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. 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!

I have commented on two works by Solkide previously, Black Pearl and Radiazioni; those were abstract studies of form. His latest piece, Spitfire, is more puzzling; it feels as though it should have some sort of narrative, but I can’t untangle it.

As I view it, the work has two parts. The lower part is a metallic ball launcher that reminds me of a pinball machine. We see ghost images of a compressed spring and of the ball in earlier positions, suggesting the launch of the ball. There is, however, no visible mechanism to cause the compression of the spring or the launch of the ball. At the end of the chute where the ball travels, there is a cone of near transparent rings; inside the cone is a structure of partial arcs, and in the center a ball that reminds me of molten lava.

A literal reading might see the molten ball as the fire, and the launcher as something that “spits” out balls. But that seems a bit too pat. And where does the molten ball come from, anyway? The launcher is spitting out a metallic ball, nothing like the molten one. Perhaps the structure of arcs acts on the balls somehow?

Solkide may be moving into awkward ground here; enough representation to be not purely abstract or “hyperformal” (as Dancoyote would say), but not enough to offer a coherent story. I continue to enjoy Solkide work with form; I’m just a bit confused this time. But then, sometimes good art is confusing.

Cheen Pitney has placed three sculptures from his first nations series: BEAR DANCER, EAGLE DANCER, and ORCA DANCER; the three dancers are gathered around another work, BONFIRE. When I saw these, it was clear that I was looking at the work of a very talented sculptor; the only thing I couldn’t figure out is how his work had managed to elude me in the past. Go read his blog, go look at more of his work; that’s all I can say. Mere mortals like me aren’t fit to criticize the gods.

This piece by Oxoc Ah looks like something out of a mad scientist’s laboratory; mysterious apparatus with glowing beams traveling between them. I don’t see any deep message here, but it’s fun to look at and the execution of the idea is good.

I have included two photographs to show a problem in the current RC viewer. The top one was taken with “Snapshot to Disk” with “High-res Snapshot” enabled; it’s a nice view of the framework of this piece but loses most of the point of it, because the glow doesn’t appear in the photo. The second one is a screenshot, cropped to take out the UI elements; that’s the way you would see the piece in your viewer — but it’s only half the size in each direction, because I can’t take advantage of the “high-res snapshot” feature in the Advanced menu. It turns out to be the same reason that Selavy’s recent playground space looked different in photos, it’s now in the JIRA as VWR-8033.

Even the better photo doesn’t show the dynamic nature of this work, so you’ll just have to go look for yourself!

Robin Moore’s workcreates a third dimension in the same way that the classic Disney animated films did: by using multiple planes. (It appears to be built entirely of flat pictures of things; rather than containing some objects made from prims.) But instead of having to rely on the animators to explore the third dimension, we can freely move our camera to see into the depths of the picture. (Moving your camera is a must for this work; looking at it strictly from one position just won’t give you the effect it is meant to produce.) I liked the “forward into the past” aspect of exploring this old way of creating depth, and felt that the moving swing added to the evocation of animation past.

(Historical background: through the 1980s, Disney animators would put cels on glass plates that were placed in layers in front of a background drawing. The filmmakers would get the illusion of movement and changing camera position by physically moving the camera and shooting through the layers at different angles; the glass plates could also be moved to create additional movement, and the cels replaced with new drawings to illustrate character movement. In the 1990s this technique was replaced by computer compositing; the cels for the various layers were scanned and assembled by computer. This new technique made more freedom of movement possible; for example, the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast would have been impossible to shoot with the older method.)

Edited to add: the description of the piece names the girl as wish Serevi.

Oxoc’s untitled work is a portrait of an unnamed model, overlayed with a tye-dye like, partially transparent animated texture. (It does not appear to be a self-portrait; I looked at the artist’s profile, which led to his Flickr page; on the last page of pictures you can see the artist.) The texture animation felt like a ploy to get the viewer’s interest; it reminded me of those horrible pictures with “moving” water that you used to see at Chinese restaurants.

I was all set to slam this as just another gimmick piece, but then I took a better look at the photo that I took for this blog. Without the distraction of movement, I liked the interplay of the colors with the portrait; this piece works better for me as a still. It reminds me of the old Rolling Stones song: “She comes in colors everywhere, she combs her hair, she’s like a rainbow.” A suggestion to the artist: if you ever sell this work, modify the script so the texture animation starts and stops with a click.

The colors in the photograph from Second Life dulled down a lot compared to what you see in the viewer; the picture in this blog has been altered to restore some of the richness of color.

