 Hello everyone and thank you for your patience while we sort out a few things here. Welcome back to the 1230 breakout session in Breakouts Zone 1 for the Arts and Community Track. As a reminder to our in-world and web audiences, you can view the full conference schedule on our website at conference.opensimulator.org. You can post your questions in local chat. I'll pick them up here. On the Ustream chat or tweet your comments using the hashtag O-S-C-C-1-3. This hour we're happy to introduce Opalei who will be presenting enhancing depth in your virtual world photos. This to me is one of the great things about being able to take photos in a virtual world and it's going to be very interesting to learn how to make them even better. Whether you still take photos for your personal momentals for a blog or your virtual business, depth adds realism and interest to your images. Learn how to use standard photography tricks and the tools in the Firestorm Viewer to enhance the illusion of depth even before you edit your image. Opalei will illustrate concepts with examples from her 365 project, Where's Dim Sum? Opalei, a.k.a. Lea Tesoro, I hope I said that right, you can correct me when you start talking, is a former software professional who thought she could successfully apply her MBA in a virtual world business but instead ended up doing more artistic stuff like digital contact creation, photography, and machinima. She is a recognized expert on stereoscopic framing. She wrote a book about relationships in virtual worlds and she still doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up. Hi, here you are, Opalei. Please join me in a warm welcome for Opalei. Take it away, Opalei. Thank you, Buffy. Hello, good afternoon, everybody. We're going to get started very quickly here. The client that I'll be using is Firestorm. We'll be talking about that mostly because, and I'll explain why later. But first, let's go over to the first slide. What you're going to learn today is how your two eyes see depth. This is really just a background about how stereo viewing, how stereo vision works and then we'll talk about how we see depth in 2D in regular still photographs. And then we'll get to the meat of the presentation today, which is how to simulate depth into these still images with inside a virtual world. And this can apply either in second life or in OS grids or any other virtual reality worlds. And we'll do that. We'll go over some of the, actually some of the, about five of the aspects, the concepts that are related to depth. But, and again, I'll mention, I'll talk about why we use Firestorm. And that's because they have the photo tools, dialogues, which make it very easy to get the settings done. First, we'll talk about what stereo vision is. On the left side of the screen, once it comes up for you, you'll see an overhead view of my head with two globes. One is close by to my head and another is farther away. And you'll see two lines converging towards each of the globes. What you'll notice is that the lines that are going to the closer globe, as you'll see on the right side, they have a wider angle between them, whereas the lines going into the further, the farther globe are narrower. This is how the brain sees distance. It sees the differences in those, in the comparison between the left eye view and then the right eye view. And so it knows where the image, where the object is relative to everything else around it. And I'll show you the next, the next slide I'll show you. This is what it looks like inside my avatar with my eyelashes. We'll assume that my eyelashes are my eyes. We'll see where it is. And this is the setup. So there's a closer globe. The globe is closer to me and the globe is farther away. The globes are actually the same size. And in this slide, you'll see the view from the left eye. I have my eyelashes on the center of the screen here. And this is the view. And we'll put this all together in a little bit. You'll see that the view has tilted slightly. And in the next slide, we'll cover it up, because we'll just, we'll come back to that a little bit later. And this is the view from the right eye. So you see how it shifted. And we'll cover that up. We'll show that as red. And let's put it all together. And you see that there's a distance, you'll see the distance here more obviously. The distance between the red edge, the edge of the red circle and the edge of the blue circle is wider with the globe that's closer to us. Now how do you see it in 2D? There are different, it's really just an illusion. Your brain kind of figures it out. And the way that it figures it out, I'm sorry, the way that it figures it out is through different things so that it doesn't look like it's just a flat image. Your brain knows that it's a 3D, that there's depth in there. And we'll go through this one by one, but let me just go over that, what we have right now. First is convergence. And we'll talk about that more in detail. The second is through collision. And you probably already heard what that is. Collision is where things are just overlapping over each other. And also their position on a plane. The third are the shaders and shadows. And some people think that that's just to make it look nicer, but it's actually giving the brain hints about the shape of the object, the 3D shape of the object and the distance of the object. And the fourth is atmosphere. That's mostly about the light, and we'll talk about that too. And then the fifth is