New World Notes

Watch: How to Improve SL Land Impact By Optimizing Mesh in Blender

Poorly optimized content continues to be a bane of Second Life, so here's a useful tutorial for optimizing SL buildings by exporting them in Blender. Presented by longtime creator "Deep Elements", who tells me this process reduces overall land impact by quite a lot:

"It's an EXTREME difference," as DE tells me. "My current build (three floor Building) would have been 271 Land Impact - now it is 94, with a functional elevator, too! All rooms/floors have realistic trimming on ceiling, floor, windows, etc. There is a lot in this build, and to be under 100 is simply marvelous."  

Deep Elements explains how his method reduces Land Impact so significantly:

Watch: How to Apply Make-Up to Hide the Red Lines Caused by "VR Face"

Here's a fun video and tutorial from Jazmin Cano, a User Engagement Manager at High Fidelity, which addresses a major problem with virtual reality that's little addressed by the virtual reality industry in general: The deep lines created by wearing an HMD for extended periods, i.e. "VR Face". Jazmin's solution: Apply blush and other make-up so that the red lines look more like a healthy sun-dappled glow.

"I do this no matter what HMD I'm going to wear," Jazmin tells me. That's because it's a universal problem for VR: "I've worn PSVR, Vive, and Oculus and get a similar result on my face. Redness on top of my cheeks and around my eyes."

As you might guess, her makeup tip varies based on user skin tone:

Cassie's Clips: How to Add Natural Light, Color Burns & Overlays to Your Screenshots With Photoshop

After a brief but much missed absence, Cassie Middles (don't forget to subscribe) is back on New World Notes with a new Photoshop tutorial for enhancing your screenshots: Adding natural light, as well as color burns and overlays.

"A good tip is to check out Deviant Art for stock lighting and vectors you can use in your photos. Please always make sure to read their licensing to see if it's okay to use, or if you need to use credits as well! The one included in this video was free to use, with no credit needed or any rules." (Link below.)

 

"A lot of these techniques are trial and error, working on figuring out which blending would look best with the overlay you use. I decided to use color burn with a lowered opacity on mine! It's always fun to try new things and mess with lighting or editing tips! When in doubt though, ctrl+J! it always makes a new layer that you're working on, helping you be less stressed about messing up, and more inspired to take some chances and experiment! But the main new things I've been enjoying work with are:

• Selective color, making skin look a bit more realistic and less red or yellow.
• Color overlay or color burn. This is effective when messing with the blending layers, making it overlay neatly.
• I used color dodge for this one.
• I also have been having fun with more dramatic shadows and grays.

More tips and resources after the break:

Firestorm QA: Yes, It's Possible to Use Debug Settings to Get Super-High Quality Second Life Images -- Here's How

Last week's post on improving SL image quality via a workaround from SLer Frenchbloke Vanmoer caused a lot of skepticism, mostly due to some poor technical wording on my part. (My bad and mea culpa!) However, Firestorm support and QA volunteer Whirly Fizzle came by Comments, and confirmed that this does, indeed, apparently work:

When I first read this blog post I thought it was a load of cobblers. But Frenchbloke is actually correct! The blog post just explains it badly. [Sorry! - ed]

This will also work just as well on the Linden Lab viewer & probably every other viewer. Those debug settings are from the Linden Lab viewer, they are not Firestorm specific.

It's easy enough to test for yourself. Get hold of a super high quality 8192 image with lots of fine detail & make sure it's saved in a lossless format - I used PNG in my test.

Set the debugs max_texture_dimension_X and max_texture_dimension_Y to 8192.
Upload your 8192x8192 image.
This image will upload and the uploader will resize the image to the maximum allowed size of 1024x1024 - this limit is enforced server side, there is no way around it.

Now open your 8192 PNG in Photoshop & reduce the image size to 12.5% using the Bicubic Sharpen (best for reduction) & save this image.
Set the debugs max_texture_dimension_X and max_texture_dimension_Y back to default & upload your image.

