Photo studio comparison
Dendre Writez writes a very informative review of SL photo studios on the Runway Kidz blog.
I especially like the comparison table at the end of the post. Who wants a market research department with posts like this? :p
After the 1st February blues
Now that the SL glitch that broke the PhotoStage’s scripts has been solved, we can spend some time explaining exactly what happened.
Linden Lab announced an update of the server code on 31st January. This was applied as a rolling restart, which caused no apparent problems other than the sims going offline for a few minutes as it is usual. However, the server update changed something that was not documented, announced or advertised. Before the update, the Description field of any prim could contain many characters, including (why not, one could ask) the character called a pipe “|”. This character is often used by scripters and programmers as a delimiter, i.e. used to separate blocks of text or values from each other. The Description field of prims is also used frequently as a common place where data can be shared by multiple scripts running in a single prim. Finally, I must point out something that is pretty evident, but apparently needs pointing out (you will see why in a minute): when you put some text into the Description field of a prim, you expect it to stay there, unchanged, until you (or somebody else) changes it. This is just common sense.
After the update, things changed. You can still put a pipe character into the Description field of any prim, but that character is automatically and silently converted to a question mark “?”. Imagine that your script puts the text “hello|there” in the Description of a prim; next time you look at it, it will show “hello?there”. As you can imagine, having characters changed by SL under the hood, silently, and without your permission, is not a good thing. Your script relies on finding some text there and, instead, it finds something else. As a consequence, what used to work before doesn’t work now.
I am going into rant mode now.
Carine photoshoot
The other day Carine came by and asked me to take a few photos of her. These are some samples.
For the first two I set the PhotoStage backdrop to black, placed a warming light to her right and a white filling light to her left and above. Then I set up an effects generator to coloured fog. For the third picture I used a wood texture for the backdrop and a third soft light placed near Carine’s feet to avoid deep shadows under her chin.
I shot at 2880 x 1700 (twice my screen resolution). The photos here are resized to 25% of their original size, and compressed as JPGs.
Thanks, Carine, for letting me show these pics here!
PhotoStage update available now
PhotoStage 1.0.6 is now available. This is an “emergency” update that works around the problems introduced by yesterday’s rolling restart. No functionality changes have been made.
Current owners of PhotoStage can get the update automatically by clicking the Reset button on the PhotoStage main menu. The new version will be dispatched to you after a few seconds.
The new version is also available from all our retail points, both web and inworld.
Important: please don’t forget to transfer any backdrop textures and saved configurations to the new version of PhotoStage before you delete the old one.
SL glitch affecting PhotoStage
It seems that the fixes that Linden Lab applied to SL servers during yesterday’s rolling restart have introduced a number of problems. The official Linden Blog reports so (http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/02/01/fix-may-cause-problems-for-scripts-relying-on-long-object-names-and-descriptions/).
A few minutes ago we detected that these problems can affect the correct functioning of PhotoStage, and immediately contacted Linden Lab via customer support requesting more information and, ideally, a fix. We are also investigating a workaround to make PhotoStage function correctly even if Linden Lab don’t fix these problems. We will make a PhotoStage update available as soon as we can. We will send a new group notice once it’s ready with specific instructions on how to obtain it.
In the meantime, we apologise for the inconvenience, and we hope that you understand that this is a problem introduced by Linden Lab and there is not much that we can do to avoid it.
Gaze points for PhotoStage
In addition to the new features in PhotoStage 1.1 (coming soon) that we descibed recently, we have decided to add one more. Sometimes, when you are taking photos of a model, you would like that she looks in a certain direction. A gaze point is just an object that you can create and ask your model to track with her gaze by “alt-clicking”. This way, the model’s gaze and possibly head position will move, always pointing towards the gaze point, when you move it around.
We hope you find this useful. As usual, your feedback is welcome.
Tutorial: Lights and effects basics
In this second tutorials post I explain the basics of lights and effects. This is valid for PhotoStage and PhotoLite as well.
First, some definitions. A light is just an object that emits light. You can have up to six of them with either PhotoStage or PhotoLite. Lights allow you to illuminate your subject using what SL calls “local lighting”, i.e. light cast by prims with the light flag active, as opposed to “environment light” which comes from the sun and moon. As you surely know, light is the essence of a photograph, so a fine control of lights is crucial to achieve great results.
PhotoStage update coming soon
We are working hard on the next version of PhotoStage. After having received great feedback from many customers, we decided to incorporate a few enhancements that will be included in version 1.1, to be released soon. If you are an owner of PhotoStage you will receive this update for free.
In addition to lots of minor improvements and optimisations, these are the major new features in the upcoming version:
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A HUD will make using the PhotoStage much more enjoyable. You will be able to avoid menus except for a few uncommon commands.
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A Channel setting will let you operate up to 9 different PhotoStages from a single Control Box or HUD. This is especially useful if you want to set up multiple PhotoStages side by side.
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An Update button will be added to the menus, so you can check for updates manually without resetting the whole PhotoStage.
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A few top-class modelling poses will be included with the PhotoStand.
We hope you enjoy these improvements. As usual, your feedback is crucial for us to make the best studio photography toolkit in SL. Let us know what you think!
Custom PhotoStage backdrops
Some customers have suggested that the standard PhotoStage backdrops (16 and 12 metres) are too large for them. The good news is that we can provide custom-sized backdrops, from very tiny to very large. So, if you have space limitations and still want to use PhotoStage, or if you want an especially big backdrop, let us know and we will build it for you. Contact us and we will give you a quote that will vary depending on the required size and delivery timeframe.
Ananké Media Systems 