depth of field, or DOF. It makes it really, it makes it, some people think it's just an effect, but it also helps in depth perception. And another way to figure out what depth is, which is not really going to be covered today, because it's more like how we perceive it inside a virtual world where we move around the object and you can see the other sides of it. And then your brain figures out that, yes, it's a 3D object. But we're not going to cover that today because it doesn't really apply. It's more for machinima, or something like that, or normal walking around. As I said, my focus here is, let me just say this because I know that this is going to be recorded, and therefore other people will probably be seeing this in the future after the viewer has changed a lot. So I'm using version 2.4.2, BL34167 of Firestorm. And Firestorm has two versions now. It has one as an SL only version, and another as an OpenSim version. So you want to make sure that you install the OpenSim version. So environment settings, I'm just going to go through this briefly. This is how you get to the menus that we're going to be talking about. I can make the slides available later also so you can have this as reference. So if you want environment settings, what you want to do is go into the World menu, and then go down to the environment editor, and choose environment settings. There's another easier way to get there. Oh, thank you about that. So there's another easier way to get there, and I'll show you that in a little bit. This is why Firestorm is what I prefer to use because of the easier way. But this is how you can get it in other clients. They're pretty much about the same way. And you can also do edits or create new settings, new in-light settings and new water settings by going to also in the World menu, go to again in environment, oh, I'm sorry, I'm lost here, and choose the, choose, I can't see my slides, sorry, and choose sky setting, sky presets, and you can create some or edit an existing one. But I'll show you how to do this faster if you're using Firestorm. If you, we're also going to talk about okay, this is the easier way to get to something, to the dialogue that's faster. We have a lot of your photography photography tools in one place. You can use the photo and video option in the World menu and either and choose photo tools that would have everything that you need in there. I'm also highlighting camera tools here because we'll also use that to move around. Usually what I do is I move the focus on where I want the, the, I want it to be clear because I use a lot of DOF, depth of field. And, but I want it, sometimes I want it off-center, of course, for composition. And that's then, then I focus on that and use camera tools to move, to move it around in the screen. So you're going to need that also. You can also get the menu from the, if you have your icon bars in the bottom. You do it by right clicking on the icon bar and then choose toolbar buttons. And these are the ones that you would want, photo tools and photo tools camera, which are surrounded by the red box there. And this is what the photo tools dialogue looks like. There's actually several tabs in there and the top one is the one on the left and several ones in the back. And we'll go through some of them today because I'm going to show you the settings that are going to affect your composition that we need for depth. So with that, now that we've got the basics behind us, we're going to talk about the first aspect that makes an, an illusion, that creates an illusion of depth. And that's convergence and sometimes it's called vanishing point because if you, if you imagine a grid around you, like in the picture there, all the, all the lines are going towards the back, towards the background will be vanishing or eventually converging towards one point until where it all disappears, where it all meets. So that's one, one way that you can tell distance. The, you can also have, but of course you're not always going to have lines. So you sometimes would have same, the same things in a row, but receding to the background and that would also give you depth. And I'll show you some examples from my, from my 365 project. And you can also have different sizes of the same things. So let me go and bring up some pictures. Oh no, oh no, I'm crashing. Oops. Okay. Just my graphics card. Okay. I think I'm out. Let me give Buffy my links. Okay. One moment. I'm sorry about this. I lost my notes too. It crashed with it. Okay. Buffy has the first link. There'll be a lot of this links though. In this, actually I'm going to show you a lot of this links and I can, Buffy would it be okay if we just copy and pasted it on the chat so they can also just go directly to the website? Because it is just in the chat. It might be easier than putting it up on the, on the board there. What you'll see in this ones are examples of things that are going towards the, the vanishing point. And it might be a bridge or it might be a dock or it could be a tunnel. So things like this which would show you that, which would would give an illusion of depth. So you have to focus on, you have to oh sorry, you have to, it's, it's, if you, if you could, don't put them in just one line in the foreground is what I guess what I'm trying to say here. Try to angle your composition so that you have lines that are going towards the back, going towards the vanishing point. And that gives you a better illusion of depth. A lot of this will be dependent on your composition. So this is one of those, one of those composition things is not really a technical thing. I'll also show you starting with Newton's cradle where you can have a rule of different things, but they're similar to actually the same things. I'm sorry they're the same things, but they're going towards the distance so that it looks like, so that you also have that vanishing point thing. It doesn't really have to be all vanishing entirely. It can just be a short distance and it will, it will already give you some depth there. And I'll, I'm also showing you some, I'll also show you some starting with arches through arches. There are some objects, for example, like the arches that you only have, I only have two in the same picture, but they give an illusion of depth because the sizes of the arches are different, although our brain kind of thinks that, yeah, they're the same thing, therefore they're probably the same size. So just the fact that they're in different sizes in the 2D photo that tells you that it's farther away, the smaller one is farther away. Another example is like the moose, for example, not rush moose. Once you get to that, you'll see that there are two mooses, I think that's the plural of moose. There are two mooses and one is larger and the other is smaller. So you kind of know, even though you don't really see the ground that they're stepping on, you kind of know that the smaller moose is farther away. Let me see if I can get back in. Buffy, can everybody just say out, or just say out in public chat if you're done giving the pictures. Just don't get distracted about the other links in there. But if you've seen the pictures, give me a cue maybe to continue. Continue. Okay, great, thank you. Go on to slide 23, please. We'll go through collusion and roots, and collusion is really just very simple. And the slides, if it's already up, you'll see on the left side the blue and the red circles. And you can't, they're 2D, they're very 2D, they're very flat. You can't really tell if, okay, thank you. Let me sit down. You can't really, oh, I'm in the wrong place. You can't really tell of, okay, sorry. Let me sit down, otherwise we can't see the slide. Okay, let's go through this fast. Did I miss it? Oh, I wanted to show this. Hold on a second. Let me back up here. I wanted to show this slide. Is it there yet? Oops, I went past it. Too many clicks. Is there a way to get to a specific slide with the system? Okay, it's not letting me do this. I have to do it slow. I wanted to show you, I wanted to go back to the slide where there's the converging lines because I wanted to show you another trick in there, which I forgot to talk about. Sorry about that. There's what you'll find is there's a way to control the distance as it shows in your screen. I know that you probably, you probably have tried it with Alt F9 or one of those, but you can actually do it also in the photo tools. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Okay, it keeps going. The slides won't stop. You know, let me do this. I'm going to go ahead and create one. Can I create? Okay, I just need to just make this faster here because this is ticking while I figure this out. Yes, it won't stop. So let me put my slides on just a prim and just do it this way. Okay, hold on, hold on. I think we're on number 23. No, not that. We want to go back to 18, 16, 17, 17. Okay, here we go. Okay, we're back in business. So let me, okay, what did I say? That was 17. Okay, let's try 18. Okay, here's 18. Now in this slide, you can see there's my avatar opal in Second Life. And in the back behind me, you'll see a very small avatar. That's my Alt Hi-Ho. What you can do with if you go in the depth of field tab in the photo tools dialogue, at the top line at the very first option there is the view angle. And the default is usually 1.047. This is how it looks like. And it usually what it does is I don't use the default anymore, because usually when you have your image on the edges, it becomes distorted. That's another reason. But I'll show you another way to kind of make the sides feel bright. Okay, hold on. To kind of make it, to control it so that you can also have another way of showing depth or another way of making your images more unique or have a different aspect, a different field to it. And I'll show you an example. I have one example. I don't use this often, but I'll show you one really extreme example. So this is 1.047 at this setting. So if I move it up, if I move it down, I'm sorry, if I move it down to 0.8, you notice that Hi-Ho starts to get bigger and he starts to come closer to the foreground. And if you also notice that the lines, the horizontal, what are they? Not the ones going to the foreground, but the square ones are also becoming more compressed. So that's what's happening as you move along, as you reduce that number. And here is 0.6, 0.6 and 0.4. See, Hi-Ho is coming really close. And 0.2. You see the difference? 