Second Life: Dragons as Art

I’ve seen several people write about “From Here On There Be Dragons.” It is an art exhibit in Second Life(TM). Follow the previous link to find a SLURL and visit. The exhibit closed January 31, 2017. I decided to check it out.

Still pictures don’t do it justice. Since I’m learning Adobe Premiere Pro, I decided to video the exhibit and use it as another project.

Exploring the exhibit is a reoccurring ‘leap of faith’ trek. There is a lot if invisible flooring to walk across.

I had heard it was a prim thing… It is but, not the dragons. You’ll see the ‘reflections’ of the dragons in the floor. That is the standard reversed build and transparent flooring. It is VERY well done, even if not totally realistic in a few places… some reflection where there shouldn’t be.

The lighting is way neat… I like how it was done. I don’t recall lighting and atmosphere being used in such an interesting combination. At 1:28, 2:13, and 3:12 the glow effect and sun shrouds my avatar (standing in background). In the later two instances the lens flare effect is pretty neat. I am using Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) and Firestorm. I expect NiranV using his Black Dragon viewer could create some awesome lighting images.

I only used Premiere effects at the transitions, all my own. I’m still experimenting with transitions. The rest of the lighting is as it was captured.

My work flow is getting better. There is much to learn about making video. I thought Photoshop was deep. Premiere has all the image editing along with motion and sound.

A really good video I came across shows how to use the Project Manager to archive a project. Something I never had to really worry about using Photoshop. But, my green screen experiment Dancing in Second Life 2016 accumulated a LOT of video. Way more than I used. I had taken tons of video that wouldn’t work for various reasons. I didn’t recognize many shooting problems until I was trying to edit things together afterward. I had to re-shoot a number of things. Whatever, I came to the point I needed to clean up the Work-In-Progress folder and clean out unused video clips to recover disk space. It was David V. Clarke’s Premiere Pro’s Project manager for backup and archive that I found most informative.

It was also at cleanup time that I decided a terabyte drive isn’t all that big…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *