Update Alert

Just a short note to let you know that I’ve finally brought my old but still frequently accessed blog post on taking pictures in SL up to date. I’ve added small bits of new information thoughout and put in a new section on resolution and image quality. The section on aspect ratio got a major rewrite to reflect the changes in the SL viewer since then. Have fun!

Face the Light

Time for another installment in Dylan’s popular series of Tips and Tricks. This time, let’s talk about something that can make your avatar look better when done right, but will make it look like Bela Lugosi in a 1930s horror flick when done wrong. The sinister thing is that you might not see the effect it has for others, depending on which Second Life viewer version you use. Let’s talk about facelights.

Note: As of April 2, 2008, the regular Second Life viewer is based on the Windlight engine. Some problems I mention here that have to do with the differences between Windlight and the older graphics engine will soon be a thing of the past. Still, if you’ve only now switched to Windlight and are wondering why your facelight suddenly looks so awful, you’ll find some clues here.

A facelight is a light-giving object you wear somewhere on your avatar to brighten up your face. The idea is first of all to make your face visible at all in dark surroundings, but also to make it look better by getting rid of stark shadows and smoothing over some of the less attractive parts of the polygon mesh that makes up the shape of your face. So far, so good.

The first thing to keep in mind when using a facelight is that it will work only for observers who have local lights enabled in their SL viewer. To check whether they are enabled for you if you are using the regular SL viewer, go to your preferences (ctrl-P), click on the Graphics Detail tab and look up whether the “Nearby local lights” option is active. If you are using the current Release Candidate viewer (which already contains the new Windlight graphics engine), go to the Graphics tab, check the “Custom” box to make the advanced options appear and find the “Nearby local lights” option at the bottom. If that option is inactive, you will see neither your own nor anyone else’s facelight, nor any other local lighting that may be present in your location. If your equipment can handle it, always keep that option active; it makes a huge difference for the better in the way Second Life looks.

You might ask why that option is called “Nearby local lights”. The reason is that the way local lighting is set up in SL, you can see only the light from the six light sources nearest to you. It’s simply a matter of saving computing power. Six light sources, that’s all; everything else will be ignored by your viewer.

This brings me to my first rule for using facelights: Don’t use them all the time. Use them only when you are in a badly lit environment. Good builders take great care to incorporate local lighting into their builds so that additional personal facelights will not be needed. And not just not needed, they may even destroy the effect the builders want to achieve with their lighting setup, so you deprive yourself and others of the enjoyment of seeing things the way the creators intended.

The second rule is: Always examine the effect of your facelight in different daytime settings in both the regular and the Windlight (RC) viewers. If your computer can’t run Windlight, get feedback and maybe pictures from friends. This is important because what the facelight does to your face in Windlight may be vastly different from what you see in the regular viewer. Local lighting works very different in these versions. While in the regular viewer the light is very diffuse, in Windlight the direction the light is coming from is clearly seen. The facelight of the lady in the following picture is located in her choker. She was using the regular viewer, so she wasn’t aware of how weird that looked in the more realistic lighting environment of Windlight at all.

Note how her nose and her lower jaw and the underside of her hair are lit from straight below. Pure Lugosi.

Another problem that is much more noticable in Windlight than in the regular viewer is that many people are running around with facelights that are much too bright for their skin tone and/or that light up a much too large area. Sometimes I think I’m looking straight into the center of a nuclear explosion when someone with a facelight like that rezzes in. Even after the initial blinding shock has passed, their faces are hardly visible because the intense light is washing out all colours and contours. One more reason to always check in both viewer versions.

So what do you do if it turns out that your facelight makes you look like Dracula? Don’t panic. A facelight is no rocket science. You can make yourself a good one within a couple of minutes. Here’s how:

1. Go to your home or some other place where you are allowed to build and create an object. The shape and size of the object doesn’t really matter, so if you know nothing about building at all just right-click on the ground, select “Create” from the pie menu, and then left-click on the ground. A plywood box will appear, and you will see the Edit window on your screen, with the “General” tab open. If you know how, you can choose a ball instead of a box and make the object smaller.