0.0, let's go back over to 18 from that to that. And you might also notice that my face is also changing. That's because it's less distorted the smaller you get. I haven't tried this with one of my images. Let me get the link. Where did I put it? Oh, no. I lost my link. Oh, here we go. I'm going to put it up on chat. I hope everybody, let me scroll. I hope everybody can hear that. Or maybe what is, let me see if I can shout it. Does it shift enter? Oops, no. That was a whisper. Oops, no. Okay, hold on. Sorry. There's a shot. Okay, there's a shot. I hope everybody heard that. Oh, thank you. I think you can read. Okay, so that's that. Yes, this is SL10B. That's actually, the turtle is actually farther away. Yes, yes, yes, it's a turtle isle. It's actually farther away, but by using this technique, I was able to kind of bring it really, really close. It looks more, it looks more I can't remember. I can't think of the word. It looks more impressive. I mean, like, it's like a huge rock coming really close. Thank you, Carrie. So that's one way that you can do it. One way you can use that technique. So it's not just that you're showing depth, but you're also able to control it. You're also able to control at least the distance of how things look like. And you can also go the opposite way by increasing that number. So it will look farther away, but then you also have to be careful not to put it too close to the edges of the picture because then it gets really distorted towards the edges if you make it too far away. Unless that's what you want to do, of course. Okay, so let's go to the next slide. 23. Yes, it's this one. Okay, now let's talk about this one. About collusion. So if you look on the left side of the top part, you see two circles, a blue one and a red one. And they look like they're right next to each other. But if you go on the right side, they're still the same image. They're still the same size. But I just put the red one over the blue one. And so you see, you think, you know, your brain thinks that, oh, yes, the red one is in front of the blue one. So that's what collusion is. It's very simple. The bottom one is about, I call it roots. I don't really know what the technical term is for this one. But if you see something like this, you're kind of thinking the blue one is in front and the red one is in the back. But really, these are just flat images and they're just moving up in diagonally. They're all the same size. It's not even the size thing. So that's another way that you can kind of fool the brain to think that, oh, yes, the red one is in the back. So this is very simple. So these two ones are very simple. Now about, okay, now let's talk about shaders and shadows. Most of us, we usually say, when we say shadows, we also refer to the darkness on the opposite side, like the shadow on the side of the moon that's not lit by the sun, for example. But for now, for here, we'll call it a shade, a shading instead of a shadow. And we'll call the shadow something that is, that falls onto another object. So we'll talk about shaders and shadows here. And that's also going to affect how everything looks. In this picture, there's actually Opal is actually standing in front of a skull. Really, really, I swear she's standing in front of a skull. But the difference is the thing is with this is that I'm using a windlight that takes away all that. The only reason that Opal looks normal is because of the built in shadings on her outfit. And you get that, okay, I'm using, let me go through here, I'm using the ambient white windlight setting, which is one of the defaults in Firestorm. But what I usually do is I modify it on the bottom side. I don't know how it's just, if you can see this clearly because it's really fuzzy on my screen. But on the bottom, on the bottom middles, not really the bottom, but on the middle right side of the screen is where you can either create a new windlight or edit an existing one. Usually what you, if you already have something and you're playing with a windlight already, if you create, if you tell it to create a new one, it will take whatever settings you have at that point. And it brings up this dialogue on the left side and the upper left hand side. The reason that you cannot see the skull is because of the part here that I have highlighted on the left side. That's the sun moon section and the ambient section. What the sun moon color is, is the color of the light. If you want it to be pure white you can have it white or a little bit gray. This white can be too overwhelming. But the ambient is usually darker and that's what shows you the shades. So because it's reversed in here, then that's why you cannot see the shadow. So let me say sorry, so I cannot see the skull. So let me show you the next slide where we show a little bit. It shows a little bit because I reversed the white and black on the left side as the sun moon color and ambient. Then it starts showing you the shades because now the shades are changing. So now because of that you can see the shape. You can see the 3D shape of the skull. That's another way to add depth. And then we'll do one more thing. I hope it's coming up fast enough for you guys because if it comes up for me then I move on. Let me know if I'm going to fast with switching slides. This one is the same but all I did is change the direction of the sunlight or the direction of the sun. So instead of being in sunset like before, let me go back to the previous one. So before look down below here okay thank you. Look down below here the picture of the of the sun is right at sunset. So it's like 5 o'clock something. But in the next one I moved it up just closer to noon this early afternoon and then the shadows move like in this screen you can actually already see the sockets of the eyes. And I will do a little bit more and in this time what I did is I changed the position of the east and there's also another way that you can enhance how the shading looks in the object that you're