Hello there and Merry Christmas !

Shortly after releasing the When You're Hot sweat and wet appliers, I noticed that the first three levels had some kind of pattern on the skin shine... It was not obvious at all, but once I noticed it I couldn't unsee it. The human eye has an uncanny ability to detect patterns, really.

So I have entirely redone those three levels, "Warm", "Hot" and "Torrid", both on the retail and the demo versions, on the head and body, for LeLutka, Maitreya, Lolas and Omega. Now those three levels of shine look more realistic and natural than before, and that freakin' pattern is gone.

See for yourself :



As you can see, the pattern was not easily spotted but once you saw it, you could no longer ignore it. I know I couldn't.

Also it does not show on the pictures here, but the new sheen gives the skin a better 3D look, while it was almost flat before. The skin is more "bumpy" now, as it should be, making it look more natural when you move your camera or when the lights move around you.

The other four levels do not use the same pattern for the skin so no need to change them.


That's not all, this update also changes a couple more things.

I have added two "Clear" buttons on the left of the "Maitreya+LeLutka+Lolas" HUD (not on the Omega HUDs, which already have such buttons), so you don't have to go through turning off the tattoo layer of your LeLutka head, pressing "clear all layers" on your Maitreya HUD and pressing "clear all" on your Proud Girls (if you use them). These new buttons do not actually clear the textures, they replace them with fully transparent textures and get rid of the materials, which has the same effect.



Finally, the Maitreya+LeLutka+Lolas HUD no longer sends messages to Omega breasts, as it was confusing the Proud Girls and probably other models of mesh breasts as well. This is the role of the Omega HUDs anyway. The reason for this is that Omega top appliers and Lolas appliers share the same channels and follow almost the same protocols.


To update your When You're Hot HUDs, simply rez the updater contained in the folder, wait a little, you will receive the new box and the updater will derez itself.


Have fun and happy holidays !


Marine

Hello and Happy New Year !

This is a small update to the Need For Seed system (its HUD, actually). I had noticed some of the face appliers had a strange grey outline under certain lighting circumstances, so this version should fix that and get rid of any grey outline or shade for good.

It also contains a fix for a strange bug, namely when wearing one of the MdlM latex catsuits, bodysuits or stockings, the additional attachments (neck piece and boots) behaved strangely when clicking on one of the main buttons of the Need For Seed HUD. It would change the mask, or change the texture of the top of the boot, or hide it altogether... There was a conflict in the channels as the MultiApplier script in charge of applying the cum through Omega and Lolas is the exact same one I use in the latex catsuits, bodysuits and stockings. Added a parameter to tell this script not to talk to attachments, and it works. Of course it still talks to the cum attachments, but no longer to the neck piece and boots, that made no sense.

Anyway, to update your Need For Seed HUD, simply rez the updater contained in the folder on the ground and wait, you will receive a new box a moment later. Leave the updater alone, it destroys itself after a while. Also no need to update the Feed Her Need For Seed HUD, this one is not impacted by this update at all, so no need to give a new copy to whoever you already gave a copy to.


Have fun !

Marine

Hi there,

Here is a small update to the When You're Hot sweat appliers that fixes an issue occurring specifically with LAQ mesh heads, where the demo would work but not the retail product.

The reason for this fix is odd and specific to LAQ. My sweat appliers use the "Default Transparent Texture" texture from the Library (it is in yours too) as the diffuse channel, while it relies on the normal and specular channels to actually render the sweat (*). Only... it seems that particular texture is recognized by the LAQ mesh heads as an information telling them to completely hide the tattoo layer. In other words, this library texture's UUID is special and must not be used with LAQ. The demos work because their diffuse textures are different, they are custom textures with big white "DEMO" stamps on them.

So I just saved and re-uploaded that texture in order to give it a different UUID, and it now works like a charm.

So if you are a LAQ mesh head user and cannot make the When You're Hot appliers to show sweat on your face, please rez the updater from your folder and you'll get a fixed version. The only thing that changes in this update is the "When You're Hot Head (Omega) (top left)" item.


Have fun !
Marine



(*) This is also the reason why it does not work on Catwa and Akeruka, those heads cannot handle materials on a layer that is not the skin.

Hi,

Today I'm releasing an update that I've been meaning to make for a while : a variant of the Body Harness that is fitted for Maitreya, as well as Maitreya + Proud Girls !





It has been a popular request for over a year, but the amount of work was quite high so I kept delaying it. People often think that all one has to do to fit an object to a mesh body is copying the weights after remodeling around the body to be close to it, but nooo ! In some cases (like here) it involves completely redoing the object since rigging involves more precision and more vertices, or else it clips through the skin. And an item like the Body Harness cannot rely on hiding body parts underneath, so the fitting has to be exact and snug.

This new variant is actually embedded into the harness, it is not a separate object. I did this so that if you are a Maitreya user (or Maitreya + Proud Girls), you can wear the main item and not the rest, saving two attachment slots. You need to wear one or two of the other two items only if you want to switch some parts to unrigged, or if you want to see the leash particle chains. More on that below.


