Shiba Viewer

Features

What Shiba Viewer adds on top of Firestorm. Anything that changes how things look is optional and can be switched off.

Poser: a full animation studio

• Timeline: pose your avatar at different moments, press Play to watch it move, and save it as an animation you can upload. Up to 60 seconds.
• Drag limbs: grab a hand, foot or the hips and drag; the arm or leg follows and the elbow or knee bends naturally. Feet stay planted when you move the hips.
• Planted feet and hands: pin a foot and it stays exactly where it is between keys - no more sliding feet in squats and dances.
• Curves: see each bone's motion over the whole animation and drag it into shape.
• Layers: add breathing, a head bob or a sway on top, each with its own strength.
• Beat: set or tap the music's BPM, snap keys to the beat, hear a tick while playing.
• Jiggle: breasts, butt or any body volume bounce with the movement, live and in the saved animation.
• Faces and hands: facial expressions for Bento heads, finger-by-finger hand shapes, and your own saved faces and hands.
• Symmetry, copy and paste mirrored keys, onion-skin ghosts and motion paths, undo and redo, auto-key.
• Scripts: write an animation as plain text and press Run. Examples included: wave, idle, dance bounce, walk cycle.
• One-click upload: opens Second Life's upload window already filled in. Also saves .anim and .bvh for Blender.
• Film: record camera shots - position, angle and zoom - on their own timeline, played with your animation or on their own. Made for machinima.

Pose the details

• Joint dots right on the avatar for fingers, face, eyes, ears, wings and tails - click and turn.
• Select several bones at once, or a whole spine, arm, leg or tail in one click, and curl them together.
• A look target: drag the ball in front of the face and the head turns to look at it.
• Foot roll: rise onto the toes or rock back on the heel, and the knee follows.
• T-pose and Stand buttons give a clean starting pose whatever your AO was doing.

Looks

• Tone mapping choices, from natural film looks to punchy and bright, with automatic exposure.
• Physical sky: a realistic daytime sky, a real starfield at night and an aurora borealis.
• Mirrors with clear, correct reflections.
• Cartoon (flat, comic-style shading with outlines) and manga (classic print screentone dots) styles.
• Depth of field that tracks what you look at, and smoother see-through surfaces (glass, hair, foliage).
• Ambient occlusion you can tune: a strength slider and a cheaper half-resolution mode.
• Music Lights: the lights around you pulse and change colour with the parcel music. Never strobes.
• Optional handheld camera shake, a video recorder and Spout streaming for OBS.

Performance

• Avatars come out of the grey cloud stage sooner: meshes, bakes and the texture cache load in a better order.
• Faster teleport arrival; disk work no longer stalls the frame while a region loads.
• GPU texture decoding on NVIDIA cards, and textures are no longer decoded twice.
• More FPS by drawing the world at a lower resolution, with AMD FSR keeping it sharp.
• Choose how many nearby lights are drawn, and a "Low End" graphics preset for older PCs.
• Video on prims plays at full speed; sites you choose always play smoothly.
• Large inventories (100,000+ items) no longer cost FPS and memory in the background.
• Graphics are prepared once after an update, with progress shown instead of a black window.

Handy tools

• Inventory Cleanup: finds unpacked delivery boxes, exact duplicates, old demos and broken links. It never deletes anything - it sets items aside, and every move can be undone.
• Import from another viewer: bring your settings, chat history, contact sets and teleport history over from Firestorm or Black Dragon.
• Mute Sounds per person: silence someone's gesture and attachment sounds without blocking them. Remembered after relog.
• Object snap in the Build window, and an easier move gizmo with axis labels.
• A login page with grid status, destinations and what's new.
• Reload Avatars, a refresh button for audio devices, and a Gesture toggle button.

Fixed compared to stock Firestorm

Bugs that stock Firestorm still has, fixed in Shiba Viewer.

• Sky flash when high upWith an altitude sky, the ground-level sky flashed for a few seconds after login and teleports.
• Given folders missing until relogFolders delivered by boxes and vendors did not show in inventory until you logged out and back in.
• Rebake Textures reloaded everythingRebaking made every attachment and HUD download its textures again.
• Crash with two folder pickersOpening a second folder picker while one was open crashed the viewer.
• Slow start, twice, after updatesAfter a version change the graphics cache was wiped and then never saved, so the next start was slow all over again.
• Lights switching off on glass and hairSee-through surfaces (hair, glass, road markings) are lit by only six nearby lights, so lamps flick off as you move. An option in Graphics > Rendering lights them with up to 255.
• Big inventory, low FPSVery large inventories kept costing frame time even with the inventory window closed.
• Video choppy on primsMedia on prims was updated too rarely to play smoothly at high frame rates.

Screenshots

What's new

Install

1. Download the installer with the button above.
2. Run it. Windows may show "Windows protected your PC", because the installer is new and not yet widely downloaded. Click More info, then Run anyway.
3. Log in as usual. Coming from Firestorm or Black Dragon? Use Avatar > Import from Another Viewer after logging in to bring your settings and chat history along.
4. That's it. Updates arrive on their own: the viewer asks at startup, or use Help > Check for updates...

FAQ