trying to feature. And I do this all the time and every image that I do I play around with the sun position because that's, you find the perfect way, the perfect position for the sun where it just hits it just the right way and it looks great and sometimes it just washes it out. So you play with it even when with images that you're doing even if it doesn't seem like it's pertinent to whatever you're trying to do. The only thing about this though is that you sometimes the sun doesn't come through if you're inside a building. So it's usually best to do it outdoors or if you have your own studio then open it up, open up the top or open up the walls so that you can have the right shadows coming in. And in the next slide I can see, let me see I have a few more of this one in this one now I turned on okay now we go back to the right side the dialogue on the right side what I did is I just turned on advanced lighting before I didn't have it on now I turned on advanced lighting and I chose sun and moon shadows that's all it is Opal, see if you notice Opal's shadow it kind of follows the curve of the skull. So that's another way that you can see that there's something there, the 3D even though you don't even if you don't see the back part of the skull you kind of know that there's something there that distorted the shadow so then you kind of can also see the shape of whatever it is that's there and there's a couple more here maybe a few more this one I have oh it's just the same one this one I turned on local lights. I had two projectors actually in this set and it's not very obvious but if you probably, I don't know if you can see it here if you're probably pulling closer you'll be able to see there's actually an overlap there. The problem with projectors the shadows for projectors is that they're only obvious if the background that it's falling on is also dark and I'll show that to you in a little bit. So you have to kind of also play with the how much light you put on it but as we go along you'll see more and more depth added to the picture the image. Oh there we go, there's a little bit more. There you see it a little bit more and in this one Hi everybody, I think Opal crashed out of Skype per second so hopefully we can get her back before we head to the end but I might suggest too while we're here that maybe if you guys have questions you can kind of pre-populate those into chat as well that way when she does get back in we'll have those waiting for her Hi Buffy, can you hear? Hello Buffy? Nope, I'm here I'm here Hi, okay, so I thought Opal was coming back but it doesn't look like it that we're going to be able to get her back. She crashed and you know how this goes sometimes we've got a lot of technology happening a lot of things going on and sometimes to me it's just amazing it works at all so what I'll do is I will make sure that I get all the questions and I'll pass them on to Opal and I'll have her get back to you hopefully before the conference ends or maybe I'll get her to post it on her website or however we'll get back to you on that anyways and I have two minutes I can talk about the suitcase for those of you who are interested because I didn't know anything. I came in here blind for OpenSim too, just kind of wandered around and the suitcase gets created the first time you go to another grid and and anything in the suitcase it looks like that's what gets copied over to the other grid so if you want a landmark it'll go in a landmark folder if you create it on a different sim, I don't think it's called sim or grid, you know I get those mixed up but anyways if you go to a different place how's that, just plain old place yeah so look for that suitcase folder the first time you grid hop and you know a good one to go to is a fleet grid if you go to the landing zones and look around there is a platform area with all the links to all the different grids you can hop to and it's lots of fun hopping around sometimes things don't make it but you know again it's new technology so we have a little bit of time for me to even do my little closing script here so bear with me I'll just say what I was going to say and we can wrap this up so I really want to thank Opal and I will when I see her for all those little tricks to make us better at being virtual photographers I can't wait to put them in practice and I hope everyone here learns something here today too next up in breakout zone 1 is Annabelle Fanshawe who will teach us how to make content with a minimum of stress with her session called using the build it once approach to making content for the metaverse I'm really looking forward to this one too I met Annabelle here I can't believe here when we were setting up and I can't believe I was offering her hair asking her has she ever grid hop before and stuff she's been doing it for years and years and years so I know it's going to make life a little easier for us down the line and as a reminder you can see what's coming up on the schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and there's lots of exciting things happening this afternoon going to the Air Force grid I'm looking forward to that too so and please do take a moment if you can to hop around to not hop don't hop because we're on the same grid here but teleport to the sponsor grids they've really put a lot of effort into making wonderful builds over there alright so thanks again and everyone have fun wherever you go next and I'll see you in a few minutes okay bye