3 Second Life panoramas and a short story about each one

Want to make Second Life panoramas? See this guide!

 

Here I am at the Neptune Bar, a stunning new build in Second Life which has been getting some well-deserved publicity. Actually, you don't see me: that's because I was in mouselook, my avatar hidden, taking many snapshots in a circle around me for compositing later.

It was a delightful day on the weekend: apparently, word of this gorgeous location made its ways through Linden Lab, and I lurked while watching Lindens and their alts drop by… including myself.

In addition to the well-baked lights + shadows, what especially grabs me about this place is, it evokes a certain mood reminiscent of classic adventure games. I try hard to relive those glory days some nights. Yet I may refer to them frequently, true (awkward sentence fragment), but in this case, it's especially well-deserved: an amalgamation of great tavern scenes where you interview the bartender & regulars to progress to the next part of the story come to mind. Perhaps it's one part Leisure Suit Larry, one part Mean Streets (which might not've actually had a tavern scene, but that's the mood I get), and mixed with a slurpy drizzle of even older, non-adventure titles such as Shufflepuck Cafe's significantly more grimey den full of mutants and weirdos. I didn't play Starship Titanic or the Westwood take on Blade Runner, but something about this screams those to me too. *recalls flipping through and sniffing the paper of video game magazines* And throw The Journeyman Project's scifi ambience — since evolved into the likes of Bioshock — somewhere in there: an uncanny voice screams "mid-90s" in the best of ways. Not that I thought that style could ever be recognizably captured, unlike the clearly-distinguished 16-color palette of early Commodore 64 games, but show me the dithered instruments and wonders of Myst, and I'll be less of a skeptic.

Second Life is a wonderful place to reexperience, and sometimes, reinvent one's childhood.

 
 

Why hello there! It's a store, on Cocololo Island to be precise. Rocky Sassoon and Jennifer Hana, who run and sell things (nice sculptie art!) here respectively, have been so nice to me. Explore the island and you'll also find a wedding chapel in the shape of a crystal-y heart.

I'm obsessed with hotels and vacation resorts. I haven't been to enough but I'm hopeful. The gold tones of the middle building really stand out amidst the pink WindLight settings I used, and I was careful about positioning the clouds. Touches like that make a big impact on the final scene. I chose to leave the roads curved because they lend a softer, almost cartoony feel to the environs without being unpleasantly distorted. It captures a friendly feel without being overly glam or dross.

 

Here's where I botched up a bit: I turned on classic clouds for part of it, then switched it off after… yeeargh. But this is a very different Overdrive Island than the one I captured in one of my first video tutorials. I centered it to let the "C-TECH" pillar jut upwards in the middle of the picture, and overall, I think it'd make a cool manga cover if folded in half and populated with characters.

I love experimenting with all sorts of different palettes, and this sort of has a subdued golden warmth, which offsets the cyan highlights on the C-TECH sign. I'm not the happiest about the clouds, but I left it as is.

Part of the fun of doing Second Life panoramas comes from adapting what's conventionally very awe-inspiring in first life into an online space, and the same goes for my experiments with HDR tonemapping. It's kind of funny that people airbrush photos of real people to look more "beautiful" but they end up just looking like avatars and/or aliens. Inversely, while antialiasing is preferred over jaggy edges on our digital models, we like to see a lot of detail, be it beard stubble, independent teeth under the lip, and life in the eyes.

See more of my Second Life panoramas, there's almost 60 of them.

Tagged as: General, Pictures