Before I begin talking about what I’m wearing, I just wanted to let you guys know that I took these images using Kirstens Viewer S22 which is an unreleased viewer that I had the pleasure of testing. As expected, it works remarkably and has exceeded my expectations in performance. Kirstens Viewer has always been so innovative and I feel the disconuation of it was a great loss to the whole community.
Living in Florida, Autumn is a season I don’t get to really enjoy. We don’t normally have the leaves turning colors and falling as they do up north. So yes, I am kinda jealous of y’all up there.
LeeZu recently released this gorgeous cardigan in the most perfect autumn colors. As always, her sculpt work and textures are immaculate. I found this cardigan to be very playful, youthful and stylish at the same time.
The sophisticated pants are from the LaViere Summer collection but I think the style and color are perfect for fall as well.
The storm sandals are my new favs from Gos. I adore all the options that Gos always gives us. The hud is fast and smooth and the toes are just perfection. You can mix and match the colors of each strap, sole, lace, etc… I’ve mixed brown and beige to go with my look today. It only took me a few mins to match my skin and decide on the shoe colors I wanted to wear. I love it when designers make our slives so easy, thank you Gos! <3
Credits:
*Skin: Belleza Chloe Fair by Tricky Boucher
*Hair: Truth Kendall coffee by Truth Hawks
*Cardigan: LeeZu Sissy Cardigan brown by LeeZu Baxter
*Pants: LaViere Wide Flare Pants Brown by Azure Electricteeth
*Shoes: Gos Storm Sandal by Gospel Voom
*Necklace: Kari Hoot Necklace Brass (female) By Menno Ophelia
*Earrings: Glow Studio Pratis Earrings Gold by Linka Demina
*Nails: je suis naive nails by Julia Merosi
*Promotional copies
Location: BlueBird
I haven’t done a Love Thursday post in a while. I think this is the perfect time for it, my Love Thursday today is definitely Kirstens Viewer! <3
For over a year now I have been a strong supporter of Kirstens Viewer, writing many posts about it in the past. Kirstens has been my go to viewer for all my photography. Almost all of the images you see on my blog and flickr in the past year have been taken with Kirstens. It works the best for me for shadows, depth of field and now mesh. I am extremely sad to hear about its discontinuation. But I do understand and I wish them both well. Thank you so much for all the work you put into the viewer, we all greatly appreciate it! <3
I do however hope that someone sets out to create a viewer that is specifically designed for photography as Kirstens was. I will hold on to the last release for as long as I can until I feel I must update. I am so happy I have the latest version S21 build 9 (which supports mesh) downloaded and it works well as I don't see it available for download anywhere now, not even on the Kirstens download page or on this page. Am I missing it?
Since my last post about the SL profiles, there’s been a few changes to them, which I thought I’d talk about. Since yesterday these have been the changes that were implemented:
Follow or Friend: If you go to my SL profile and if you are not on my friend list, you should see a follow or friend button now. This means you are able to follow anyone’s feed that you like, without the need to friend them. As I mentioned in my post before, I don’t mind if you guys wish to friend me at all, in fact I welcome it. But I do understand that some people prefer to keep their friend list inworld small. So now we have the option to just follow those we may be feeling too shy about friending. Yesterday I went on a major follow spree and followed some of my favorite Lindens, bloggers and content creators. Kind of feel like a stalker now, but I think it’s all good! :P
More Privacy Options: This is the part that I love the most! If you go into “settings” and then the “privacy” tab you will see two options for your feed now. First option is the setting for “who can see your profile feed and your posts” there are four different settings for that. I know a lot of people had concerns about having the feed and have completely turned it off by setting it to nobody. However, I think it can be a very useful feature for content creators. If you set it to everyone, every time you do a release you can announce it on your feed just by adding a few words about it and then linking to your blog post or flickr. It’s a great way to let your customers (that may look up your profile for various reasons) know that you have released new items.
The other option for the feed is down at the bottom and this is the important one. You may or may not want to give the ability to people to write on your feed. You can completely turn it off and turn your profile feed into your own personal announcement feed. I think it’s a brilliant idea for content creators who may not want their customers leaving all sorts of comments on their profiles, but could easily still use their feed the way they see fit.
So far I am loving these changes and look forward to seeing more great developments in the SL profiles. Right now I use my feed mainly to announce blog posts but I do occasionally read my friend’s feeds and input my thoughts here and there. I look forward to seeing more and more people using the profiles and interacting more on there. Remember, feel free to friend or follow me if you like!
A few days ago Kirstens Viewer released a new build which has 3D capabilites. I have been pretty excited about this and have been playing on and off with it the past few days. Then I noticed a huge increase of people googling how to enable 3D in Kirstens Viewer and ending up on my blog for some reason. Now I’m not sure if I’m actually doing it 100% correct since I didn’t really ask or talk to anyone about it, nor do I have any technical expertise in this field at all. But I did manage to fiddle with some settings and I was able to see myself in 3D using my 3D glasses.
Currently the 3D capabilities are only available for Windows machines and you will need 3D glasses to view it which I have linked to at the end of this post.
I’ve done a really quick video tutorial below, please correct me if I am doing this incorrectly, I would love to start a discussion about this and learn more about it. Following is a link to the video tutorial. I will also type out the steps below and then link to some other sites and videos that you may find useful.