That's right, you can mix rigged and unrigged, there is a new plugin helping you with that, called "HarnessFit", accessible only to the wearer.


For example, suppose you don't like the deformation at the shoulders (as some animations may stretch them perpendicular to the straps, making them look wider), you can tell the plugin to use the unrigged variant for those straps only, and you have the control over how to resize them then.

Clicking on any part button cycles through the different variants available for that part. For example, if you click on  "Above breasts", it will cycle between "Unrigged, "Maitreya" and "Proud Girls". For the crotch and stomach, which are linked together since they are always rigged, you have the choice between "System" (the original rigged part that is far from the skin), "System tighter" (a part I made later that is closer to the skin) and "Maitreya". The former two are to be used with a system body or a mesh body that is not Maitreya.

Likewise, if you are wearing a tight corset, one that cinches your waist, the waist part of your Maitreya harness would not fit you anymore, so in that case you may decide to switch to the unrigged waist part, and to resize it so it fits better. And when you remove the corset, no need to resize again, just toggle the waist back to Maitreya with the HarnessFit plugin, and it will fit your body again. Best of both worlds.

The three buttons on the top row are shortcuts to switch the whole harness to "System" (meaning system rigged crotch and stomach and the rest of the harness is unrigged), to "Maitreya" or to "Maitreya + Proud Girls".


There is another change : the HarnessTex plugin has been divided in three plugins, HarnessTex and Style. The former being the same as before minus the "show" and "hide" buttons, which are now the responsiblity of Style (I used to merge the two before but it doesn't make sense now). Style lets you show and hide each part individually.


Please note that Style is in charge of showing and hiding parts individually but it doesn't care about the fitting, i.e. it shows and hides the parts corresponding to the fitting you've selected in the HarnessFit plugin and keeps the other variants hidden. For example, if you selected the "Maitreya + Proud Girls" variant of the  "Above breasts" strap in the HarnessFit plugin, and you decide to hide then show the "Above breasts" strap in the Style plugin, it will be this "Maitreya + Proud Girls" variant of the strap that will be hidden then shown again. The other two variants ("unrigged" and "Maitreya") will remain hidden. It's all very simple, you'll see. Just keep in mind that :

- Style (keyholder only) is in charge of deciding what parts to show or hide, it works exactly like the plugin of the same name in other RR products (Deluxe Straps, Siren ropes...).
- HarnessFit (wearer only) is in charge of deciding which variants to use, those variants will be the ones controlled by Style, the others will remain hidden. Be aware that it won't show a strap that is hidden by Style.
- HarnessTex (keyholder and wearer, or keyholder only if "Deny" is active) is in charge of changing the textures, materials and tints, it works exactly like the other Texture plugins in other RR products (Deluxe Straps, Highbinder...).

Lastly, the Leash plugin still spawns its chain from different points of the harness, depending on what parts are visible. The ring above the breasts will take priority, if it is not visible then the one below the breasts will, and if that one isn't visible either then the one on the belly will. And if that one isn't visible, well, no chain will show. Since particle chains spawn from the actual location of their source prim, it is best to spawn them from an unrigged prim, because rigged mesh may appear to be a totally different place than where it is actually attached. For this reason, two of the three chain spawners are located in the unrigged torso part of the harness, the third one is in the main part since that part is attached to the left pec (like the waist part before this update). In other words, if you wish to see all three chains, you need to wear the main part and the torso part, even if you don't show any unrigged part of the harness.


Naturally, if you are not wearing a Maitreya mesh body, let alone the Proud Girls breasts, this update won't do much for you, but it is always best to keep up to date.


To update your body harness, simply go to any of my updaters, click on it and follow the instructions. You need a replacement, a simple update won't do.

At the time of this writing, there are four available locations :

My Little Shop
Chorazin's store
Roper's Dark Playground
Dark Wishes

Please note that out of the box, the Body Harness is set to display its unrigged and system parts, you need to use the HarnessFit plugin to switch to Maitreya.


Have fun !
Marine

Hi !

Here is a small fix for the Need For Seed HUD, which would not apply the "V15c" texture to Lolas-compatible breasts like the Proud Girls or to Omega-compatible mesh bodies. That's this one, the third square on the lowest row of the fifth folder :


It applied correctly on the Maitreya mesh body but not on other mesh bodies or any mesh breasts.

To get your HUD fixed, simply rez the updater included in the folder or the box you have (depending on where you bought it, Marketplace or in-world), and wait a little, you should receive a new box. No need to delete the updater afterwards, it self-destructs after 20 seconds.

Have fun and sorry for the inconvenience,

Marine

Hello there,

First of all, sorry for being silent these days, I'm very busy on an RL project, but I'm still around :p

Secondly, I've been asked a few times to make a Maitreya version of the Happy Spanker. As you may know, it is currently just two spheres, regular prims, they're not even mesh. So why am I not making a Maitreya version of them ?

