Bringing out the good stuff in Second Life®: fashion, hot spots, freebies, etc.

So, I was in the mood to go around some place on the grid and experience again how the look of things could be enhanced by shadows. I didn’t want to think too hard so I just visited some of AM Radio’s installations. The difference it makes there is very subtle as he already provides most of his builds with shadows and shadings, but it is there, perceptible, and, as shown here, the difference in mood can be even further enhanced by the use of Mescaline Tammas’ windlight settings.

I doubt that anyone who reads my blog hasn’t been to at least one of AM Radio’s builds before but I showed them to someone there yesterday who had never heard of him, so, heck. Incidentally, he’s the one who was telling me about the introduction of screen space ambiant occlusion in the SL client, for more realistic shadows, which is what got me to post some pics here.

Surface is the most recent installation that was uncovered maybe a week or two ago, which I liked very well, and I think benefitted hugely from the live shadows. The build I’ve always liked the most, though, is The Radio, and being there today, seeing everything like this, like in the pictures… well, it beat everything!

Shadows can now be enabled in the latest stable Second Life viewer (1.23.4.123908). The feature is not perfect, it bugs out on transparent textures (they tend to flicker or just not render well at all), but well, we can only hope it’ll get better someday. But here’s how to get them working if you want to try out yourself.

Go to your preferences, and set your graphic settings to ultra (or as high as you can), then click on the ‘Hardware Options’ button and check the Anisotropic filtering button, and then set the antialiasing to at least 2x.

Then press CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + D, go to ‘Advanced’ in the top menu, and click on ‘Debug settings’ at the bottom of the pull-down.

Write ‘renderdeferred’ in the field and set to FALSE.
Then ‘renderusefbo’ and set to TRUE.
Then ‘renderdeferred’ and TRUE again.
Finally, type in ‘renderssaoeffect’ and change the first value to -1.

And… enjoy. It makes a hell of a difference !

No post-treatment here at all, other than adding the shadowed white edges.