Photoshop and Second Life

From now on, I will be posting colourful and necessary additions like this in between the days of our library's construction progress.

This is the very first photoshop work experiment using: Filter - Render - Lighting Effects.

What needed to be done was "to generate a white light by casting 3 coloured lights over it," as resulted above.

Just for the comfort of you not having to click to enlarge, here's an original size.

Again using the three primary additive colours but on Second Life

SL environment was darkened for the sake of this visual. The surrounding orbs emit the RGB colours and the result of their combination on the centre orb.

Now, my avatar surrounded by the lights.

I think I mentioned this before but, this is my avatar in Second Life and the bald dude in NZVWG. I'm inclined to think SL offers more flexibility, this being a minor yet mustsay example. However, NZVWG has proven itself to be better in some cases.

Did I also mention that NZVWG stands for New Zealand Virtual World Grid?

Making with offset filter



This is the beginning of something beautiful.

Like the first experiment, I played around with lighting effects combining different colours of light to start. Then the three white spotlights were added in the centre that to me, looked more like holes with light coming through them rather than they themselves being the light sources. This perception became the seed to be watered and nurtured.

With every addition of 'holes,' it created this seemly sinister look that actually went well with the mesmeric hues of the mixture.

Curves tool was used to emphasize and see your true colours, and that's why I love you.

A small trick I learnt from a past tutorial; I selected and deleted only the white in the image using colour range tool. The holes were perceived, then realised.

The current pattern of holes were then copied, reduced, and then pasted until the final product above went under the offset filter.

The image was offset exactly by half, both horizontal and vertical.

Using Liquify, then Twirl Clockwise tool, the crisp cut-lines were in with the flow.

And finally, there it is in a repeated pattern in SL.

 Trying out different colours, I like green.

Closer view of the final product, looking groovy.

Making with alpha channel

I followed two ways you could make a material in NZVWG with transparency. One was to create an image with transparent background, make whatever on it, then save as .png file. This method doesn't make any use of alpha channel but, I found it to be swifter as to create a transparent material for the virtual world.

Now, making with alpha channel

Mocking about with effects and shapes, I decided to make beam structures that would somewhat utilize the steel structuring and the V-shaped columns from the article of Stuart Piercy and Richard Conner in 'Architectural Design : A.D."

With the shape made, I clicked on to 'Channels' and created a new channel that was called 'alpha 1' by default. Then its background was painted white.

What the alpha channel did was that, after pasting my shape image, it would make the black parts of image transparent, as far as I know.

The image was then saved as a .tga file so to import it to NZVWG, and there it is!

The shape was then multiplied and coloured to blend into the existing design. From Piercy Connor, the beams were integrated from function to aesthetic values.