There's been lots of interest in Stevie Davros' Custom Skies now in the SL Marketplace, so here's Stevie's step-by-step tutorial video for updating the default SL skies in your viewer to those custom-made by him or anyone else, for that matter. This tutorial is specifically for the Mac version of the viewer, but Stevie tells me the process for Windows should more or less be the same, except more Windows-ish. (Hopefully Windows users can post some tips in Comments.)
As discussed in the first NWN post on his clouds, these custom sets are pre-loaded into the viewer, so Davros says they don't impact a user's Second Life performance -- and because only the user with Davros' Firestorm feature can see these skies at all, they're ideal for SL photography and machinima.
I purchased one of these via the marketplace. I am pleased, but must highlight a few points. First, this really is a bit tricky to install. The marketplace purchase just points you to a website where you need to download and unzip files. Then you need to copy them over manually to various locations. (BTW - unless you are a Mac-person, ignore the video and just follow the text files that come with the download.)
Further -at least in Firestorm- you need to go to "Preferences>Firestorm>Windlight" and change your default cloud from "default" to some other .tga file. Then you need to reboot. This will change the cloud pattern, but to really see something exceptional you need to figure out how to change the Windlight settings from "region specific" to "fixed" and do a bit more poking around. When all is said and done, these do look cool. I certainly got my Linden's worth, but it was not a trivial process.
One unexpected benefit of working through all this is that it highlights the fact that -again, perhaps just in Firestorm- there are alternative cloud and sky settings built into the viewer - much more than there used to be.
Again Davros' files are impressive and worthwhile, but I encourage Firestorm users to also check out their existing capabilities.
Posted by: Lagomorph7 | Tuesday, January 30, 2018 at 12:01 PM