New World Notes

These Incredibly Moody & Realistic Apartment Photos Are Actually from a Second Life Skybox Using Custom EEP Settings

Update: Marketplace listing and description for EEP settings has been updated below!

Elie recently posted gorgeously grungy photos like these to his Twitter and the lighting was so moodily perfect, I first thought they might be photos from his real life apartment.

But no, this is his skybox in Second Life, shot with Firestorm and some of his custom-made EEP and WindLights:

Tips & Tricks for Creating Amazing Images in Midjourney & Other AI Generators -- Excerpt from Evo Heyning's New Book Promptcraft

Promptcraft: Guidebook for Generative Media in Creative Work is a new book by longtime XR creator Evo Heyning and as the title suggests, has copious advice for getting the most out of AI image generators like Midjourney and beyond.

Evo has a starting YouTube tutorial above, and she kindly shared some helpful image generation tips from the book:

Experiment with many different generative media tools

Each tool has its own set of features and capabilities, so it is important to explore different options to find the ones that work best for you. There are over a dozen in this book to try from Scenario.gg to HeyFriday, ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

Use generative media tools to create a starting point

Example, you can use a generative media tool to create a random palette, pattern or shape, and then use that as a starting point for your painting or sculpture. This iterative ideation can help to break the creative block and give you a sense of direction for your artwork - use multiple image prompts in Midjourney to try blending your works and ideas.

Much more after the break:

How to Make Virtual World Screenshots Look Like Old World Paintings

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Now that's we've all marveled at Scylla Rhiadra's stunning tributed to Degas paintings, Scylla pulls back the curtain to explain her techniques for turning raw Second Life screenshots into an image like the one she created above.  (Original here on her Flickr.) While these images include multiple avatars, they are actually all her:

My basic process is to start with a composition that is, most often, comprised of multiple figures – because part of what I want to capture is the relationship between the young dancers, which must have been simultaneously close and supportive, yet also fiercely competitive. Rather than using a small army of alts or friends, all of these figures employ my own avatar, and the images are produced by a composite of multiple shots of each. I take separate depth maps for each, as well as supplementary shots to deal with things like clothing glitches and subtle lighting effects.

“The Dancer VII: Les coulisses” (above) includes six figures, and was composed of nearly 20 different shots merged or worked together in different ways. (Interestingly, Degas began his own training as a painter by producing paintings from photographs, and he remained interested in photography throughout his life.)

Next comes post-processing in Photoshop and running it through a free Adobe app:

 

Flickr So Popular With Second Life Photographers That Flickr Adds a "Virtual Photography" Category to Platform -- Here's How to Use It

If you're among the tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of Second Life users who upload SL screenshots and video to Flickr, you'll want to watch this Flickr video tutorial above from Strawberry Linden, explaining how to add Flickr's new Virtual Photography category to your SL Flickr content. More info on the Flickr blog:

Virtual photography is an emerging art form specializing in photos taken inside a video game or virtual environment... we’re introducing this new category with two types of photography in mind: video game photography and content shared by the Second Life community.

As that suggests, this category was created primarily to serve the huge SL community on Flickr.

"The Flickr community manager was on Lab Gab back in May and she said they were looking to implement this feature for the SL community on Flickr," Strawberry tells me. (Watch that below.)

Ironically, Flickr itself was first created as an image sharing tool for a virtual world called Game Neverending, so it's fitting that another virtual world community has since embraced it as their own.

Flickr even sought SL creators' feedback on before adding it:

SL Fashion Blog Tip: How to Export Your Avatar Outfit Details to Text

I just remembered there is a way to save your outfit details in the Outfits menu in the viewer. I made a quick video to show. pic.twitter.com/yGzxeXvqSi

— Strawberry (@strawberrysingh) May 11, 2022

In case you missed the update from last week's post, here's Strawberry Singh's walkthrough for exporting your avatar outfit details. As she shows in the above video, there's an option for doing just that in the viewer's Outfits menu. (She's using the official viewer, but this should also work with third party viewers.)  It's a partial solution to an ongoing problem in the SL social media ecosystem: Giving proper credit to the creators of all the items in a screenshot in a way that's not tedious and time consuming.  As she mentioned in our chat, it's what almost caused Strawberry herself to give up blogging and YouTubing:

How to Connect Your Kinect to VRChat for Full Body Tracking

Here's the latest clever hack for VRChat: An Xbox One Kinect connected to the virtual world, so the user's real life movement is tracked and mapped onto their avatar.

In this video above, VRCer "Zotteke" is using a Quest 2 to log into VRChat while dancing in front of a Kinect; Zotteke's furry avatar does the rest. The body tracking is fairly decent (especially for an older device that's likely sitting in your closet if you still have one), even accounting for its single camera:

Fifteen Tips for Second Life Style Bloggers: How to Grow Your Readership & Keep Them Coming Back for More

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I like amplifying SL blogs I admire, and after doing Cajsa’s Choices for over three years now, I have discovered things I would do differently if I were actively blogging Second Life fashions today. I have seen some innovations by bloggers I really like -- and many things I don’t like. 

So here are some tips I have accumulated over the past few years, along with some additional tips from Hamlet: 

Provide information about how you can be contacted and links to your social media. This is usually an About Me page, though many people post a link to their Gravatar, a global avatar with links to all social media if you set it up. Your About Me should include your in-world/legacy name so readers can send you a message, or a creator can drop some samples your way. Some people also include their basic avatar information, the body, head, hands, and skin. If you wear the same in every picture, that makes sense. 

Let your readers get to know you. Too many fashion posts only display the creator credits, which makes for dull reading. It is also a loss for you, because readers don’t really form an attachment to a product list. Instead of just blogging the type of collar or waistline a dress has, you can write about how the outfit makes you feel. Like you can conquer the world? Does it make you feel sexy? Playful? Tell us why you like it so we get to know you. 

Include the creator’s SL name in your credits. That way, if they rebrand or move their in-world store, people can still find them. It also gives you a way for people to find items while complying with Flickr’s TOS for free accounts. I have never valued posting SLurls, because I really hate teleporting to a store that has moved and getting orbited by a hair trigger security device. But when the creator’s name is displayed, I can find their Marketplace and find their most up-to-date SLurls in their profile. (Unless they neglect their profile, and that’s on them.)  

Many more below!

Look: More Fun Turning Avatars Into "Real" People With Artbreeder AI

In case you missed it, here is Ugleh Ulrik's tutorial for using the AI-driven platform Artbreeder to transform avatars. If you have questions about his tutorial, clickthrough here to ask him on YouTube.

On Second Life Friends, a large Facebook group for SLers have been using this tutorial t0 turn their avatars into "real" people. With permission, here's some of my favorite before/after pics:

Tutorial: How to Turn Second Life Avatars Into "Real" People With Artbreeder

Want to turn a Second Life avatar pic into the "photo" of their real life analog? Watch this Artbreeder tutorial from Ugleh Ulrik, the SL creator who first started the whole buzz around using the AI-driven platform to transform avatars.

"I do a lot of experimenting with new AI tech," Ulrik tells me, "and once I saw Artbreeder my first thought went to Pixar characters but then after that I realized making Second Life avatars more real was a possibility and I tried it out on a few close friends and it worked well."

Here's his key tips to keep in mind when using Artbreeder on an avatar:

Real Life Photo or Virtual Image? Tiago's Tutorial To Make It Hard to Tell

‌Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

The pictures by Flickr artist Tiago that I featured last week, especially the one above, sparked some discussion of whether they were taken in Second Life. or in real life. Can you guess?

Click below to find out -- and find out how Tiago creates images like this: