar Physics added, so you will look correct to users of this Viewer. Its expected that Imprudence, Ascent and the other TPV's will be updating shortly. If your friends tell you that you look Ruthed to them, they will need to update their Viewer.
Workarounds for this issue:

If you appear Ruthed to friends on out of date Viewers, you can do the following:

Take off your Avatar Physics Layer.
You must then TP to another SIM or relog for the server to display your shape correctly again to out of date Viewers.
You will still see others Avatar Physics correctly, but no one including yourself will see yours.
or…

Go to Avatar → Preferences → Firestorm → Avatar → Tick “Don't send Avatar Physics to server”. You must then TP to another SIM or relog for this settings change to kick in.
You will then look correct to any viewer, you will still see your own Avatar Physics & those of others, but nobody will be able to see your Avatar Physics effects.