It would be easy, I've already made a few tight-fitted Maitreya items, like the Proud Girls and recently the Body Harness.

But if I did that I'd be faced with this alpha-sorting issue on rigged mesh. Let me explain.

The texture I made for the Happy Spanker is an alpha-blended one, meaning that it has partial transparency. It cannot be masked or it would look dirty and weird. If I made a fitted mesh version for Maitreya, it would ideally have to go under the "Underwear" layer so that when you're spanked while wearing panties or a catsuit, your butt would redden under it and not through it. Same if you are wearing jeans (either on the "Clothing" layer as an applier, or mesh jeans), as it does not make sense to see your butt redden through them.

Problem is, as I mentioned above, the texture is alpha-blended, which means it would be hidden under any other alpha-blended texture rendered on your body or even fitted to your body, like transparent catsuits, sweat, applied panties or even stockings (since they use the same lower part of the body). And it would hide an applied tattoo that is alpha-blended as well. You know this issue well I bet, this is why you have to switch "Mask Mode" on your Maitreya HUD when you wear more than one transparent layer on your body. It's annoying, it's a rendering issue (not a bug but an optimization, so it's there for a purpose and won't be fixed by LL), and it happens only with rigged mesh, not with unrigged mesh (or sculpties or prims).

This is the reason why I don't want to make a Maitreya fitted version of the Happy Spanker just yet. Not until I find another solution. If you don't believe me, you can try the Code-5 spanker that is fitted to Maitreya, and try to use it along with a transparent catsuit. It literally makes a hole through your suit. Same with sweat.

But yeah, I too would love to make a Maitreya-fitted Happy Spanker so that it follows the curve of my body perfectly. Prims are sooo 2010. More recent is not always better though, I guess.
There is hope though, that LL will release their "texture baking on mesh" feature one day. If they do, then it might be possible to make a fitted mesh version of the Happy Spanker that won't make your butt burn through your clothes.


Have fun !
Marine

Hi !

It's been a while but I have gone back to working on the RLV during the week. This RLV is the first one to be 64-bit, and I'm sorry to say that I will not keep working on the 32-bit one anymore, since it would mean twice the workload for me. Windows is 64 bit now and has been for a while so I believe this will not be a problem anyway.

The other thing about this viewer is the fixes I brought into it, most of them being about silhouettes and vision restriction spheres.

When I first introduced silhouettes in the RLV, my idea was to make an avatar difficult to recognize, yet be fully aware of what they are doing when they're close. Now I've managed to do that by making the silhouettes look like silhouettes, i.e. flat gray shadows without any feature save for their outlines, they're not 3D anymore. It can be very interesting if the avatars around you are both rendered as silhouettes and have their names hidden, it becomes a lot more difficult to know who's who and that's the point. Silhouettes were also lacking the unrigged mesh attachments worn by the avatars, which was problematic in some cases.

I also worked on making vision restriction a lot more accurate. Before this version, when blindfolded you could see some of the transparent parts of the avatar in front of you simply disappear, for example a sheer latex catsuit, or a hair base, or even eyes. It looked silly and was caused by the RLV hiding alpha-blended surfaces if their objects are too far from you (since alpha-blended rigged attachments poke through the vision restriction spheres). It no longer works that way, the distances are now tested on a face-by-face basis, in other words a surface will disappear if it is too far, not if its containing prim is too far, which makes a big difference when it comes to avatars.

And the calculation of what rigged surfaces to hide and show when blindfolded has been sped up a lot too, so normally you should stop seeing your viewer slow down to a crawl when blindfolded in the middle of a crowd.

Oh and when every occurrence of a name is replaced ("censored") in a chat message or a hovertext, it is replaced only when it is a complete word, not a part of a word. This should stop some silliness I see when people choose very short display names like just one letter, and that letter is replaced by "This resident" in everything word containing that letter.


Here is the full change list :

- changed : The viewer is now 64-bit, which means you need a 64-bit operating system to make it run. You may run it via the provided SL_launcher executable (which checks for updates) or on its own, this makes no functional difference.

- improved : When rendering avatars as silhouettes via the @camavdist RLV command, the silhouettes now appear as flat grey 2D without any shading, as they were intended since the beginning.

- improved : Silhouettes now feature every single attachment the avatar is wearing, including unrigged ones unlike before. The only attachments that still don't show are the unrigged alpha-blended ones. I will try to work on that in the future.

- improved : The calculation of what to hide beyond the vision restriction spheres is dramatically sped up, there should not be such a slowdown anymore when around several avatars while blindfolded. Moreover, the faces are now hidden on a face-by-face basis and not on an object basis, i.e. you should no longer see alpha-blended parts of an avatar disappear when taking a step back while blindfolded.

- fixed : The avatar of the user is no longer hidden by its own silhouette when silhouettes are active and you are looking at someone else from certain angles. Thank you Henri Beauchamp for the fix.

