But the nature of Second Life photography is that - even with a top-notch graphics card and well thought off lighting - some things will always be ‘fail’. Take a look for instance at the ear being more ‘reflective of light’ than the metal earring, the breasts that are strangely squared and a full bright necklace/lack of pearl necklace. So I asked for permissions to “brush up” Shoshana’s raw “low-key”* file and see what I could make of it. Those permissions were granted:

Most of the image was tweaked, to much small alterations to mention, but a few very personal ideas on this & tips I wish to share:

1. Start of with duplicating your layer, and put it to ’screen’ as layer style. Then merge & start manually darkening the appropriate areas again using “burn”.
2. Portrait photographs are often shot with a prime at small aperture. This makes that not all parts of the body will be as sharp. Usually, the part of the photograph most in focus is one of the eyes (side portrait) or both eyes (front portrait). (I blurred out the hands a lower waist a bit to much here, but this was mainly to camouflage the bad job Second Life does at rendering & lighting hands.)
3. To get the blue black & whitish feeling, don’t use “desaturate”. It would kill to much of the different colour tones. Rather on your final edit of the colour file, activate the red channel only, and copy paste this to a new document. Copy paste it back into your working file, and use that as black & white layer. Colourize at will - using layer overlays, photo filter, … - but make sure a little tiny bit (about 5%) of the original colour edit shines through still, so I doesn’t become to monotone in colour.
4. Don’t use Sepia colours. Whilst it _may_ have some charms left on printed paper, on LCD screen, Sepia is the suxxors.

* Low-key lighting is a style of lighting for photography, film or television. It attempts to create a chiaroscuro effect. In traditional photographic lighting, three-point lighting uses a key light, a fill light, and a back light for even illumination. Low-key lighting requires only one key light, optionally controlled with a fill light or a simple reflector. Low key light accentuates the contours of an object by throwing areas into shade while a fill light or reflector may illuminate the shadow areas to control contrast. The relative strength of key-to-fill, known as the lighting ratio, can be measured using a light meter. Low key lighting has a higher lighting ratio, e.g. 8:1, than high key lighting, which can approach 1:1. (from Wikipedia)

Yes, I know it’s nice to be a Resident of Second Life (at times). The name shows we belong to something that spans the different communities such as there are vampires, nekos, humans, roleplayers, sex addicts, tinies, … and different levels of players, from the casual 5h/month over the solitary content creator to the big development companies. But at the same time, “being a Second Life Resident” is getting us no where. We don’t have a parliament. No referendums, albeit Linden has the powers to easily poll all of us. No social security or health benefits. No property rights. No subsidizing the arts. Just some minor funding for education and some LDPW paved roads.

So what should we be then? As almost all of us have “their payment info on file”, what do you think about “a Second Life Customer”? Customers have rights, no? Companies do research to find out what their customers want, no? Although “residents” seem to be fairly expendable lately, no company can do without customers? I’m not sure if thinking, saying and writing “customer” for a year will change the idea of what we want from Linden Lab - or even better, what they are willing to offer us - but it won’t hurt? (Except maybe our ego’s a bit.) Let’s make 2009 - opposed to 2008 where residents got screwed over.. and over - year of the Second Life Customer?

The end result? Virtual land that you really, really, really own. And err… if I can do it.. well… most of you can. :) May I present to you - with an uptime of over an hour on a very old XP box - “Vintville”:

A few additional bits of information:

Creating user accounts

When logging in with the super avatar created in Zonja’s Step #6, I ran into this “Could not authenticate your avatar.” Which is strange, as I triple-checked spelling. Ah well, I just created another user in the server console. This is how to:

1. You have your “server console” (the Command Prompt Window) still open and will see: “Region <root> # :”.
2. Type “create user <first> <last> <password> 1000 1000″ and press enter. (Example: “create user Vint Falken v1ntr4wks 1000 1000″.) (The “1000″ are X & Y locations, and a necessity when creating users for a standalone grid like ours.)
3. Login with your client and use first & last name and the password set above.

Shutting down your OpenSim

In the same “server console” (command prompt window) type “shutdown”. Your OpenSim will automatically run ‘backup’. Important sentence: “[scene]: persisting changed objects”. This means next time you start your OpenSim, your objects laid out on your virtual land will still be there.

If then you want to close the command prompt window too, just type “exit” and press ENTER.

Restarting your OpenSim

Go to Start > Run. Type “cmd” and press ENTER. Type “cd c:\program files\opensim” and press ENTER. Type “opensim” and press ENTER. Give it some time to load. Startup with me takes 14 seconds. When you see “Region <root> # :” you’re fine to login again using your Second Life client. If all went well - and you used the ’shutdown’ command for turning it off, anything created previously will still be there.

How to see the uptime

Curious how long your sim is running already? Type “show uptime” and press enter.

Other fun (and possibly grid-breaking! ;)) system commands to play around with can be found in the OpenSimulator wiki.

“We haven’t delivered the promised ‘before January’ information on script limitations for OpenSpace and Homesteads yet, but… lookie!!! Snowman!!! Whilst you’re distracted by that much snowy goodness, we’ll look into continuing to keep this promised information from you in different languages*). Happy New Year!“

Snowman ’shot’ by by Nim and build by Cutea Benelli.

* Not that we’re doing a good job at that.

Update: LL just released a time estimate on inserting script limitations, which differs a lot from the initinal “Before January 5th, we’ll tell you what the script limitations will be.” Timing for Script Limits:

1. In Q1, we will be gathering data on script load, and sharing this usage data with the community before deciding what the most appropriate limits are.
2. In Q2, we expect there to be Viewer changes to allow you to monitor your script usage against those limits.
3. In Q3 we will begin enforcing script limits.

