Tweak your Second Life preferences a bit and make Second Life look much better. And if it looks better to you, it looks better in Snapshot too. ;)

There are three major parts in this tutorial:

• Changes you make to your Second Life preferences
• Options you can toggle on and off in the Client menu
• Camera control

We’ll start with the changes you can make to your Second Life preferences. Go into the Edit menu and choose Preferences.

The Graphics tab:

In the ‘Graphics’ tab you will find ‘Draw Distance’ with an number behind it. That number is in meters and tells you in a how far a distance from your camera objects, avatars and such will look completely rezzed. Anything beyond that number will look blurry or will not be visible at all. As you’ll increase the number, you’ll look further and see more clear, but it will make Second Life run slower.
In real life photographers play with the diafragma of a camera to make parts of a picture blurry to enhance the feeling of depth in a photograph or if they want the whole photograph to be crystal sharp for landscape photography. With draw distance you can do the same in Second Life: if you want your subject to stand out against a background that’s more then 64 meters away from your camera, decrease the number to 64 and the background will be blurred and with less contrast. If you want to shoot an impressive Second Life scenery, increase the number all the way up to 512 meters.
Here comes my plea to Linden Labs: Please will you lower the minimum focus distance to something around 0.5 meters or so? Second Life portrait photography would certainly benefit from that.

The Graphics Detail tab

All the options in the settings tab ‘Graphics Detail’ influence what you see and how you see in Second Life and so all of them will also influence the pictures you take.
The most important is Lightning Detail. If ‘Nearby local lights’ is activated you will not only see the light that comes from the sun and moon, but also light sources created by other Second Life residents. Garden lights, photography spots, club lights, … will all cast their own light and shadows, which makes our second life look a bit more like first life.
As demonstrated in Torley’s Advanced Snapshot Magic video (somewhere at 8.40) you can also create your very own cheap light sources if the location allows you to create objects there.

Also ‘Enable Bumpmapping and Shiny’ is definitely worth being activated. Objects are often made shiny or bumpmapped so they resemble their first life brothers and sisters better. If you don’t enable this, you won’t be able to see those special effects.

The Avatar Vertex Progam takes care of avatars and their shading. The shading to avatars looks more natural when this option is enabled. If your graphics cards allows so, and you’re going to shoot some portraits of your fellow Second Life residents, consider switching this on.

The Advance Graphics tab

The Adv. Graphics tab – I guess you’ll have figured out yourself that stands for ‘Advanced Graphics’ – gives us even some more means to ‘tweak’ our photographs in-world.

Gamma and Nighttime Brightness allow you to make your view brighter. It’s a very handy way to tweak your picture’s contrast in-world if you don’t posses or are allergic to Photoshop.

The Fog Distance Ratio is closely related to the ‘Draw Distance’ option. The higher the number, the clearer your background will be. This does not affect Second Life speed at all.

Torley’s clarification on fog distance ratio: “focus distance” doesn’t serve the exact same purpose as “Draw Distance” but if you wanna make things realllly close up, then lower the Fog Distance Ratio to, like, 0.1 with “Draw Distance” set to 64. It’s not as close, but here’s what you can do: position a friend (model) towards the foggier part away from you, and use Ctrl-0 to zoooom in! Then you can capture some of the softer feelings.

Anisotropic Filtering will make textures less blurry when looked at them from certain angles. I only put it on when I’m shooting at location, because it slows down Second Life significantly for me.

Object Mesh Detail makes all objects – actually all prims, but an object is nothing but a collection of primitive shapes – look finely finished or raw and blocky, depending on if you slide it to the left (objects look like if they where build during the stone age) or the right (the objects show like they were meant to be seen).
The same goes for trees (Tree Mesh Detail) and avatar attachments (Avatar Mesh Detail). For avatar attachments, when the mesh detail is lowered, they will not look ugly, but the attachments will just not show at all.

If you want to know about some options from the Preferences that I didn’t cover (enough), you should consider reading The Second Life Preferences Guide from the Second Life Knowledge Base.

The second part of this Second Life snapshot tutorial consists of interesting things you can do using the ‘Client’ (activate it by pressing Ctrl+Alt+D) menu:

High-res Snapshot

It’s under the ‘Client’ menu and when you have a ‘X’ in front of it, it’s activated. It’s only useful if you use the ‘Snapshot to Disk’ function because you can change the resolution settings manually in the Take Snapshot option window. Normally if you take a ‘Snapshot to Disk’, it has the same resolution as your monitor. When High-res Snapshot is activated, that resolution is doubled. (eg. 1280×744 2,72MB becomes 2560×1488 10,8MB)

Mouse Moves Sun

Ever been in a situation where you have the most perfect scene and a gorgeous model present, but the sun refuses to cooperate? Well, why don’t you just move the sun then? Play for god by going into the client menu and activating ‘Mouse move sun’ under ‘World’. You can also just press Ctrl+Alt+M. Now you just press M or go to ‘World’ and then choose ‘Mouselook’. Move your mouse around and see how the sun follows. Move it up a bit for daylight and down for a beautiful Second Life sunset.
Pressing Escape or M on your keyboard let’s you quit the mouselook-mode and the sun stays where you’ve put it. It would be great if they could implement this feature in real life too. ;)

Quiet Snapshots to Disk

The people around you won’t hear that awfully fake *click* sound anymore when you take Snapshots to Disk. Neither will they see your hands move, so if you activate ‘Quiet Snapshots to Disk’ that hawt stripper will never know you’ve photographed her. ;)

Disable Camera Constraints

When ‘Disable Camera Constraints’ is activated, you can move your camera around the whole sim and even further. This a a great option to use for Second Life landscape and aerial photography. Moving your camera around when all constraints are gone becomes a whole lot easier if you active the Camera Controls that are under the View menu.

Although if you start to use ‘Disable Camera Constraints’, sooner or later you are bound to lose track of your camera. using the ‘Camera Controls’ makes that less likely to happen.

You can activate Camera Controls in the View menu. An interface tab with two circles and a slider in between them will appear. The slider serves for letting your camera zoom in and out. You can rotate your camera around your focus point (alt+click-focus-point, remember?) by clicking the arrows on the left circle. Rotating the camera around it’s own vertical and horizontal axis is done by respectively the left and right and up and below arrows in the circle on your right. As with all second and first life things, you get better at it by doing it a lot. Have you tried taking a aerial photography of your favourite second life location already?

If you have any questions, remarks or tips I forgot to put in, don’t hesistate to leave a comment, to drop an email or to contact me in-world.

Vint Falken