- fixed : Censoring names (replacing with "That resident", "This person" etc) in the chat and in HUD texts looked wonky when someone had a very short user or display name. For example, hearing someone say "I need more money" no longer reads as "I need This soulre This soulney" when around Mo Noel.

- fixed : RLV commands that you can send to someone else through IM (@version, @stopim and others) could not be sent when the IM  window was in "expanded view" mode.

- fixed : Glow and fullbright no longer poke through the vision restriction spheres when they are not black.

- fixed : Surfaces that are fullbright, with environment and materials and alpha-blended (yes, that specific) no longer render through the vision restriction spheres.

- fixed : Put "share" after "replace links" in the inventory context menu.


You can grab the Windows version here :
http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows executable is :
145d1e7ff8d1e76b40362ecbc8972e50

Alternate download :
http://www.mediafire.com/?nsck5qglp7gdi

Have fun !
Marine


PS : I know the 64-bit SL viewer and many 64-bit TPVs have been around for a while already, the RLV kind of comes late to the party. This is because I have been (and still am) very busy in RL, and the code I have had a nasty crash on startup that did not allow me to release it sooner. I coded a workaround only today, it will stay until I find the cause of this crash (which is probably due to one of my merges) and fix it.

Hello there,

I am proud to announce the complete rework of the Restrained Elegance set, converting it to mesh using materials !

Until now the collar looked like this :


Now it look like this :


It wasn't looking bad before, but this set has met a lot of success so it was high time it got an upgrade, don't you think ?

If you remember, the Restrained Elegance set was designed from the original real life cuffs set named "Heaven's Hell" by SM-Factory, with a written permission from Hans from SM-Factory to use the design and Hywel from RestrainedElegance to use the name, because it is on RestrainedElegance that you see those cuffs used the most. The design I came up with in SL wasn't bad for the time, but since then I actually acquired a full set of Heaven's Hell made to measure... you can guess where this is going.

I used calipers to reproduce the cuffs and the collar in SL, so your product will now be exactly the same as the RL one. If you own the same set in RL, or if you look closely at the pictures on the website, you'll notice that the front "pyramid" may have different shapes. My cuffs have a pointy pyramid, but some pictures show that piece flat on the front.

I even recorded sounds of me locking, unlocking, inserting and taking keys so you get the real thing. The little jingle you hear in those sounds is the key ring provided by SM-Factory.

Of course, since the shape is now exact, the materials have to be exact as well and I spent a considerable amount of time making sure of that. And by materials I mean there is not just steel. You have over thirty materials at your disposal, some of them being tintable to give you a plethora of options. Some of them, like steel, have a strong baked lighting on top of the dynamic shine, because we can't make mirrors in SL, so that's the only way to simulate reflective surfaces. Others have a lot less baked lighting but still a little to avoid looking plain.


How to update

Before going further, if you are eager to update your set, simply go to one of these locations :

My Little Shop
Chorazin's store
Roper's Dark Playground
Dark Wishes


Once there, click on the updater and follow the instructions. You absolutely need to choose "REPLACE" on the menu instead of "UPDATE" since the objects are completely different. If you do not get a "REPLACE" option, contact me (Marine Kelley) to get a manual replacement.

I forgot to say, this update is of course free.


The materials

Without further ado, let's see what materials you'll get, keeping in mind that the main part, the padlock and the details (the front "pyramid" and the rings) can be textured and tinted independently. I'm also showing the collar from different angles so you see the reflections are dynamic. And of course, the cuffs have the same materials, not just the collar, even though only the collar is displayed in these pictures.

(*) The legacy shine refers to the way SL renders a shiny surface without using materials. The "Legacy" materials are there for those among you who can't or don't want to see materials on their cuffs. After all, you probably bought the Restrained Elegance set at a time when materials in SL were not even an idea, and if your computer cannot render materials, your set would be broken by this update if not for these "Legacy" materials.


So that's all the built-in materials in the new Restrained Elegance set. You've seen that the surfaces can also be tinted on top of it, but you can also adjust the tint by choosing a custom saturation and a custom luminosity. This is handy because most of the built-in colors (which are the same ones as the MdlM Latex catsuits so you can make them assorted) are fully saturated, but in the real world most colors are at least slightly desaturated to look more natural so you can do the same here.


EleganceTex plugin

All this customization is done through the new EleganceTex plugin, which is accessible both by the sub and by the keyholder, but the keyholder can choose to deny access to the sub if she wants.


