Sunday, January 16, 2011

Shady Shadows

I LOVE to take pictures in Second Life.  Sometime candids, but mostly I love to set it up, pick an appropriate outfit, and make sure the lighting is good.  It takes hours, and the hours fly by.  It's challenging to get everything just right and if all goes well, it may make it to my Flickr account.

The thing that had been driving me crazy, is that other people have shadows in their pictures...  I didn't know how to do that.  Were they doing something in GIMP or another photo program that I had to learn?  SL didn't have shadows... or so I thought... until today.

I was lucky enough to stumble across how to do this.  Here it is if you want to do it too...

How to Enable Shadows (I'm using the SL 2.4 Viewer, Dec. 15 2010):
  • Press Ctrl+Alt+D to bring up the Advanced Menu
  • then Press Ctrl+Alt+Q to bring up the Develop Menu
  • Go to Develop -> Rendering -> check Framebuffer Objects
  • then check Light and Shadows -> Shadows from Sun/Moon/Projectors -> and SSAO and Shadow Smoothing
Yayyy!  I'm soooo happy!  It's those little things in Second Life...



It uses a ton of bandwidth, so I can't use it all the time, but when I'm ready to snap that shot, ITS ON!!!

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Enter a recluse's paradise

I have way too much to say to put it in a status update somewhere, or the limited amount of character space to tell you "what's happening" on Twitter.  Besides I don't want to answer the question of what's on my mind every damn day.  It's pressure I don't need.

Welcome to my musings... with a little touch of undiagnosed OCD, and the outlook on life that everyone is like me, yet they truly aren't.  Sometimes I have to figure out where the heck they are coming from in order to process their information so I can decide how to respond to them appropriately.  I'm a lot sarcastic, and my humor is somewhat sideways, so it doesn't always jive.

Thank goodness for Second Life.  A place to go that I can create my own world and I don't have to necessarily interact with anyone if I don't want to.  Mostly it's a IM kinda chatting and I have time before I can respond, so I can try to pick the right responses.  I feel like it's time to stop being such a recluse, however, and this is my attempt to reach out... although still somewhat removed, cause I don't have to really talk to you... you can just read.

Marylis is my home and my friend Dave's home in Second Life.  Dave pretty much lets me have run of the sim, and decorate to my heart's content.  Lately we have been trying to figure out a way to make it look like there is a sunset, where there is a orange glowing ball of gas that sinks into the ocean at the same time that the SL sun sets.  The SL sun is a ball of good looking sun during the day but it loses it's shape on the horizons.  WTF???  We are continuing to work on it, because it has not been successful so far.  We may give up too, cause some things can't be fixed to my idea of perfection (damn it!).



Anyone can stop by on Marylis. Come and loiter...  we love visitors.

SLurl-->  Visit Marylis