2. Give the object a name. Just put “Facelight” where it says “Object”.

3. Then go to the “Features” tab. Click the Light option and fill in the values:

My advice: Leave the colour unchanged. Anything other than white light might do funny things to your skin tone. The intensity is a value you might want to play with a little. 1.000 is the maximum value and looks good for darker skins. If your skin is very light, you might want to try a lower value. Radius is set to 10.000 by default, which is much too high for a facelight. 0.800 to 1.200 is plenty enough. Set Falloff down to 0.000.

4. Make your facelight (the object, not the light) invisible. You do that by going to the “Texture” tab, clicking the texture image and then replacing the plywood texture with a fully transparent texture. If you don’t have one, pick up a freebie textures box somewhere or ask your friends. Someone will have one for you. If all else fails, give me a shout in-world, I’ll give you one. Note: Setting the “Transparency” spinner on the “Texture” tab to 100 won’t work, the spinner only goes up to 90. Your object won’t be completely invisible. You need the invisible texture.

5. Close the edit window and take the object into your inventory.

6. Find the object in your inventory, right-click on it and select “Attach to”. Select an unused spot in your face, the chin for example.

7. The next step is probably easiest if you do it standing on a posestand. You’ll find one in any clothes store in SL. Press Ctrl-Alt-T to make all invisible objects visible. You will see your facelight as a red, half-transparent shape right in your face where you attached it. Right-click it and select “Edit” from the pie menu. Now you will see the edit window again, and also 3 axes going through the middle of your object – red, green and blue. Each axis has two cone-shaped handles. Move your mouse cursor over one of the handles on the red axis (which will point away from your face) until the handle gets larger and lights up. You can then grab the handle with the left mouse button and drag it carefully away from your face. The object will follow the handle. Drag until the object’s center is floating about 30 or 40 cm in front of your face. Close the edit window and press Ctrl-Alt-T again to make the red beacons disappear.

8. That’s it! Now if you want to detach the facelight, right-click it in your inventory and select “Detach”. If you need it, right-click and “Wear”.

9. And if all this is too much hassle, just visit The Shelter, go to my info stand to the left of the freebie corner and pick up your free ready-made, full-perm facelight from there. That one’s even got a built-in script that lets you switch it on and off with chat commands .

One final hint: When you’re dancing with someone, even if your facelight is set up properly for yourself, chances are it will be too close to the face of your dance partner and make them look ugly. There are ways to solve that, for example by adjusting the light intensity down to 0.500 if both of you are wearing facelights, but in most cases it’s probably easiest to just leave facelights off while dancing with a partner.

The Tao of AO

(Updated October 15, 2009.)

AOs (animation overriders) are one of the must-haves for anyone who cares about their SL appearance. What good is the sexiest, hunkiest avatar if it moves like a badly oiled robot? So there’s a need to replace at least some of the default SL animations, especially the walk, with better, smoother looking animations. That’s what an AO is for.

Now the animations you need for that you can pick up as freebies in many places. You can also buy very good ones all over SL for a rather small price. The AO gadgets as such are free, and often you can find an AO already loaded with free animations as part of a freebie package. Fully loaded AOs with high quality animations are available from well-known animation vendors such as Vista, The Motion Merchant, or Abranimations. These aren’t cheap though – a good AO package costs between L$800 and L$1200; sometimes much more.

At some point, though, I predict you will want to individualize your avatar further – replace that walk or that standing pose from the package with an even nicer one you found somewhere or maybe even created yourself. Then at least you will want to know what components an AO is made of, how it works and how you can adapt it to your personal needs. So here’s your Tao of AO – all you ever wanted to know about AOs but were afraid of asking.

Getting Started

If you have some L$, you will probably be tempted just to go out to one of the major dealers and buy a good, fully loaded AO from them. This is certainly the easiest way, and if it doesn’t make a difference to you whether you spend more than you need to or not, this might be the way to go for you.

