Snaphots, lighting & camera control, and postproduction techniques

I was pondering this just the other day because I have something I'd like to do which would require being able to position the camera in the exact same place relative to my av across multiple logins. I was wondering if maybe it was possible to create a pose stand/booth that worked as a vehicle with the vehicle camera positioned to look back at the av. I don't know if it's possible but that was my first thought for what would be the easiest and most consistent way.

For consistent lighting I just use force sunset and keep the foot shadows pointed directly away from the camera.

What a great topic to talk about. I've been thinking about this too, along the lines of getting consistent product shots if you want to swap through many sets, but don't want to worry about bumping the camera and throwing the angle off (as funny as that sounds in the digital domain). These sorts of things can be easier with two people, but even so, we don't currently have the most convenient tools to "freeze" a camera angle, lighting settings, etc. as a "snapshot" of its own, and then return to that from a palette. But I see this could be a very useful macro.

I'm surprised, actually, that when it comes to adjusting lighting, we have the flexibility of Mouse Moves Sun, but no way to lock a sunphase slider on the clientside. Wish there was an option for that.

Even a basic way to freeze a camera angle would be nice. I.e. I rotate the camera to face me (like "mirror" in There), lock it, and so when I walk forwards, the camera still points at my face and doesn't swing back.

I saw a product on SLEX that was supposed to give you consistent shooting time and again, setting the subject and camera posistion, but I haven't tried it out.

I can see where the consistent composition/pose would be good for some things.

Is this the item you are thinking of Blaze?

Item Name: Camera Control System( Donation Version )
Purchase Price: L$10

This appears to be a crude system for taking snapshots of builds, mostly. It also requires a manual setup and camera positioning which makes it unreliable if one crashes, logs out, or stands up from the camera locking prim (no good for wearable textures either, as the avatar becomes unseated during that process).

If you're using priority 4 poses you can also tie them to a sit ball and use the llCameraPostion and llCameraLookAt commands (sorry, can't get multiple windows or tabbed browsing so they might not be quite the commands).

They will force the position relative to the pose ball, but will be consistent for that ball. You can then use direct positioning etc. from the edit window or through scripting so you can get multiple positions set up and move between them and move back.

Beat me to it! lol

I don't actually have call to take a great deal of posed shots (not a lot of free time available for recreational photography, and not actually producing anything that requires publicity shots atm). However, I have considered this problem on occasion and came up with the following solution.

llCameraPostion and llCameraLookAt are what I would use when needing to ensure continuity between shots. It's relatively simple to have a paired camball/focusball so the camera always points to the focusball that is 100% alpha. You can then adjust the focus, angle, distance etc quite easily - and using a poseball for the subject means that the setup is infinitely repeatable - even between sim crashes.

Lighting is something I've yet to conquer - although I tend to use a whiteroom (white with full bright on all internal surfaces) or blackroom (no full bright needed for obvious reasons) with placed and coloured 'light' prims (with a full alpha texture so they don't get in the way) to get the right look - also repeatable if you only photograph at night.

I have, occasionally, used this technique to get the pose right, then cut out all of the plain white or black in something like PSP and overlaid the subject on a snapshot taken during a sightseeing tour of a nice area as a background. This method is pretty much repeatable as you already have the 'blank' snapshot saved and can retake the subject to fit the background using the repeatable method above.

Hope this helps!

Torley... How do you lock the camera. I'm good at some things in SL...photography doesn't happen to be one.

wisper -- you can't right now, torley was writing it as a feature request (seconded!)

in terms of shot setup, i agree it's a pain to take pictures of oneself. a real pain.

to get a consistent shot i can imagine a setup that is similar to some posted above:

1. use mouse moves sun to put it where you want (and use fullbright background if you a bluescreening the shot).
2. pose the avatar on a prim so it's always in the same spot rotated the same way
3. have a "look here" prim that you alt-click on and adjust it to a compromise spot so your next step gives you a decent perspective angle
4. rotate the camera using the arrows/pageup/down and set marker prims so you know where to rotate to


(re foot shadows, i seem to remember that torley had a way to remove them entirely by editing a file on the hard drive)

Thanks Forseti...it really helps if you can read! ...lol

I'll vote for that feature too, btw!

I thought there must be a way to do it with LSL. If someone feels so inclined here's a description of a product that I'd find indespensible and would definitely buy if it was available...

A full-bright booth (I use one now that's a cyllinder with the outside surfaces set to fully tranparent and the inside set to full bright white) that also acts as a pose stand that you can load up with your poses of choice and easily switch between them (from some kind of GUI ideally). Make it have an adjustable lockable camera position relative to the avatar that can be saved and reused in multiple sessions. Even better would be to have 2 or 3 different positions that could be saved and reused and switched at will. Also the ability to switch the color of the full bright inner surfaces on the fly would be great (I usually use black or white depending on what I'm trying to do). I'd pay well for something like that and I bet a ton of other people would too

Some day I really need to learn LSL!

