EEP Tutorial – Second Life

Penny Patton has a new written EEP tutorial out about how to use the Enhanced Environment Project, the Windlight update, on your land. She uses the Black Dragon viewer in her tutorial for the source of the illustrations. Most viewers have the exact same panels for setting up the environment. So, the only problem for Firestorm and other viewer users is getting the initial About Land panel open. About Land allows you to edit the parcel’s environment settings. Otherwise, you are editing your personal view of the environment.

Custom Environment

At ground level in Firestorm, you can right-click the ground and select About Land. You can then edit the environment at the parcel or region level. Easy.

In Firestorm, the World->Region Details or Alt+R and then the Environment tab opens the same environment panel but, for Estate Managers until you right-click the ground you are editing your personal settings. And if you click on anything else you snap out of the parcel environment edit mode.

Also, if you teleport up to a high altitude you will likely lose the link to the parcel and can’t edit the environment.

I have a Green Room set up at 2,200m. I want studio lighting for the room. I have to edit my parcel environment settings while at ground level and then TP up to see how it looks.

I did try flying up. That works. It just takes forever to fly up 2,200m. BORING!

But, fortunately, there are better ways… and several different ways to get there.

On the way to better… find the Inventory Library section, it has environment settings. You can do this from the About Land->Environment tab or in Inventory->Library->Environment. In both places the Environment folder is the last in the list.

Included are [AnaLu] AvatarOptimal, CalWL, StrawberrySingh.com Closeups, and Studio Light. All of these are good for doing skin color matching.

There are also a number of folders with environments some of which are meant for skin matching, i.e., Nam’s Optimal Skin and Prim. You’ll have to sort out which you think works best.

I’ve used CalWL forever. But a number of people have written about why it isn’t so great why their choice is so much better. I have used AnaLu’s. I think it works well. I just don’t see much difference.

For the type of photos I like, I need something that casts well defined shadows. I wrote about getting those shadows setup in Firestorm 6.4.12 Shadows for Photography.

Now, the better way. Find an environment setting asset and right-click it. It appears you can right-click an environment setting anywhere you see it and get the same menu. You have some choices, as shown in the image. Click a choice and poof. You are good. Now I can see what I am doing in the 2,000m to 2,999m zone.

The problem with this choice is it sets the environment for all the vertical parcel zones, no matter where you are, i.e., ground, 1,000, 2,000, etc. Play with it a bit and you’ll see how it works. You’ll quickly see one needs to start at ground level and work their way up to have different settings at different altitudes.

You have the most control using the About Land panel where you can easily set the vertical zones.

These Library settings are editable, at least the ones I have tried. But you do have to copy them out of the Library into your own folder to make them editable. They can’t be edited in the Library. These settings make for good starting places for your own custom settings.

If you have a Linden home, you can use these settings on your home parcel. If you rent from someone, you may or may not be able to change your environment settings.

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