If you care about spending your money wisely, on the other hand, I wouldn’t recommend this for a couple of reasons. For one thing, with a fully loaded AO you are buying replacements for all default animations, including flying, flying up, flying down, landing, jumping etc. Most of the time, it isn’t really necessary to replace all of those, so you are paying for stuff you don’t need.

The second reason is that you probably won’t like all the animations in a package. You might like the walk and some of the stand poses, but other stand poses and some of the sit poses might look weird to you. So you’ll end up replacing the animations you don’t like with others that are more to your taste, thus spending even more money. Maybe you’ll even get so fed up with the package that you’ll buy an entire new one, like I did.

If I had to do it again, I’d start by picking up one of the free AO gadgets – my hands-down recommendation is the ZHAO-II, which you can find here - and filling it bit by bit with animations I like: first with a walk and a few stand poses and a sit pose, then bit by bit with other things I need or think would be nice to have.

To make it a bit easier for you, you can also pick up a free AO Starter Kit from my own store, dylanimoves, pre-configured with some of the most needed animations: a walk, three stand poses and a sit pose (female and male versions available).

Whichever way you go, it will be helpful for you to take a closer look at your AO and the parts it is made of.

Dissecting your AO

First of all, an AO is an object, either an invisible one that you wear somewhere on your avatar or a HUD object, that is an object that shows up as a display on your screen. Of course, all the things that make the AO do what it is supposed to do are inside this object, so we have to open it and have a look at the innards.

Now in the instructions it always says you have to drag your AO object from your inventory to the ground to open it and edit its contents. As the object is usually quite small and at least partly invisible, this can be a bit tricky. Countless AOs have been lost because people did that and then couldn’t find the object anymore. So be careful when you put your AO on the ground. The ideal place to do it is a smooth, uncluttered surface in a sandbox (that way, if you do lose it after all, it will be automatically returned to you after a while). Or, if you happen to be at the Shelter, you can do it right here – auto-return is set to 5 minutes. Use “View – Highlight Transparent” (Ctrl-Alt-T) and make yourself acquainted with moving your camera with Alt + left mouse button and Ctrl-Alt + left mouse button.

The good news is that you don’t have to do that every time. It’s perfectly possible to edit and open your AO while you are wearing it, and of course it is much easier, especially if it’s a HUD attachment. Just right-click on it, select “Edit” from the pie menu that appears, and then go to the “Contents” tab. The only thing you can NOT do while you are wearing your AO is dragging animations into it unless they have full permissions. Everything else works fine. (Thanks to StormCrow for correcting me on this point.)

Got it? Right. Now in the Contents tab of your AO object, you will see up to 3 kinds of things:

(1) The AO script(s). This is the heart and soul of your AO. Without them, it’s just a dead object. You don’t have to concern yourself with them, other than never deleting them.

(2) One or more notecards. One notecard that definitely has to be in there is the one that specifies which built-in SL animations are going to be replaced by which new ones. Very often it is called “Default” or “Default Anims”. If you’ve bought a pre-loaded AO, it’s alrealdy filled in; if you’re starting with an empty AO, you have to edit it to fill in the names of your animations in the appropriate lines.

Some pre-loaded AOs leave the “Default Anims” notecard unchanged and put this information in a second notecard, which might be called “Set 1″, for example. Actually, you can have as many of these notecards in your AO as you want. For example, you might have one notecard for your normal everyday movements, another one for times when you want to move like a drunk, another one for times when you want to move like a zombie. When you’re wearing your AO, you can use the menu to load the notecard you want.

Another type of notecard you might find in there is one of instructions for you to read. The best thing is to copy this one to your inventory so you don’t have to edit your AO every time you want to read it.

(3) The last thing that belongs in your AO is the animations you want to use. If your AO isn’t pre-loaded, drag them here from your inventory.