UPDATE: Before you view the video and start the steps, Kirsten has a left a comment to this post below which is very important and I wanted to highlight: “3D does not work properly in shadow mode, turn shadows off and use normal renderer then toggle anaglyph on you will see it work well then” So please disable shadows before enabling the anaglyph and you will see it working better than in the video below.
There are a couple of things I wanted to cover today. First is that Mr. Revolution (btw, did you read his wonderful Garden City Relief post yesterday? I love the way he writes <3) got a new computer, so I had to get off my lazy arse and get my windlight settings all organized for him to use. When I did that, I decided I should finally share them with you guys as well, since I've been sitting on them for months. So what I've done now is gone ahead and made a WindLight Settings page which I will update periodically whenever I create more settings that I wish to share.
I hope you guys like them and find them useful. It’s always great to get feedback so feel free to email any comments or suggestions you may have for me.
The second thing I wanted to go over today is something I think I should have done a long time ago. LOL I keep getting IMs because my tutorial about enabling shadows for viewer 2.1 is not completely accurate anymore. In the latest viewers enabling shadows has been changed slightly. So here is an updated video and post for enabling shadows in Second Life Viewer 2.5.
I apologize but I just noticed that the top menu bar has been cutoff in some parts of the video, I guess that happened when I was processing it. I hope you are still able to figure out how to enable the shadows. If not, I am also typing out the process below:
Make sure your graphics settings are as close to ultra as possible. To get to the graphics settings: me > preferences > graphics
Activate the Develop menu by simultaneously clicking: ctrl-alt-q
In the Develop menu under rendering, make sure the following items have a checkmark beside them: Framebuffer objects
Lighting and Shadows
Shadows from Sun/Moon/Projectors
SSAO and Shadow Smoothing
Choose a windlight setting that will let you see shadows, such as midday.
That about covers it. Just so y’all know, I use Kirstens Viewer for all my shadows and photo taking. It seems to work the best for me, but only if I use my alt which has a very low inventory count. My inventory on my main account prevents me from taking any decent high-res snapshots inworld in any viewer. So for those of you that are struggling with shadows and such, this might be something more to look into.
» You can view all of my current tutorials on my tutorials page.
Credits for the picture:
*Skin: DNA Brady by Brox Riaxik (released last week)
*Hair: Plume (They now have hair for men, released this week) :D by Lulu Jameson
Watch: [CALYPSO GIANO] WATCH – Rock my Life by Calypso Giano
*Tattoo: Huz Tats by Hunain Bellic
*Jeans: Zaara by Zaara Kohime
*Pose: Diesel Works by Rogan Diesel
*Promotional copies
Location: The Far Away by AM Radio
WindLight Setting Used: StrawberrySingh-Diamond (with slight modification and light photoshopping)
A couple of days ago I started using Kirstens Viewer S20 Build 42 and I am so excited that I wanted to share with you guys. This is the best viewer I have ever used, hands down.
If you are in my friend list inworld, you have probably noticed the amount of times I crash on a daily basis. This happens to me often when shooting images with shadows. I am always looking for a better viewer and so far I am loving Kirstens Viewer S20 Build 42. It was released on Sunday and it’s been amazing so far.
It’s a combination of half mesh beta + half viewer 2.5. So it can render meshes and when I installed it, it actually recognized my video card and automatically setup optimal shadows and depth of field for me.
I plurked about it here last night and I got a lot of ims and comments in plurks of people asking me questions about the depth of field and how to turn that off since it is automatically enabled when you install this build. Also over the past few weeks a lot of people have contacted me about what windlight settings I use and more questions about shadows, so I thought another quick video tutorial is in order.
Basically I just skimmed over what I do for windlight settings. I start with my windlight preset for shadows which I have available for download here and then I play with it more in the environment editor until I get it just to my liking.
For depth of field, you need to go to preferences > graphics > advanced > misc and there you will notice the three camera option sliders which you can adjust to reduce depth of field.
For enabling shadows and more details about Kirstens viewer you can watch and read my previous Kirstens Viewer video tutorial.
For those wondering what kind of computer I am running, you can view all of my system specifications in detail on my system specs page.
It was a lot of fun watching everyone plurk their depth of field and shadow shots last night. I look forward to seeing a lot more from all of you! Please send me your links inworld or on plurk or leave them in the comments here, I would really enjoy that! <3
» You can view all of my current tutorials on my tutorials page.
EDIT: I was just made aware of another depth of field tutorial on the blog Grid Expectations. It has a tutorial for depth of field on the mesh viewer which is awesome! She also shares the ctrl-0 trick which I think is a really important part of sl photography so make sure to check it out!
Credits:
*Skin: [LeLutka]-Natasha/WALNUT-Makeup3/Hairbase by Minnu Palen
*Hair: Maitreya Nimue – Cacao by Onyx LeShelle
*Outfit: Mimikri by Mimikri Kit
*Scarf: ::je::suis::chaude::scarf::ALL COLORS by Julia Merosi
Earmuffs: /artilleri/ Knit earmuffs! (CHIN) *white* by Antonia Marat
*Boots: BAX Prestige Boots White Leather by Bax Coen
*Pose: oOo Studio by Olaenka Chesnokov
Location: Nordari
I used Camtasia Studio 7 to record the video
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