This is a meta-post about how to configure your viewer to see everything the artists intend you to see. Those of you with gaming übercomputers can skip this post; you’re already seeing everything. But readers with more modest computers might need to be aware of how their Second Life graphics preferences interact with the visuals of art here at Brooklyn is Watching and elsewhere in Second Life.

First is your choice of viewer. Windlight, the new visual rendering code introduced in 1.19.1, changes the appearance of most things in Second Life, sometimes drastically. (Lighting, both sun/moon and local lights, are especially different.) Artists were among the earliest adopters of Windlight, so anything made in the past six months is likely to look not quite right in an older viewer.

Some artists have started to work with glow effects. Glow was added to Second Life with Windlight (1.19.1) and was made scriptable in 1.20 (currently still in Release Candidate status). Some recent works at BiW, such as Oxoc Ah’s plasma experiments, can only be seen in their full glory with the RC viewer, or with 1.20 or later once released.

Your graphics preferences (Edit/Preferences, and then pick the Graphics tab — or if you prefer, Control-P) can also have a major effect on how art looks. Unfortunately, the options that make the art look better also make your viewer slower, so residents with slower computers might have to increase settings to view art, and then turn them back down for other SL use.

I’m only going to be talking about the preferences for Windlight viewers (1.19.1 and later); if you’re still using something older you’re on your own. To get full control over the things I’m going to be talking about, you need to check the Custom checkbox, next to the slider that has Low, Medium, High, and Ultra settings. If you’re at High or Ultra and you’re happy with the performance of your viewer, you can stop reading now; you’re already seeing everything.

The most important settings are the checkboxes in the Shaders section. Bump Mapping and Shiny is essential; half the art at BiW (anything with metallic surfaces) will look wrong without it. Fortunately, its performance impact is small. The next checkbox, Basic Shaders, also has a big effect on the appearance of art. But this one also has a large performance impact on some systems, including my laptop with integrated graphics, so I keep them off much of the time and turn them on for art viewing. Without Basic Shaders, the sun/moon lighting will look flat and glow won’t work. The next checkbox, Atmospheric Shaders, is what makes the Windlight sky look pretty; it’s less important for viewing art. The final one, Water Reflections, doesn’t matter most of the time, but it does make a difference for viewing pieces that interact with the water such as Bob | Box by Mencius Watts and Taggert Alsop.

Next is the Lighting Detail section. Any pieces that use light effects won’t look right if you have “sun and moon only” selected here; that turns off rendering of all light prims. Local lighting has almost zero performance impact if your graphics card implements it in hardware, but a big effect if it does not.

Draw distance is important for viewing some of the really large pieces. The 128m default for the High level is enough for just about all art; smaller values like 96m (the Medium default) or 64m (the Low default) may cause you not to see the more distant parts of some large installations.

Some works use particle effects; basically, most things that spew out temporary effects that you can see but can’t touch. So it’s important not to set the Max Particle Count to zero, which disables all particle rendering. So far I haven’t seen any art at BiW that uses really large numbers of particles, so modest values like 1024 should work fine.

The only detail sliders likely to have any effect on your art viewing are Objects and Flexiprims. Keep the Flexiprims detail all the way to the right if at all possible; low detail for those looks really ugly. Object detail is less critical, though more is always better if your system can support it. Avatar detail could matter if you’re watching a piece of performance art — it changes the distance at which avatar imposters (lower-res 2D versions of avatars)  take over from the normal avatars.

Finally, in the Hardware Options section, there are two options that can make your Second Life prettier in a subtle way: Anisotropic Filtering and Antialiasing. (Edited to add: the antialiasing option was added in 1.20. Previous viewers have no way to turn on AA, but you might be able to enable it by using the control panel software that comes with your video card driver.) I suggest using 4x antialiasing if your hardware can support it without a big speed drop; it makes all those jagged edges look a little smoother.

There are a number of viewer bugs related to snapshots. If you take pictures, either in-world or saved to disk, and they don’t look like you expect them to, you may just have to find another way to do things for now. Screen captures are effective, but are a pain to do because you have to get all the viewer UI out of your way. (Snapshots automaticaly hide the user interface and HUDs.)

Torley Linden did a video tutorial about setting these and other options. If you’re not sure how to change these things, have a look.

Hope this has been enlightening. Happy viewing!

Posted by Shirley Marquez on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 12:36 am.