Example

Here’s an example of what a ZHAO-II, loaded with a walk and 3 standing poses, would look like:

Notice how the “Walk: Sexy Slow” animation from the objects contents is named as the walk replacement in the [Walking ] line in the “Default” notecard. For [ Standing ], the 3 standing poses are named, separated by the pipe character (|). This format may be slightly different with other AOs. Many use a separate line for each standing pose, for example, but the basic principle is the same.

A Matter of Taste

Lastly, a personal recommendation if you are going to use freebie animations with your AO: use your good taste and judgment. Try out animations from different sources and see which you like best. Specifically, not every freebie standing pose you find will really look better than the built-in SL animations. Many so-called standing poses are really modeling poses, totally static and unnatural. In my opinion, you’ll be better off sticking with the built-in animations until you can find a really good standing pose.

Right! Thanks for reading this far. Now get moving!

Some Hints on Taking Pictures in Second Life

(Updated July 2009)

Today I’d like to write about a practical aspect in SL that many people seem to have some difficulty with – taking pictures. While getting a snapshot is a breeze, getting it to look really good presents some challenges. The areas where many SL photographs fall short of the desired result are camera position, resolution / image quality, lighting and aspect ratio. Here are a few hints that will help you overcome the most common difficulties in these areas.

Camera Position

The first requirement of a good photo is that it should show what it’s supposed to show. To achieve that, you have to know how to move your camera. There are essentially two ways to do that.

The first method is to move your mouse cursor on the desired subject of your pic, press and hold the Alt key (the mouse cursor turns into a magnifying glass), press and hold the left mouse button and move the mouse. You’ll notice that you can easily dolly your camera around the selected object or avatar that way, as well as zooming in and out.

By additionally pressing and holding the Ctrl key, you can also tilt the camera angle up and down.

This gives you a lot of freedom to place your camera at exactly the right spot, always keeping your subject in the center of the frame. (If it doesn’t seem possible to select the object you want to focus on, the cause might be an invisible object between you and it that receives the focus instead. Try approaching your subject from a different angle.)

The second method is a little control box called Camera Controls, which you can access from the View menu. It consists of 2 circular controls and a control bar between them. After focusing on an object (Alt + Left mouse button), the left control moves the camera in a horizontal or vertical circle around the object. The right control pans the camera in a straight horizontal or vertical line. And the bar in the middle zooms in and out.

Try which of these methods suits you better. It might be that you’ll use one of them for some kinds of motifs and the other for other kinds.

For both, it can be helpful to get rid of the default camera constraints. You do that via the Advanced menu (press Ctrl-Alt-D if you don’t see it; it will appear next to Help in the top menu bar): Advanced – Disable Camera Constraints.

Hitting Ctrl-0 once or several times is a great way to zoom into a close-up. After using it, Ctrl-9 will reset your view. (Ctrl-8 does the opposite of Ctrl-0).

And now for a trick I’ve learned only recently and which is a HUGE help, especially when you want to shoot a pic of a moving object or avatar – dancing avatars for example. If you’ve ever tried it, you know how hard it is to get both the right moment and the right camera angle for that perfect shot you’re aiming for. Well, did you ever notice that Freeze frame option on the snapshot dialog? It gives you a full size preview of your photo instead of the little thumbnail on the dialog window. And here it comes: you can move your camera AFTER you’ve freezed the preview! That means you can just hit “Snapshot” at the right moment and then take all the time in the world to place your camera exactly where you want it. If you check the “Keep open after saving” option additionally, you can even shoot the same frame several times from different angles. I recommend checking “Auto-refresh” too, as it is all too easy to forget hitting the Refresh button in the heat of battle. Try it out, it makes a world of difference!

Resolution / Image Quality

It goes without saying that if you want to make good pictures, you should use the highest graphics quality your system can handle. Even if you usually use a lower setting for moving about, it’s worth pulling the slider as high as possible when shooting photos. After all, you don’t need a great frame rate for a good still picture!

