I’ve recently returned to using the official Second Life client. Well first of all, let me recap, there was a stage when the official client was the only client I really liked using, I was wary of those third party clients, despite all their bells and whistles.<\/p>\n
I’d tried them, I didn’t get on with them and then one day I tried Firestorm<\/a>, and quite frankly I never looked back when it came to taking photographs in Second Life. The photo tools, the sheer amount of windlight settings, I was as happy as Larry playing around with these and ramping up my graphics for the right shot, moving the time of day slider to cast shadows. Awesome sauce.<\/p>\n Then one day I noticed my AMD graphic drivers were a tad out of date and updated them, and Firestorm made a very sad face at me. However I saw some light on the horizon, a new version of AMD graphics drivers were released and I updated again. Alas, this was a terrible mistake as Inara Pey pointed out<\/a>. However the investigative Inara Pey also points out that there may be hope on the horizon<\/a>.<\/p>\n The thing is that may my main issue with Firestorm was not regarding rigged Mesh, well it is now, but the issue I had with Firestorm after updating my graphics drivers was that if I set my settings to Ultra, my scene looked like something rendered on the Sinclair Spectrum.<\/p>\n So I returned to official Second Life client and that’s where my head scratching started.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The first problem I ran into was “Where the bloody hell are all the Windlight settings?” Fortunately help was at hand because Faithless Babii over at SLUniverse was asking about windlight settings<\/a>.<\/p>\n The answer is to copy the xml files from your Firestorm install folder into the windlight folder of the official Second Life folder. Now I had my Windlight settings, my favourite is Vintage Village but there are heaps in Firestorm compared to the official client.<\/p>\n However then I ran into my next issue, where the bloody hell is the time of day slider? On Firestorm it’s right in your face, you just slide the slider to cast shadows. Eventually I discovered that to do this in the official Second Life client I have to edit the sky preset and then go to the lighting page where I have options on time of day, angle of the sun, gamma etc. Then I have to save those settings. Now if you’re trying this at home, my advice is to save the settings to a new windlight setting, rather than overwriting an exisiting one.<\/p>\n I happily overwrite my customised one, but I refrain from overwriting the original settings.<\/p>\n Firestorm is a much easier client to use for photography, however I do wonder why Linden Lab haven’t incorporated better Photo tools into their client. I really wish they would.<\/p>\n