(Edited to add: the small versions of this photo as resampled by Flickr for embedding on this page lose some of the fluidity of texture of the original. Click the photo to visit Flickr, click the “all sizes” button above it to view a larger version, and then “original size” in the list to get the full-size picture.)

Near the playground, Ichibot offers us a work that leaves me trying to untangle its layers of meaning. A dimpled sphere next to the playground launches hand puppets; the puppets land on the path between the playground and the castle, bouncing around a bit before coming to a stop. They are physical, so the viewer can kick them around; they are also temporary, so each puppet disappears after about a minute. There appears to be some random element in the launcher; the puppets are not all launched in exactly the same direction or with the same amount of force. Still, sometimes a newly launched puppet bumps into one or more of the ones that are already on the ground, and they interact.

The faces of the puppets are not typical youthful-looking child images, as one commonly sees on toys; rather, they have a wrinkled face, with a mustache truncated on both ends that reminds me of Adolf Hitler. The body part is small; my first reaction on seeing the piece is that the things tumbling were severed heads, not puppets. The puppet bodies come in random colors, but otherwise the puppets all appear to be identical.

This piece make me think of a lot of things. The location near the playground evokes toys that are casually thrown around by children. The severed look of them, combined with the vaguely Hitleresque look of the faces, suggests violence and perhaps retribution. And their colorful nature and the fact that they are physical suggest interaction and play. Very mixed messages, and I think that ambivalence is what makes it interesting.

Henry is a clockwork robot. The outside is nice enough, with good prim work and texturing, but the interesting stuff is inside. Mini-Henrys are at work keeping him going, there are working gears and a fireplace to provide power, and even a heart. Make sure to have a look at the back; there is another open door there with more visible works. I see it as an allegory on the insides of humans (emotional as well as physical), and how different they are from the shell we see on the outside.

There is a plaque above this piece:

“henry”

created for the Museum of Robots “build a robot challenge”

over 40 robots on display now through late July

click here for landmark

(Edited to add that the title I used is based on the name of the object - capitalized, and with the (doors open) text. The title on the plaque is not capitalized. I try to spell and capitalize the names of art as the artist does; this one was difficult because the artist did it two different ways.)

playground space was first placed last week; I took some pictures at the time but didn’t post a comment because I was still trying to figure out how I felt about the piece. When luntsberg candy castle went up, I posted on that and noted that it would have complemented the now-missing playground space; it looks like Selavy and Ichibot listened, because it’s back. Unless, of course, I just had a weird viewer issue the first time I looked at the castle and didn’t see the playground. SL is SL, it could have happened. In any case, both are there now, and Ichibot added a colorful striped pathway tying the two pieces together; the pieces of the path are named “cick” and “lunt”, so they are clearly intended as such, not that there would be any confusion anyway!

I’m ambivalent about playground space. On the one hand, I love the idea of it, and I like the way that the two artists have worked together on it. (The base build is by Selavy; Ichibot contributed the table and chairs in the third photo, and the ice pops on the raised platform.) The grass texture is really nice. There is some potential for interaction with the space; the swing operates, and you can kick around Selavy’s signature cubes. (For those of you who are new here, many of Selavy’s works include standard size cubes that have been used in creative ways.) There is even one of Arahan’s super happy fun balloons left over from the Injustice installation last week.

On the other hand, a lot of the execution left me flat. Selavy was probably trying for a minimalist visual style, but I think she went too far; a bit more detail in the build would have made it more evocative for me.

The photos of this piece presented some interesting challenges. The highly detailed grass texture foils JPEG compression; as a result, I had to compress these pictures more aggressively than usual to get the upload size below 300K. (Flickr doesn’t seem to like uploading images larger than that, at least not from me.) The third picture, the closeup of Ichibot’s table and chairs, also had to be cropped quite tightly, in addition to the higher than normal compression. The Windlight time of day was changed for best effect on each; the big overview picture (the one that shows the castle and the playground) is at 7:00am, but the table and chairs are at 4:40pm. The first picture (the one showing the entire playground, but not the castle) was from last week’s shoot.

There is a bug in the release candidate viewer that sometimes make the display screen / photo frame on the raised platform look washed out and blank. Oddly, photographs of the scene are fine even when it doesn’t look right on your screen.

Local Brooklyn Journalist Alanna Martinez interviewed Selavy Oh at Brooklyn is Watching yesterday for her upcoming story in the Williamsburg / Greenpoint Arts and News. We’ll post a link to it here as soon as its released, which i’m told is likely to be sometime next week.