While you’re in your graphics preferences, take a look at the “Hardware Options” button, too. Here are some often overlooked settings that make a huge difference for the image quality. Especially Anti-aliasing (16x if possible) is essential. Anisotropic Filtering is very useful too. Rule of thumb for shooting photos: If it doesn’t make you crash, use it.

Another important step to enhance the quality of your shots is to save your pictures at a higher resolution. Use the dropdown menu under “Size” in the snapshot dialog to specify your resolution. If you use “File – Snapshot to Disk” or Ctrl-` to shoot a pic, checking the “High-res Snapshot” option (again in the Advanced menu) will make sure that your snapshot is saved at double resolution.

Lighting

Lighting for photography is an art form in itself, so only a few very basic things can be said about it here. Of course you want your picture to be light enough to be able to see what’s in it. Most people try to achieve that by just forcing the sun (World – Force Sun) to noon.

While this will surely fill the scene with plenty of light, however, it doesn’t always yield the desired result. For example, when you’re trying to make a portrait of an avatar, it might be that the noon setting leaves the avatar’s face in relative shadow. In that case, you might be better off with the “Sunrise” or the “Sunset” setting under “Force Sun”. (Or with turning the avatar’s face toward the sun if that is an option.)

If this doesn’t get you what you want (for example when you want to take a picture in a nighttime setting), you have to use artificial lighting.

For that to work, the “Nearby local lights” option in the Graphics tab in your preferences has to be enabled. (Checking that will possibly be all you need to do to solve your lighting problem as local lights are already present in many places.)

Making a light source is easy peasy Japanese. Just create an object, go to the Features tab in the edit window and check the Light option. Play around with the light object’s position relative to your subject and the light colour, intensity, radius and falloff until you get the look you want. You will see that it is possible to create some really artsy effects that way. If you get adventurous, experiment with more than one light source in different colours.

Aspect Ratio

This is a point where the SL developers have gone out of their way to confuse us, with gratifying results. So let’s screw our heads on tightly for a moment and see if we can find a path through the thicket. If you don’t panic, it’s not so difficult after all, promise.

First of all, what is aspect ratio? Quite simply, it’s the relative length of the sides of a picture, mathematically expressed as a division. For example, in a square picture the width is the same as the height, so its aspect ratio is 1:1. A conventional computer or tv screen is one third wider than it is high, so its aspect ratio is 4:3. Modern widescreen TV screens are still wider in relation to their height; they have an aspect ratio of 16:9.

With me so far? Good. Now imagine you have a 4:3 picture and change it’s aspect ratio to 1:1. That’s as if you were putting the picture sideways into a vice and squeezing it. Of course, everything in the picture – faces, bodies, objects – is getting squeezed, too. Hence all those pictures you see in SL of people looking much thinner than they are.

Or you have a 4:3 picture and turn it into a 16:9 picture. In this case, you put it vertically into the vice and squeeze, so the result is that everything looks flattened as if run over by a steamroller.

Now you may ask, why should I want to change a picture’s aspect ratio in the first place? If I leave it just as it is, I won’t have a problem, right? Wrong, because this is where the built-in SL confusion comes in. I shouldn’t complain, as it used to be a lot more confusing than it is now, but it’s still all too easy for a beginner to end up with a horribly distorted picture.

This confusion results from the fact that in SL we are constantly forced to change the aspect ratio of our pictures without even being asked.

It starts with the three main options you’re presented with when you open your Snapshot dialog. You can send your picture via email, save the snapshot to your inventory or save it to your hard drive. Sending via email and saving to your hard drive will work fine. What you will get is a picture with the same dimensions as your screen, minus the user interface parts. If you try saving the picture to your inventory, though, the fun begins.

The reason is  a peculiarity both with pictures you upload from your hard drive to SL and with snapshots you save directly to your inventory, namely that SL will change their aspect ratio. Whenever you upload a picture to SL, its dimensions will be rounded up or off to the closest power of 2. So if you try to upload a picture with an original size of 1024×768 (aspect ratio 4:3), for example, SL will accept the 1024, which is a power of 2, but it won’t like the 768, which is not. What you will end up with is a picture of the size 1024×512 which will be noticeably vertically squeezed.