Through this plugin you can :

* Change the materials like shown above
* Choose a tint to replace the possible built-in tint of the chosen material (like Aluminium which is grey)
* Choose the surface to change the material or tint of
* Adjust the saturation and luminosity
* Dull down the shine (you can't make it brighter since this modifies the shine color, not the glossiness) with the "Shine factor" button
* Deny access to the sub with the "Deny" button
* Choose to apply manually or automatically with the "Live" button
* Reset the tint, saturation and luminosity with the "Defaults" button
* Reset the materials back to "Steel new" and "Brass" for the padlock with the "Reset" button


Changing the tint

Some materials come pre-tinted, like "Steel alloy" which is grey by default whereas its texture is actually white. When you tint a surface, its built-in tint is replaced by the one you chose. Be aware though that some other materials do not have a built-in tint yet have a definite color, like Gold or Copper. Those materials have non-white textures so tinting them may lead to surprises. It's best to shade them instead, i.e. diminish the luminosity or choose a grey tint, which is the same thing.

When you have chosen your tint, you may want to adjust its saturation and/or luminosity. This is done independently and if you change the tint later, the saturation and luminosity stay the same. Using the saturation and luminosity are a good way to make a tint look more natural (like above in the pictures with the desaturated green and blue tints) without having to calculate a custom tint and to enter it manually in with the "CUSTOM" button in the "Tints" sub-menu.

The materials that you shouldn't tint but can safely darken are the following ones :

* Gold, but you can tint it princess pink to make pink gold, such a thing exists and it will even shine orangeish

*  Silver because it is naturally medium grey

* Brass because it is naturally brown

* Copper because it is naturally dark brown

* Steel (and its patterns) because it is very metallic, so its baked lighting texture is strong, contrasted and colorful

* Iron rusty, Iron old and Iron ruined because rust is supposed to be reddish

* Corroded and Statue fore the same reason

All the other materials can be safely tinted and they will look good.


Metallicity

The cuffs and the collar are made of metal, that is a given. This means a lot of things when it comes to rendering, in particular how the shine changes when the surface is tinted. Unlike plastics which shine the same color as the lights around them, metals actually tint the reflected light. In fact, the more conductive a material, the more it tints the light it reflects. The human eye is good at telling a metal from a plastic posing as metal, and this is how it manages that.

This means that when you tint your cuffs, the reflected shine is tinted as well. Most of the materials are bare metal so the tint is strong, like here on this steel alloy collar tinted blue :


Notice the shine is blueish there. If it were white instead of blue like the metal, it would look like this :


It looks... I don't know. More polished, maybe, like there is a layer of varnish over the metal. It doesn't look bad, but it does not look the way we would expect from a metal surface, so the shine changes color with the tint you choose instead of staying white.

This leads to interesting results, because some metals have a natural blueish shine, like iron and aluminium, making them shine cold. If you tint an aluminium collar red, it looks like this :


It is not obvious at first glance, but the shine is actually halfway between red and purple, making it look cold, like metal. It really adds to the feel of the surface.

Some materials are halfway between plastic and metal, like the "Paint" materials. Their paint reflects the shine with a slight tint to it depending on the tint you choose, but is not as conductive as bare metal. As for "Plastic" materials, they don't tint the shine at all.

Another interesting thing to note is that darkening a metal does not make it less shiny, so what the shine loses in saturation (because the closer the color is to black or white, the less saturated it is), it gains in luminosity. That way a grey steel will shine as bright as the same steel tinted pure black.

I've mentioned above that some materials don't react well to tinting, that's the case of "Gold" for example. If you tint your gold collar blue, it becomes green because the texture is yellow (but not plain yellow, which is why I couldn't make the texture white and tint it yellow automatically).

A better idea is to shade it by choosing a lower luminosity, let's say 10%. You can obtain black gold this way :


Classy, isn't it ?


New chains

I have redone the particle chains to make them look better, as the old ones looked too blocky and too big for this set of refined cuffs :



Engrave

The Engrave plugin, which is used to show a classy word on the side of the cuffs, has been redone to make it easier to use and more flexible. I have also removed the restriction that prevents the wearer from using it when she has the keys, and the forced time to spend in cuffs before you could change the engraving again. Now the keyholder can always use that plugin whenever she likes without restriction. More over, the collar too now contains this plugin so you can get rid of the manual text and show an engraving instead if you so wish.


The plugin now lets you choose the text (it is invisible by default), its color (the choices are the same as in EleganceTex), but also the saturation and luminosity so you can make the color match that of the metal underneath. And if you want, you can make the text glow :


It is easy to make your own textures for the Engrave plugin, which lets you choose a custom UUID (the ID of a texture item in your inventory). To do this, download the following UV map :

 
Use it in any graphics software like Gimp, Photoshop, Inkscape or Illustrator, write what you want inside the yellow area, which does not take the whole texture so it stays aligned vertically and covers the area between the top and bottom pattern, if any.

The font I used to make the engravings was Scriptina, it's free and very pretty. I added an emboss to it to make the letters look like they are engraved into the metal. Once done, hide the yellow part, export your image as PNG, upload it to SL (it costs L$10) and copy its UUID by right-clicking on the texture in your inventory and selecting "Copy Asset UUID". Then you can enter it with the "CUSTOM" button in the "Text" sub-menu.



