New World Tableau: Connie Sec's Nude In Shadowdraft

Most screenshots taken in KirstenLee's Shadowdraft or other open source versions of the Lindens' dynamic lighting code focus on the way it renders architecture and other objects. This detail from a nude portrait modeled and created by Connie Sec shows us how shadow makes an avatar's flesh come alive. Click here for the full view, or after the break (possibly not safe for work viewing, obviously.) Of course, she performed more loving ministrations on the image before and after post-processing, which included some tricky details that screenshots in Shadowdraft bring up. Read how she did it after the break.

"The background is a texture mimicking light falling on a surface which is textured on a prim behind me," Connie writes me. "The shadow on it and my body (the hand and hair shadow on the torso for example) is generated by the Shadowdraft (SD) viewer. Work went into setup beforehand, with a lot of mucking about with WindLight settings and local light intensity, radius and falloff.

"The generation of shadows does add another element that doesn't necessarily work with my normal avatar lighting, and presets I've saved in my normal viewer that I'd copied into the skies folder of the SD Client.

"The skin too is important, so I put this one together myself. Many skins have heavy baked in shadows and highlights, which look good for a quick screenshot with heavy facelight on. However this won't work with SD, as the shadows and so on can conflict with the 'perceived' shadows baked into a skin. It's a delicate balancing act to have a skin with 'depth" but without overpowering 'mock environmental' lighting.

"An analogy would be the prim shadows we have now and the shadows cast by the SD client. If you took a pic with both in a landscape, it would look pretty unrealistic with the sun- generated shadows pointing in a different direction to the prim shadows.

"The post- processing: I needed to get a large shot to work with, so I took two shots of the same scene and then laid one on the other. The top pic I made transparent by 50%. My software (Photodraw 2000) then makes the resultant pic 50% bigger. With a square aspect ratio this can usually be around 1800 x 1800 or larger. I then used a warping tool to fix the avatar glitches (eg: wrist bulge). I also 'improved' the breasts with that tool, as the SL avatar mesh doesn't allow you to get a realistic curve at the top and bottom of them. I then used the N-filter (in Gimp) to enhance with edge detect, alpha optimize and so on to bring out the detail in the skin. I then used sharpen to, well, sharpen, then worked on the brightness and contrast.

"As SD doesn't allow anisotropic filtering, or antialaising, the raw picture is usually very jaggy. This can sometimes be 'enhanced' by any sharpening you do. I therefore had to hand fix with a paint smear brush to rid myself of the jaggies before doing any of the above. This is one reason I make any pics I do in SD as large as I can."

See more of Connie Sec's equally great work in her Koinup account.

Comments

[Dagny]

*sighs* "If only I could find the shadow viewer available somewhere. Sadly, I learned of it after the whole GPL affair, and it was removed from availability."

[Connie Sec]

There is a shadow version of coolviewer available here
There is also a shadowdraft version of Coolviewer:

my.opera.com/boylane/blog/
However there is a glitch that makes your eyes and lips look horrid..and i haven't been able to sort out why. But works just fine for landscapes and such. but may be worth to Ggve it a try. If you can sort out the glitch..please let me know.