A similar thing will happen when you save a snapshot to your inventory. The difference here is that in addition to having its sides resized to powers of 2, a snapshot saved to inventory will always be square. Now I’m willing to bet my entire inventory that your screen isn’t square. So what you will get is a square picture that looks noticeably horizontally squeezed if you have a 4:3 screen or ridiculously distorted if you have a 16:9 screen.

Of course, if you’re planning to put your picture on a prim in SL, you can correct the aspect ratio. Just make sure that the dimensions of your prim have the same proportions as those of your original picture.

If you just want the picture in your inventory though to look at it there and share it with others, you should change the original size. The option for that is hidden by default and will only appear when you click the “More>>” button in the Snapshot dialog. There you’ll find a drop-down menu for your picture size. The default setting is “Current window”. The drop-down list offers you several square formats and a Custom option. Make sure you specify a square format when saving to inventory, and you’ll end up with a correct aspect ratio. When you prepare a picture or texture in your graphics program to upload to SL, make sure you use powers of 2 as its dimensions so SL won’t mess it up when you upload it.

Still with me? Excellent! For SL has one more hurdle of confusion for us to take.

One of the most common uses for snapshots is your profile. And guess what? For the different tabs in your profile, you need not one, not two, but THREE DIFFERENT ASPECT RATIOS!

I kid you not. The picture frames on the 2nd Life and Classifieds tabs are roughly 4:3, the one on the Picks tab roughly 16:9, and the one on the 1st Life tab 1:1.

As you know by now, the only one of these formats at which you could save a snapshot to your inventory without distortion is the 1:1, and that is precisely the tab where, by definition, a snapshot from within SL is no use at all. They really have thought this through, those Lindens!

So how do you get pics for your profile without (too much) distortion?

Generally, you have two options: Either save the pictures to your hard drive first, edit them in your graphics program, then upload them back to SL, or do it all within SL by selecting the Custom option for the size and putting in the right numbers.

The thing to remember here is that the pictures should be small, because the frames are small, so large pictures would only make your profile unnecessarily slow to load.

First, option one: you edit the pics in your graphics program. In this case, either specify a custom size with the correct aspect ratio when you shoot the pic, or crop it to the correct aspect ratio in your software. Then, resize them to 256×256 (2nd Life and Classifieds), 512×256 (Picks) or 128×128 (1st Life) and upload them. They will look square and distorted, but they will look correct as soon as you put them in their frames in your profile.

Option two: you do it all within SL. In this case, select “Custom” when you shoot the pics and specify the following dimensions: 320×240 for the 2nd Life and Classifieds tabs, 512×288 for the Picks tab. Again, the resulting pictures will be square and distorted, but will look right in their frames. If you want to use an SL picture on your 1st Life tab after all, 128×128 will do for that one.

Phew! That was a hard piece of work. You’ve earned yourself a cuppa and a nice dance and chat at the Shelter now. Hope this helps you to get great pictures of your Second Life from now on. If you get stuck, just ask!

Appendix:
A Note on Widescreen Monitors

Okay, I got myself a widescreen monitor now, and I noticed something that’s rather annoying and bears mentioning here. On a 16:9 screen, SL doesn’t give you a real 16:9 image but does the same thing that widescreen tv sets do when they have to display a 4:3 image and fill the whole screen with it instead of leaving black bars at the sides. It’s sometimes called “Smart Zoom” or something in that vein. The 4:3 image is stretched horizontally, but not uniformly, but the stretching gets more pronounced toward the left and right side, so that the middle of the image stays relatively distortion-free, while the distortion gets almost unbearably obvious toward the edges. No use at all for photography. That’s why I’ve decided to specify a 4:3 format like 1600×1200 when I save pictures to my hard drive instead of using the Current window setting.