Text on the collar

The Text plugin in the Elegance collar has been replaced with the one used in the Vixen collar, which works better than the original Text plugin. That plugin lets you choose the text, enter one yourself, change the color and font, and even choose several colors and fonts in the same text.

Currently the only way to hide the text completely is to click on "CUSTOM" in the "Text" sub-menu and to validate without entering any text, this simply clears the text. I might change that in the future and add a "Visible" button like I did in Engrave, but for now this is the way to do it.

Please note that since the collar now has an Engrave plugin, it is possible to show both the engraving and the text at the same time, but you will usually want to use one or the other.



Style

Another thing that is present in other RealRestraint products but that is new to the Restrained Elegance set is the Style plugin. With it you can choose to hide and show the front parts of the collar and/or cuffs, like in real life. The front "pyramid" is not actually welded to the metal cuff, it can be removed, as well as the ring, giving the cuff or collar a sleeker look :


Of course, if there are chains going to or from the ring, it will show itself. If you lock the collar on "Lock", hide the ring and leash it, the chain won't appear (but the leash will still be effective, the chain is there but just invisible).

You can also use the Style plugin to completely hide the whole set if you want, which hides the cuffs and the chains but does not remove the restrictions.

The button to hide the ring is labeled "no rings", plural, because each cuff and collar actually has three rings, each one showing a different angle (well the collar has six, see below), but only one shows at a time depending on the lock. That way, the chains and rings look a lot more natural.

There's also a little dependency between the arms cuffs and the collar. When you are locked in "hands to collar" (that's the 7th lock, located in the second page of the main menu of the arms cuffs), the collar's ring change to the oblique one. Likewise, if you choose the "overhead" lock (5th lock of the arms cuffs), the horizontal back ring will show on the collar, with a new piece to hold it in place. And if you choose "reverse prayer" (8th lock on the arms cuffs), the back piece will show as well but to hold the vertical back ring.

Finally, you can freely detach the elbow cuffs even when locked on "Lock" (not in other locks), that way you can choose between a complete look and a light look when simply wearing the cuffs as decorations.


The Spy box

As you already know, the Elegance collar contains the Spy plugin, and when it is activated a small plastic box appears behind the collar, with a LED that lights up when the chat listener is active :



There was as much attention to the detail and quality put into this box as in the rest of the product.


Easter egg

Easter was not long ago so why not hide an Easter egg into those cuffs ? In fact, let's play a game.

The first person who finds the Easter egg and tells me what it is, what it means and where it comes from, wins L$2000 worth of products from RealRestraint, Marine's Goodies or Maison De La Marquise, either for them or for their friends. There is a clue somewhere in this very blog post. Happy hunting !



That's all, enjoy your new Elegance cuffs !

Marine

Hi there,

Here is the latest version of the RLV which fixes a couple bugs as well as benefits from LL's latest changes, which also fixes several bugs present in the SL viewer (for example the freeze when you first close a window in the viewer). Here is the list of RLV-specific changes :

- fixed : We could not see the result of pressing the "Undo Changes" on the edit window of any wearable or body part, even though the wearable itself was back to its original shape.

- fixed : Made it so the user can be force-teleported even while logging in. Some objects are programmed to force someone to teleport somewhere else as soon as they are detected (consensually, this is not about security orbs), which could fail when the user was simply logging in there as the RLV command would simply be ignored during startup.


You can grab the Windows version here :
http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows executable is :
7c4b8ed6afc9639cfb6d2917718ccb0f

Alternate download :
http://www.mediafire.com/?nsck5qglp7gdi

Have fun !
Marine

Hi,

This blog post is about the new GDPR, aka the European General Data Protection Regulation (PDF in English), and how I (Marine Kelley) comply with it. In this post I'll try to go full disclosure with you about what I know when you purchase or use a product I made.

In a nutshell, the GDPR is a regulation that states that you, as a user, have the right to your privacy and that regulation gives you the right to know what data is processed by a vendor, to whom it is given, and a right to decide what you want to share and even to be forgotten.

Although this is a European regulation and Second Life is managed by Linden Lab which is based in the United States, I believe you have those rights no matter what. I have those rights as a European, and so should you. And as a European, my business should comply with this regulation anyway.

I'm going to try to remain concise here, but in case you don't want to read, here is the tl;dr version :

I do nothing with your data, I know very little about you, and I've follow these principles long before the GDPR was even an idea.


If you want fuller details, read on.

As you may know, there are several ways you as a user may interact with me as a merchant :

- By buying products from a vendor in-world, either from a RealRestraint vendor or a Marine's Goodies vendor.
- By buying products from the Marketplace.
- By contacting me in-world through chat or IM (Instant Message), directly or through a friend when language is an issue.
- By contacting me via email.


Let's start with the most important part : what I know about you. Then I'll explain how I gather these data and what I do with them.