More from Mr. Fizzle, including a sample comparison images they took:

How to Display Extremely High-Res Textures In SL's Firestorm Viewer

Click to embiggen: Catwa head texture displayed in normal, 1024K, and 8K (pics via M. Vanmoer)

UPDATE, 2/13: In Comments, some readers have pointed out that this hack might not necessarily work as described, or could cause performance problems for users -- so caveat SLer. (Then again, the top avatar mesh bodies sold in Second Life already have major performance issues.)  Also be sure to read Vanmoer's responses in Comments.

SLer "Frenchbloke Vanmoer" recently told me about a cool Debug setting in the Firestorm viewer that enables extremely high resolution textures to be displayed, with far more detail than is seen by default. (As seen above, and after the break.)

"It's not a bug as far as I know," he tells me, "just that it's hidden away in the Debug settings -- nobody looks in there properly... Some [creators] I have talked to were unaware it existed and were making all their textures for upload from up to 8K sources as 1K uploads."

He says making the change doesn't cause much viewer-side lag: "They are just the usual 1024 x 1024 textures as far as your inventory and viewer is concerned. The main difference is that it looks a lot nicer. It's the same principle as photo resizing as well as audio for broadcast -- the better the quality in, the better it will be when compressed. It's one of the first things you learn when using images -- best to start big and then scale down, than the other way around. I'm curious to see what mesh creators can do with this on uvmapped mesh."

As with any debug adjustment, user beware! Here's the Debug setting Vanmoer is talking about:

Cassie's Clips: How to Improve Your SL Performance Despite Heavy Mesh

As we've been discussing, Second Life mesh, especially the most popular avatar bodies, tend to be extremely resource heavy, causing you (and everyone around you) low FPS, unrezzed graphics, or what's colloquially called LAG. Unless and until Linden Lab starts curbing this excess, watch this great tutorial by NWN's Cassie Middles, who explains some tips on improving your SL performance. Top tips include:

Cassie's Clips: Walkthrough of Blogotex, the Online Management System for Second Life Fashionistas

Courtesy NWN YouTube correspondent Cassie Middles, here's a hands-on walkthrough of Blogotex, the quirky name of a cool and useful web service for SL fashionistas, especially bloggers:

"Blogotex is a good alternative to blogger groups if you're ever low on group space in Second Life," as Cassie explains. "Even with a Premium subscription, I used to run out of room and would have to leave one group to join another. Aside from event groups, this is where most of my blogger items come from now. They list all new releases and normally what events they're for, or Flickr links. You can grab a limited amount and blog them, post your blog posts there to be able to grab more. You can also get redeliveries of items if needed." The delivery system, which deposits items directly into a user's SL inventory, is a particularly cool feature. There's also some new-ish features which expand on the platform's power:

Cassie's Clips: Previewing Genus Head's New Motion Captured Animations

Exclusive to New World Notes, Ms. Cassie Middles previews an ambitious new update to the Genus mesh head -- motion captured animations for facial expressions:

"Now the head has mocap and there's several resting animations, fluid moving animations, gestures, and eye, brow, and mouth phases of animations," she tells me. I'm impressed, because it's incredibly difficult to mocap facial expressions, since they involve so many muscle groups.

It's not 100% perfect, she allows, but still smashing: 

Cassie's Clips: How to Use Backlighting & Projectors to Make Second Life Screenshots Look Amazing Without Post-Production

Today NWN's YouTube correspondent Cassie Middles shows Second Life photographers how to use backlighting and projectors to create amazing, "in camera" effects: 

"So, backlighting is something so many bloggers requested to learn and use for their photos," as she puts it. "This is where there's a solar glow in the background but doing it without too much post-production work. With a few projector lights and a good WindLight, it can make something go from plain to ethereal, casting light into sheer moments and adding a unique flow to it that makes your avatar to pop out."

Part 2 below:

Cassie's Clips: How to Unbox Items to Use in Second Life -- A Common User Interface Confusion Among New SL Shoppers

Here's NWN video correspondent Cassie Middles with a helpful and very necessary tutorial for unboxing items in Second Life. It's necessary, because even though fashion and virtual shopping is essential to the Second Life economy, Linden Lab has allowed its user interface for owning and using items to remain incredibly counter-intuitive and user-unfriendly. Which is not only hurting the economy, it's frustrating newer users. As Cassie points out, many bad reviews in the SL Marketplace are actually about this confusion with the user interface: