Viewers

Second Life Photography w/Black Dragon & DoF & Photoshop

2020/04/25 by Nalates Urriah

This is a tutorial on how to use Black Dragon to capture DEPTH information for use in Photoshop (PS). The techniques can be used in GIMP and Paint.Net. The buttons are just in different places.

The reason you may be interested in using PS rather than a viewer’s built-in DoF is to get more control. Viewers tend to provide a perfect render of a scene. Our eyes pick up the texture and dust of real-life so a computer image usually doesn’t fit our experience of how the world looks. Making a photo-realistic is about adding the subtle noise of real life to an image.

This image raised some questions in the SL Forum thread How does your avatar look today? (About 1,300 pages) Mostly, I think, because I pointed out I did the Depth of Field out of focus thing using Photoshop with a Black Dragon Depth map.

Most viewers provide Depth Maps. You can create Windlight settings that will create a depth map too, but that is a PITA. It is easier to use a viewer that has the feature. So, Firestorm or Black Dragon or the Linden Default Viewer. I haven’t checked the others. I assume most have the feature.

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Second Life’s Firestorm Viewer April 2020

2020/04/24 by Nalates Urriah

Everyone is interested in when Firestorm will release a new viewer with the EEP feature. Me too. However, it isn’t urgent for me as I may use the new Linden EEP viewer for a bit as it is said to have a really low crash rate. Something that has been an issue for me with … Read more

Second Life Viewer News 4/23

2020/04/23 by Nalates Urriah

There are some interesting bits of news floating around. Nothing spectacular.

We now have Linden viewers with controls and intelligence for the new Premium Levels and EEP. The release of EEP is a big deal as it has been holding other viewer releases back. With its release we will see new versions of the viewer releasing faster.

The way the Lab develops software is to release a viewer version. Then add all its features to the other release candidates. This merge often causes problems that have to be resolved. Other viewers were held back so EEP could finish and release by having fewer problems to resolve.

Second Life EEP Coming… coming… soon…

2020/04/10 by Nalates Urriah

The Second Life Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP) has taken way longer than anyone at Linden Lab thought. I suspect the reason for that is the old render engine. It is an ancient (in computer time) engine and the original programmers long ago moved on.

Some problems encountered in the project lead the Lindens to bring in some specialists. They have been working on resolving some complex problems. About a month ago, I’m not following viewer development as closely as I used to and my sense of time frames is shaky, the number of problems fixed exceeded the number being reported. So, we are likely to see EEP release soon, probably in April. I’ve missed my guesses a few times now… Lindens are more optimistic.

I am more optimistic because Whirly Fizzle hasn’t found any EEP bugs recently.

Second Life Images/Pictures

2020/02/11 by Nalates Urriah

The Lab has a very interesting image on display in Home > Blogs > Inworld > Second Life Pic of the Day 02.06.2020. I found it interesting because of the avatar poses. Getting poses is sometimes hard. In some cases, one has to make their own. I suspect Madd Flair did some manual posing to … Read more

Second Life News Week #42

2019/10/19 by Nalates Urriah

General Second Life News

BoM

See the feature… change… request BUG-227585 – [BOM] Display the new Universal wearables between the Skin and the Tattoos ones.

Gael Streeter (of GA.EG products) has pointed out a possible problem with the use of the Universal Layer added with BoM, Bakes on Mesh.

As it is now, most are familiar with the original Classic layers provided by the SL system pre-BoM and pre-Mesh, Skin, Tattoo, Underwear, and Clothes. These stacked respectively from bottom to top. Each layer could cover the layer below.

The Universal Layer added a new layer between the Tattoo and Underwear layers. The order of layers doesn’t seem all that important as layers other than skin can be used for any purpose. The problem comes in how people think of the layers and figure out how to use them. So, using a tattoo layer for anything other than a tat is confusing until one learns what is going on.

Skin makers for bodies and heads have run into the problem of adding shiny and wet looks. With the Universal above the Tattoo layer, things get a bit complicated and require way more textures and layer-items to get the look possible if the Universal were moved down one layer.

Think of it as a tat maker having to make their tats for the Tattoo, Universal, Underwear, and possibly the clothes layer so we can dress as we want and stay mix and match.

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