… and of course, take snapshots. All of a sudden, I slipped and fell, which launched my camera under the icebergs and uncovered the ocean. My mind went “Woot! Reflections!” until it realised… water in a frozen landscape does not really make sense. But Lindens gave us WindLight, and everything is possible with WindLight, right? If it can turn water into wine, or blood, or jelly it can definitely turn water into flat ice with the right texture and settings? Sure it can! (For the WindLight water settings to pour over your virtual water, click the thumbnail.)

How do I access the WindLight Water settings? Go to World > Environment Settings > Environment Editor and then click “Advanced Water”. The advanced water editor will pop up, with the tabs “settings” and “image” that you see in the Ice Settings example above.

Which Ice Texture did you use for the water texture? I used Torley’s “Ice Shelves“. His “Ice kapades” does the job too, but is more uniform thus more flat. When using ice kapades you’ll get less the “this ice is transparent and this ice has part of the ice is white” effect, which creates depth. In your library you’ll also have “Ice rock”. Try this one for yet another effect.

Thus, AM Radio’s “The Quiet” on Ice. Because… well… “freeze” is the best way I know off to make something last forever… . And this is how it looks without ice. ;)

Second Life email responses to offline-IM’s fail
if you include special characters
like the German ‘Umlauts’.
Better make damn sure your email reply
is 7bit charset.

Tired of asking “Hey, did you not get my offline reply to your message?” Chances e-mail replies to Second Life Instant Messages* it will reach it’s destination are far higher if you use ASCII characters. So forget about é, è, ê, ë, ® and ©. An ‘@’ should be fine, though. Corresponding JIRA issue under ‘internationalisation’. Vote if you wish this to be fixed.

And oh, people, please delete the original message you’re replying to from the email body! It looks terrible when returned in IM. Tyvm! ;)

* You did know you can respond to an offline Instant Message you receive by email by pressing ‘reply’, right? You need to enable this in your Second Life preferences on the secondlife.com website.

As found in the comments here.

Most Popular

‘Free Skins’ - This all started with news of Miss Eloh Eliot releasing her skins as ‘open source’ photoshop templates end 2007. This excellent example by Miss Eloh was swiftly followed by Sezmra Splendor. Basing their work on Eloh Eliot’s skin templates, and also releasing their .psd’s were Miss Strawberry and the Brazen Woman skin brand. I wonder if this means we’re cheap, or really interested in the craft of making SL skins? Regardless, I’m hoping to see some more ‘open’ skins released in 2009! (More or less also in this category: my free full perm bikini template. Lot’s of views & downloads, not many comments though. *shakes fist*)

The Tutorials: although most of the tutorials on this page were written in 2007, you are still really interested in ‘learning new stuff’. Toppers are using Photoshop’s liquify tool to correct squared breasts, layer styles for depth in textures (I still need to do Part II) and - strangely enough - How to see last login date.

Exotic Second Life Clients - Lots of interest for Kirsten’s Second Life Shadow Viewer and The 3D Stereo Viewer. I assume people like to see things “in a different perspective” once in a while, and of course, shadows rendered on the spot, for even the budget PC’s is something we continue to dream about. =)

Real Life - Anything ‘real life’ related gets a tremendously high view count, admit it, although you deny, you’re all pretty curious! Be it about the fact that I deny to be male or How the Second Life ‘flickrites’ look in atomic form, you can’t help but click it! ;)

OpenSpaces - Despite such virtual wonders as the Garden of NPIRL Delights and Philip Linden being switched for M Linden, we’ll probably all remember Second Life’s 2008 as “the year the openspaces vanished”. Lots of just commotion over an unjust ‘pricing and policy change on Openspaces‘. That unjust that a Free Accounts Pricing and Policy changes suddenly became believable for a lot of residents. In the mean wile, the promised announcement about ’script limitations’ on openspaces & homesteads - “before January” - have not been announced yet. But for the real ‘effects’ - besides a serious drop in land mass - of this Linden Error, we’ll need to watch 2009 closely! ;)

OpenSim & Moving Your Stuff - Less comments, maybe most think “let’s wait and see” but lots of views on topics relating OpenSim, other girds and importing and exporting goods from and to our Second Life inventories. I believe this interest in OpenSim will only grow in 2009, as the code gets more stable, the functionality expanded and more and more people will turn to OpenSim to get their very own small grid, hosted on their own virtual land servers.

For 2008 definitely remember:

1. Second Life User Interface Design Contest
2. Second Life Bloggers Mix’n Match.
3. Linden trademark policy change and the new ‘your imagination, our trademark’ policy.
4. Change in reporting ‘copyright violations’ and DMCA procedures.
5. Prim in my Hand.
6. Launch of avatars united, Myrl and Koinup growing.
7. Attachments stuck up ass was fixed.
8. Richard Minsky’s SLart. (still ongoing)
9. SlangLife. (deceased in 2008 too)
10. Vint joining “Team Rezzable”. In the same category: The Garden of NPIRL Delights & Dino Destroy.

We want to forget about:

1. SLim.
2. Age Verification.
3. SL5B ft. child avatars.
4. The new and not-really-improved secondlife.com.
5. Lindens pretty much ignoring the teen grid.

Various Numbers

1. Vintfalken.com average traffic went up 134,26% compared to 2007.
2. Flickr.com is still my #1 referring site.
3. Most of my visitors come from the USA, the UK, Germany, Canada and Belgium.
4. In total people from 186 different countries visited vintfalken.com.
5. There are currently 901 posts and 6,689 comments and Akismet has protected this site from 92,904 spam comments.

And errr.. before I forget:

Happy 2009!