Your data

I know very little about you. Your user name (for example Jane Resident), your display name(s) at the time(s) you interacted with me, the purchases you made, what you said to me when we discussed, the money you spent buying my products, and that's it.

Some of these data are on my hard drives in the form of textual chat logs, the rest is on the Gmail servers because I use Gmail as my primary mail service. All purchase logs go to my Gmail mailbox and sit there until the time I need them. The purchases transactions are also on the LL servers in the form of a Transaction History. None of my other mailboxes receives any data about you.

I do not know anything about your real name or identity, nor do I know anything about your IP address, computer, let alone real world location.

Lastly, I do not share nor sell any of your information to anyone. I did not wait for a regulation to tell me not to, I believe we are all entitled to our privacy.


When buying from a vendor in-world

When you buy a product from either a RealRestraint or a Marine's Goodies vendor, I receive in my mailbox an email from my server stating what you bought, when, from what vendor, for how much money, and if there was an error.

There is also the Linden Lab Transaction History, on which I have no control except consultation. When you make a purchase, paying me money in exchange for a product, a log entry is added to that Transaction History, stating your user name, the amount of money, the time and the location of the vendor.

Some of my RealRestraint vendors belong to my friend Angelina Sinclair, who gets a share of the earnings when buying from one of those vendors. As a result, she is notified when you buy from her by seeing your user name in a popup in her viewer, as well as in her Transaction History.


When opening a box

Nearly every box containing a product I made also contains a small script named "_Inventory", which is responsible for sending me an email when you rez the box. The data contains your user name, the inventory inside the box so I know there was no mistake when packaging the product and nothing was lost during the transfer, but also the slurl pointing to the place where the box was rezzed.

This might raise a privacy concern but in practice I do nothing with that information, which is not something my script is even programmed to send, it is automatically added by SL when sending the email, there's nothing I can do to prevent that, short of using an in-world relay and compounding the system.


When using a product I made

None of my products gathers any information about you nor shares anything with me. RR products do contact my home server once a week to get the "message of the day" and to get notified when an update is available. I do not log those commands nor get any information from them.


When updating a RealRestraint product

When you update a RealRestraint product (with a simple update or a replacement), I know what you update, when, from what updater and if there was an error. All these data are sent to my Gmail mailbox.


When buying a Maison De La Marquise product

When you buy a product form Maison De La Marquise, which is my Marketplace store, I receive an email from Linden Lab containing your user name, your purchase, who you gifted it to if it is a gift, the money you spent, the money I earned (that's what you spent minus 5% and commissions if any) and the time of the purchase.


When communicating with me
When you IM me, two things may happen. If I'm online, our conversation is logged to a particular text file on my hard drive (and on yours too) with your user name, display name and the dates and times. If I'm offline, your messages go to my mailbox, as well as my answers since I can communicate even while offline (thanks LL for that feature !).


When going to my shop in Pak

There is a radar in my booth in Pak that sends the user names of everybody who is present around the parcel to a prim that is located in my home sim. This list is not stored anywhere, it is just displayed as a hovertext that I look at once in a while. When someone leaves the vicinity or logs off there, their name disappears from the list.

I use this radar mainly to check if a specific person (usually a griefer or a troll) is present and if I have to intervene.


When reading this blog

Blogger belongs go Google and they may or may not gather information about you. They do not share any of it with me except for regular, non-identifying statistics and I have no control over what they gather.


When downloading the RLV

The RLV archive is stored in a folder on www.erestraints.com. I do not control any part of this site except for the FTP which I use to upload the RLV, and I get no information about who visits that page, downloads the viewer or when.


When using the RLV

The RLV does not share any data with me or anyone else about your usage you make of it. It stores the same data as the official SL viewer. LL sends me a regular report about crashes and other statistics, but none can identify anybody, they're just numbers and release versions.


The right to erasure

You may request me to erase all data I have about you. This is a manual process and I reserve the right to do it within reasonable delays, and this is what I'll do :

- I'll search your name in my mailbox and erase all entries.
- I'll erase your IM text log from my hard drive.


There are three caveats though :

- I cannot erase that data from the LL servers so my Transaction History will forget about you when it expires. Likewise, I cannot guarantee that Gmail won't keep a copy of the erased data, I have no control over that either. I can only erase what I have control upon.
- I treat my regular customers better than the ones who buy only a product or two from me. This means that when someone requests something from me that goes against normal business practices (like a replacement when the original object was lost, knowing said object was no-copy/trans and I can't be given a proof of the loss), the amount of money you spent with me goes a long way to help me decide if I should help or not. If you want me to erase those data, you may go back from "good customer" to "standard customer" status.
- Technically I do not own any of the data stored on Gmail, even though I own the credentials to access that mailbox. So I'll erase your data from there as an act of good will, but I am in no way required to do so. The only data that I own are the ones on my hard drives, and those are the ones I am required to erase. If you really want Gmail to erase your data from my mailbox once and for all, you have to ask Google.



