Tutorial: SL EEP: Personal Lighting

← Previous Page

Personal Lighting

What Is Personal Lighting?

With Windlight, SL photographers and machinima makers are familiar with being able to visit an in-world location and using the environment tools within the viewer to make changes to the environment to suit their needs: move the sun higher or lower in the sky, move it around the sky, change the cloud density, alter the horizon haze, etc.

However, as EEP assets have permissions associated with them, this may not always be possible: if a No Modify EEP asset is applied to a region or parcel, then things like the Sun position, the clouds, etc., cannot be altered.

To get around this, EEP offers a couple of options:

  • You can apply an EEP asset from inventory to your avatar (see: Applying EEP Assets To Your Avatar). However, doing so means the applied settings probably won’t offer a reasonable match to the location’s actual environment, which might be preferred, and trying to get it to more closely resemble to location’s environment could be a painstaking task.
  • You can instead use the Personal Lighting floater to take a local “snapshot” of the environment.

Use of the Personal Lighting floater means that:

  • Any changes made to the environment are only visible in your viewer.
  • Changes cannot be saved back to inventory as a new EEP asset, so preserving the permissions of of the original.
  • Changes made via Personal Lighting will persist until you:
      • Log out of SL.
      • Select World → Environments → Use Shared Environment.
      • Apply an EEP asset to your avatar.
  • If you are in a location where the environment can be modified, and you wish to make adjustments to it and then save those changes as an EEP asset you can re-use, you should used the Fixed Environments options.

The Personal Lighting Floater

As noted above, the Personal Lighting floater allows you to make changes to a location’s environment that are only seen in your viewer – although they will remain in place until you either select World → Environments → Use Shared Environment or log out of Second Life.

The Personal Lighting floater
  1. Ambient Colour and Density pickers: set the ambient sky and cloud colours –  simply click on the required picker, select the required colour and use the slider on the picker to set the colour density.
  2. Haze sliders: used to adjust the atmosphere and horizon haze. If you’ve not used them before, the simplest way to understand them is to experiment with them.
  3. Scene Gamma: set the overall brightness.
  4. Position trackballs: use the Sun / Moon image on the trackball to adjust the position of the Sun and / or Moon.
    • If the sun/moon image on a trackball is dimmed it is below the horizon in-world, use CTRL-left-click and drag to raise it above the horizon (or conversely, to move it below or onto the horizon).
  5. Glow and brightness sliders (Sun and Stars only): sliders for setting glow and star brightness. Note that with stars:
    • To hide them in low daylight settings, set to 0.
    • If those who have Advanced lighting Model enabled in the viewer will be able to see stars “twinkle” if they are set bright enough.
  6. Show beacon: toggle Sun / Moon beacons on / off (also accessible via the beacons option World → Show → Beacons Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N).

Creating and Editing EEP Assets

Creating EEP Assets

New EEP assets can be created either from the My Environments floater or from inventory. Each offers two means to create a new asset.

  1. By clicking on the + button at the foot of the panel and then selecting the required asset type (Sky, Water, Day Cycle) – when using inventory, you’ll need to go via the create menu → New Settings sub-menu.
    • Using this method will automatically place the created asset within your Settings folder.
  2. By right-clicking on the Settings folder and selecting the required Asset type via the create menu.
Creating a new EEP asset from either My Environments (l) or Inventory (r) using the + button (1), or via right-clicking on the Settings folder and the selecting the required asset type from the create menu → New Settings option (2)

Notes:

  • You can create new settings in any folder of your choosing in Inventory (or visible in the My Environments panel), but the Settings folder is the recommended location for EEP settings.
  • You can obviously create sub-menus in Settings to organise your EEP assets if you want.

Editing EEP Assets

To edit a settings asset:

  • Open your inventory or the My Environments floater.
  • Navigate to the folder containing the settings asset you wish to edit and then:
    • Double-click on the required settings asset.
    • Right-click on the required settings object and select Open.
    • Click the gear icon and click on Edit (My Environments floater only).
  • The relevant edit floater will open (Sky, Water, Day Cycle). These are described in detail in the following sections.

 

 

Intro  Viewer UI  Personal Lighting/Creating Assets  Fixed Environments  Day Cycles  Import Windlight/LSL