In yesterday’s blog post I told you I played around with the new 360 snapshot tool in Second Life, using the Second Life 360 project viewer. I didn’t really got into the how and what, so I will make up for that by explaining a bit more!
To make 360 snapshot you will need to download the 360 project viewer, which looks and feels like the regular LL viewer, so that is familiar. OK…maybe not for the Firestorm fans, but for me as a LL viewer user this project viewer is nothing weird!
The only difference is, of-course!, that you can choose to create 360 snapshots. You can bring up the menu to do this in 3 ways:
- press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+6 (are you kidding me, I only have two hands!)
- Go to the ‘WORLD’ menu and select : 360 snapshot
- Take a snapshot as you always do and choose: 360 snapshot in the bottom right of the well-known snapshot floater (my preferred way so far)
Once you click the ‘take a 360 snapshot’, the snapshot floater will change and will give you some new options! Not really difficult and since you can’t break anything, feel free to press the buttons and see what happens.
You first decide on the quality level, in this case I choose Maximum, because why not? The option to hide all avatars is recommended – moving objects and avatars don’t do well in these kind of pics. But hey ho, feel free to try it out, it could well end up very artistic!
The preview panel gives you the chance to check out how your final image will look like and you can also click and drag it. I noticed that the preview looks very blurry, but it does give a good idea of composition and this does not mean the final image will be blurry! When you are happy with the preview, you simply click : create 360 image!
You will see that the image is no longer blurry! Yay! If you are pleased with it, then finally you can save it to your hard-drive! Easy peasy!
To view a 360 snapshot it needs to be uploaded to a platform that enables 360 images and luckily Flickr is perfect for that. But you can also post them on Facebook! In blogs as mine, WordPress, you will only see a weird flat image as shown here:
To see the actual 360 image, it’s on my Flickr here!
A few thingies.
Best result is in as high graphics as you can be.
And even then some stuff won’t show properly, it happens. It’s best you take the time to let everything rezz, specially textures, to get the best result. Choose the hide avatar option to avoid stretched creatures in your image (unless as said you love those) and play around with the camera point of view to get the result you want.
I am sure we will get to see the most awesome 360 pics, this really can be wonderful to show off a region, a main-store (as I did in this blog for example) and events. I, for one, will surely use this in future blog-posts.
Happy snapping!
Useful links:
Download the 360 project viewer here
Alexa Linden’s blog-post on the 360 project viewer
Second Life Gallery on Flickr with examples
Pics in this blog shot at Dutchie Furniture and Homes
Cait's World 