When news on the ‘Shadow Draft’ of the Second Life Client first came out, I was thrilled beyond normal Vint-levels. But… it did not work for me. Regardless what I tried - amongst others, buying a new laptop ;) - I could not get it to work. Now, Kirstenlee Cinquetti has a Shadowdraft available of the ‘Kirstens Viewer’ (of which I never heard before today, I feel so ashamed!) - which works ‘perfectly’ for me (and a lot of others)! Behold, this lovely shot taken at Carnival of Doom (TP):

How to get Shadows yourself?

First huge question is which graphics card you have. You should be OK with one of the following: NVIDIA 8800 and 9000 series and the ATI HD cards 3800 & 4800’s. If you have another one, well, believe me, the shadows are worth giving a try regardless of your chance at success!

All the necessary files & info you can find on Miss Cinquetti’s blog, but it’s spread over a few blogposts, so I’ll spare you the trouble of searching for it:

1. Download (Kirstens SD2-R5.exe) and install the Kirstins Viewer Shadowdraft 2 REV 5.
2. Preferably install it somewhere far away from the normal SL clients, so avoid confusing situations. With me they are on another disk than the usual c:/.
3. Boot the client, set your graphics settings to max.
4. Press ctrl+alt+d to enabled the ‘Advanced’ menu.
5. In the ‘Advanced’ menu go to ‘Debug Settings’.
6. Find ‘RenderDeffered’ and make sure it is set to ‘FALSE’.
7. Find ‘RenderUseFBO’ and set that one to ‘TRUE’.
8. Go back to ‘RenderDeffered’ and set that to ‘TRUE’ also.

As Kirsten puts it very well you have now three possible outcomes:

1. No Change
2. Lotsa Cool shadows and eyecandy
3. Spectacular Crash !

Option 2 is for the lucky ones, and option 3 we might be able to fix. That is, at least, if you run into the same problem as I did:

NVIDIA GeForce 9650M-GS & Hardware Antialiasing

Something I normally ALWAYS have activated can be found under the Preferences > Graphics > Hardware Settings in your menu. It says ‘Hardware Antialiasing’ and - although normally obliged for the sake & quality of the snapshots - you want this disabled now, as it makes your newly acquired shadow viewer crash! So reboot the client, turn ‘Hardware Anti-aliasing’ OFF and go through steps 4 to 8 of ‘How to get Shadows yourself?’ again. I hope this works for you! (And else, well, at least we gave it a try! ;))

Some interesting and less interesting notes on Second Life shadow throwing capacities

1. The atmosphere seems to be overly bright in this client. Go into ‘world’ > ‘environment settings’ > ‘environment editor’ > ‘advanced sky’ > ‘lightning’ tab and lower the ‘Scene Gamma’. Better, no?
2. This might sound obviously, but err… you make your shadows longer by lowering your sun and moving your sun moves the direction of your shadows! ;)
3. This might sound obviously, but err… you get harsher shadows by lowering the amount of ‘ambient light’ and upping the amount of ’sun/moon color’.
4. Your avatar limbs even throw shadows on each other! So you can have the shadow of your arm on your leg.
5. The farther away your camera focus (alt+click) is from an object, the less harsh/strong it’s shadow is. If you move away to far, the shadow totally disappears.
6. Alpha textures drop a shadow. So do prim trees. So you get a really life like leaves shadow on the ground.
7. Worn attachments cast a shadow on your avie. So we now have more or less realistic shading created by our hair!!
8. Shadows on sculpties are funny.
9. Shadows do not work on water. They merely stop reflection from happening.
10. Shadows do not work on full bright floor.
11. … I have so much shadow-exploring still to do!!!! :D

And the whole of this post shortly summarized? WOOT! Shadows!

The Kirstins Client ‘Home Blog’: KirstenLeeCinquetti.Blogspot.com.

Hat tip for this fine discovery: Rob Dantion via Kean Kelly (who was as nice to IM me this juicy shadow goodness!)

Tags: graphics, kirstins viewer, photography, shadows, SLinovation

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