I tried posing on a prim, and found the margin of error to be a few tenths of a degree out of sync each time. Whenever I had to reseat myself for a texture change, or because of logging out and back in, I lost the angle by about .1 to .2 degrees. Enough to screw up the snapshot for it's intended use. It seems SL rounds off, or is in some other way not precise with camera position and rotation. While that approach might be good enough for most people to produce nearly identical looking ads, I need to have information match perfectly down to every last pixel. All of the makeup shots I have been producing thus far use the appearance camera settings to duplicate the exact camera position. Force sunset solves the lighting issue. Combine this with Priority 4 animation poses and the angles can be loaded precisely each time. The process is still a little buggy because appearance snapshots need to have thier levels adjusted in post production. Eye movement cannot be controled, so I paste a set of eyes from a previous snapshot over all the other snapshot layers in post production. Also, designing a custom pose for appearance needs to take into account the fact that appearance swings the camera around the subject 180 degrees. Even with these limitations, I am still able to get what I need out of high rez snapshots and produce perfect results each time.

Makeup displays was the same reason I was pondering this. Ultimately I just decided having slight variations in each shot is preferable to having to jump through too many hoops.

Aside from forcing sunset and cutting the av out from the background to paste onto a different one, I don't do any post processing. I'd rather make sure people see it exactly as they would if they bought it and put it on, minus differences in graphics cards. Then again, I'm far lazier with my ad and box images than most people

Namssor, yes, i think it was that L$10 version on SLEX--Sorry I didn't investigate it more. Your make-up ads looks great--you have those really well nailed down as it is. Isn't it wild how much time it takes to create marketing promos compared to making the actual item!?

Chip, that is a great idea. I could see a user HUD with that photo studio really useful, also.

It'd be really nice if we could snap the camera to the grid like we can prims. Hm....

As For said...

I was expressing my HOPES AND DREAMS for a way to do this in SL. There isn't currently an easy way that I know of.

Creds go to Strife Onizuka and Kathmandu Gilman for the FOOT SHADOW KILLER (DIE DIE DIE) hack... find out more here:

/109/01/70615/1.html
/109/c9/70889/1.html

Yes, time is always an issue, and I would have settled for the "99% there" method had it not been neccesary to accurately represent all possible makeup combinations within a single file. Shooting a million snapshots for each combination would keep me busy well past SL 2.0, as well as bankrupt me if I chose to upload them all back into SL The ability to layer eyeshadow, eyebow, lips, and any other variations inside a single file reduces the number of snapshots I need to take to one for each texture component. Millions of makeup combinations can then be produced for ads by turning on and off certain layers in a Photoshop file.

I agree that accurate product representation is also very important. Even though I can't tell the difference between the snapshot and the actual image I see on my avatar, I know others will have different avatar shapes and different light settings when they place the textures on thier avatars. The only way to combat that is to provide demo textures for everything I sell.

Yep, hehe. I was considering allowing people to choose eyes and lips seperately so I was looking for a way to do shots for the vendor so people could create their own combinations from a stack of image strips. I finally decided that would be too much work, at least for now. When we finally get generalized texture layers or equivelant then it will make more sense to do. I wasn't crazy about the idea of having to create a composite in PS for every possible combination or have to do them as they came in. The whole reason I decided to do my own makeup sets was to cut back on that kind of work. Your sample images look gorgeous by the way

GTL's, Amen!! Then we can all just put these components in vendors and let people go nuts with all the options

Exactly! Can't wait. Then we can start bugging them to give us a few different blend modes

Seems I've come a bit late to this discussion but I wanted to add the simple solution I use.

Being a furniture architect I want my images to convey my furniture without any modifications from photoshop past the naming and description on the image itself. To take these pictures I made a five sides photobox which each wall a differeing shade of tan. On the floor of the photobox I have position boxes which I stand on as I take pictures and Verticle strips on the walls to line up between.

When aligning to take a photo I zoom in to a point where both of my verticle stripes are equadistant on my screen and standing on my Mark all of my display images come out with the same Vantage point.

I am still brand new to designing and post production in SL but I have recieved good feedback so far on my furniture images.

~Bella

Cybella Sieyes
CyDe Creations

Not at all Cybella. Thanks for your input!

I made a 'camera chair' about a year ago so i could take snapshots with the camera in a fixed position/orientation over multiple sessions. I made it to help Fallingwater with her jewelery shots, but its not always the best solution... Only good for modeling shots if you have a friend modeling or taking the snaps.
I did toy with making a time lapse film of the SL sun rise/moon rise for fun, but didnt have the patience

Its basically a vehicle with the camera fixed looking forwards, with the controls rotating you in 2 axis (rotate left/right and up/down... no tilting) with 3 settings for fine to coarse control while sitting. Its got a viewfinder for roughly lining up the shot when you edit/move it, which goes transparent when you sit on it.

Its still beta - I never got around to polishing it off - but if anyone wants a copy (for free as-is) IM me and I'll drop you a copy next time I'm in-world.

I've not tried, but I think I could build something that would fix the photographer and the model to lots of levels of precision.

If there's enough demand tell me this way or in IM sometime and I'll have a play after we discuss precisely how you want it to work. It shouldn't be a hard coding job, and I'll try to make it not too clunky to use.

lizzy just showed me what an amazing difference HW Lighting (ctrl alt 5) in Debug > Rendering > Features makes. Not only does it make our avatars illuminated, it also appears to smooth features out a bit. My nose looks infinitely better!

I'm rather floored to have just now learned about this one.