Full-function viewer for normal SL use, including mesh uploading. If you are having problems, click here for clean install instructions. 7.¹Virtual reality, ²Set in Second Life®, ³Science FictionIf you experience any problems with your viewer after performing a basic install, you can try reinstalling with a clean install. Older versions and other downloads Download Firestorm Viewer for Second Life. The Emerald Viewer itself was used for a distributed denial of service attack against iheartanime.com in August 2010, leading Emerald Full-function viewers for normal SL use, including mesh uploading. The Emerald Viewer (formerly Greenlife Emerald) is a third party viewer for Second Life, developed by Modular Systems.The project was owned by the avatar Fractured Crystal, who was banned for griefing on his former accounts in the past.I use Firestorm, a third party viewer which has a number of features that come in handy when creating machinima. Sorry, Mac users.What viewer you use to interact with SL has an impact on certain aspects of film-making. Luckily, one of my super-powers is remembering what it feels like to know nothing.One more thing: whilst many aspects of the upcoming tutorial posts will apply regardless of the computer you’re using, I am a PC user and so there will be some elements (eg, key combinations) which will apply only to that machine. It’s a human weakness that we tend to forget that we didn’t once know the stuff that we know now, as evidenced by the SL residents who still seem to think that all the paraphernalia associated with mesh bodies and ‘appliers’ is easy (whilst still expressing astonishment that more people don’t take up SL). The problem with this sort of stuff, however, is that people rarely take the time to write it all down because they assume everyone knows it. To anyone who’s dabbled with machinima in Second Life, the following will likely be nothing new.To derender an object in Firestorm, right click it, click on ‘more’ in the pie menu, click on ‘more’ again, then click ‘derender’ and finally click on ‘temporary’ if you don’t mind the object reappearing next time you visit the sim or ‘blacklist’ if you want that item gone from your view permanently. Since Stömol was filmed across a number of different locations in SL, however, it was very frequently the case that I wanted to get rid of one or two items (sometimes considerably more than that) so the derender feature became invaluable. If you intend to create your own sets for your machinima then this won’t be a requirement for you since you’ll only place objects you want there and anything which gets in the way of your camera view can just be moved. At the top of the list of handy features for me that comes with Firestorm is the ability to derender objects you don’t want in your scene. I stuck with Firestorm for Stömol because I had been using it to take photographs for years and so felt very comfortable with it.If you’re an official viewer user, there’s nothing stopping you from using that for machinima, but you will be missing a few helpful elements. I understand that Black Dragon, for example, offers a number of pretty cool features.
Best Second Life Viewer 2017 How To Hide TheFirestorm offers a very simple off switch for people you don’t know, to save you the bother of derendering each of them individually. Frame rates (the number of frames per second – the generally accepted minimum for filming is 24, though it’s possible to go a bit lower) get slashed horrendously in busy sims, making it almost impossible to film a shot when there are lots of people around. It’s actually extremely simple:To remove main viewer interface (IM windows and icons, chat text, inventory window, map, etc) press Ctrl + Alt + F1.To remove inworld interface elements (HUDs) press Shift + Alt + H.One more quick tip. Believe it or not, for every single machinima I made prior to Stömol I had no idea there was even an option for this, and spent ages before every shoot getting rid of any HUDs I didn’t need or pushing them in edit mode to the very edge of my screen – and then, in the edit, I had to crop my images so that all the bits that did still show were removed. Before I move on, however – and so you can actually get on with doing some filming – I will share one piece of very important information it took me an age to find out, which is how to hide the user interface when you film. It also provides a handy frame rate indicator in the corner of your screen which changes from yellow to red when you’re recording.You can download a free version of Fraps which will place a limit of 30 seconds on your record time (none of the clips I created for Stömol ever exceeded that time) and place a small watermark in the top-centre of the screen (which is easily cropped out in the edit). Fraps will then save each clip in a folder of your choosing. Fraps is incredibly easy to use – once it’s open, you just minimise the Fraps window and go back to SL, then press the key you’ve defined as the record start/stop button (in my case, F9 – which I think is the default option) to start recording your clip, and again to finish. The software I use for this is Fraps, an app optimised for capturing the output of video games. Video capture softwareThe next thing you’ll need is a program for your computer to capture video from SL. Don’t forget to untick that option once you’re done filming – vanished folk will then reappear when you teleport out of the sim and back into it. As mentioned above, the number of people in a sim will also impact on this (hence the tip above on removing non-friends). There are a few tricks you can use to get around that (the most notable being don’t do too much panning – it’s way over-used in machinima anyway), but once you start dabbling with filming you’re probably going to start lusting after a machine that will take all the bother out of this for you.Of course, frame rates don’t only depend on the speed of your machine. I use a Lenovo i7 PC with a GeForce GTX 970 graphics card (which was a high-end graphics card when I bought it) and I still have problems getting smooth pans. Minecraft no download for macFor Stömol, however, I needed something much more feature-packed and downloaded Lightworks. When I was only filming short videos, I used Windows Movie Maker for very basic editing (which is no longer part of Windows 10, but can still be downloaded for free). I’m a cheapskate, however, and the monthly fee for that application would have pushed the cost of Stömol into hundreds of dollars considering the time I’ve spent on it so far. There are loads of these available and many movie-makers will probably insist on Adobe Premiere Pro. Video editing softwareOnce you’ve created your clips, you’re going to need a video editing suite. If you’re planning on making an occasional five to ten minute machinima then your current set-up might suffice: any longer than that, however, and you’re probably going to need to invest in an additional hard drive. Sound editing softwareFinally, you’re probably going to need a sound editor for any sounds or voiceover for your video. Luckily, there is a free piece of simple software to do exactly this called Eyeframe. To get around this, you need to transcode each clip into a format that Lightworks accepts more readily. The clips created by Fraps don’t work properly when imported into Lightworks and often stutter or judder. I will mention one important thing, however. My SL movie looks fine in 720p – it’s not like I’m filming skin pores or anything – so I’m going to stick with that.I won’t be going into many of the details of Lightworks in the coming blog posts (with a few exceptions, such as speed adjustments and the trick of reversing a clip) since there are many very helpful Lightworks tutorials available on YouTube that will do that job far more effectively than I can.
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