The right to access

This one is more difficult, because it requires not to erase data but to format it in a reusable way (likely a text file). This is not a problem for IM logs, but it is for purchase logs as they are stored in my mailbox. I don't know if there's a way with Gmail to selectively archive some emails to a hard drive instead of all of them. I know that archiving the whole mailbox takes two days.

The same caveat applies : I do not own the data stored in my Gmail mailbox, even though I own the credentials to access it, so I am not actually required to share what is stored in it.

Hi !

You might remember Boy Lane's "Hardcore RLV" version of the RLV, a long time ago. That version, unlike the official RLV, did not have a "RestrainedLove" debug setting to deactivate the RLV features after relogging. If you did not use any other viewer, that made you effectively unable to cheat out of RLV. That was a real thrill.

A few successive attempts were made to make this kind of hardcore RLV totally secure, meaning you really could not use any other viewer to cheat out. That was done essentially by giving your password away or having it scrambled so that you could not log except with one particular viewer. An example of this technique was XtremRLV.

This didn't sit well with Linden Lab, who banned such techniques and stated in the SL ToS that you could not prevent anyone from logging with the viewer of their choice, and that was the end of that.

I'm not here to argue whether to use a hardcore RLV is a good thing or not, as there are two main sides : those who really want it to feel as real as possible, and those who are more into roleplaying. I respect and understand both sides. Besides, people also change with time and may switch sides. Personally I am more on the "RLV must feel real" side, but I did not believe in solutions like XtremRLV for security reasons. A griefer could completely lock you down for good if they got hold of your RLV relay with that kind of thing, and you'd be screwed.

Being on the "RLV must feel real" side, I actually don't like the "RestrainedLove" debug setting that allows the user to turn RLV off, even though it needs a relog afterwards. This is no different from relogging with another viewer, but still, it feels a little too easy. Likewise, I don't like the blacklist feature, since it allows a user to cherry-pick which RLV restrictions they like and which ones they don't like, making scripts unable to identify a RLV by its version. Lastly, I don't like to be allowed to send OOC chat (when you surround with double parenthesis like this : "(( ... ))" ), that too feels like cheating. But then again, I don't like long emotes either. I realize that there are a lot of things that I don't like, maybe I'm getting old and grumpy...  But back to the subject at hand.

Here is a little experiment I'd like to do. I'm releasing a hardcore version of the RLV in which the value of the "RestrainedLove" and "RestrainedLoveBlacklist" debug settings do not matter. The former is always interpreted as being True and the latter is always interpreted as being empty, regardless of their actual value. And no more OOC chat either. This version is on the erestraints.com website alongside the normal one so you can choose whether you want it soft or hard :)

At the time of this writing, the two viewers are exactly the same except for the "hardcore" differences stated above. They will diverge though, and that's where the experiment takes place. I don't actually know how many people are roleplayers and how many prefer it hardcore among the users of the RLV. Usually, like always, I hear only the malcontents, as those who are satisfied with what they have do tend to stay quiet and to just enjoy themselves. I genuinely don't know which direction to take there, so I'm giving you those two choices for now, knowing that I won't have the time to maintain two versions, so eventually one will take precedence over the other. Personally I'd like the hardcore version to prevail, since there are other viewers that offer a way out of RLV anyway (Kokua, Cool VL, FS...). I like the idea of having to download a different viewer in order to get out of RLV instead of just turning a switch off and relogging with the same viewer.

I understand that safewording is difficult on a hardcore RLV. If you are totally restricted (I'm talking IMs blocked, chat blocked, emotes blocked, inventory blocked, essentially turning you into a living furniture), and you need a way out, how to safeword ?

If I were you, I'd do what I did with the Banes going through the Banishment Program, a few years ago. I'd decide up front that a burst of three consecutive blocked IMs means that the sub requires attention and needs to communicate something important, while a burst of five consecutive blocked IMs means to stop immediately (that's your safeword). It works well like that and is simple enough to remember. Besides, if the sub starts spamming you with "*** IM blocked by sender's viewer" messages, eventually you'll wonder if something's wrong.

Anyway, the Hardcore RLV (it's not actually called that, I'm just using this name because that's rings a bell with most people) is available here :
http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/RestrainedLoveSetup_Hardcore.exe


And the MD5 hash of the Windows executable is :
5ddefa14eb9ca619024329e7ab7b6ed6


I forgot to change the version of this particular RLV, it will show as 2.9.23.1 like the normal one. But to check if you are using the hardcore one, simply start it with "RestrainedLove" set to False, or gag yourself and try saying something between "((" and "))". The hardcore RLV will not let you speak that way.

I'd be interesting in knowing whether you prefer a soft or a hard RLV for the future. I know that most people don't actually know that there is a debug setting to deactivate the RLV features, and they are disappointed when they find out.



Have fun !

Marine

Hi !

In the 70's, when we wanted to brainwash someone, we had this :


Granted, it was a bit unwieldy, but it worked pretty well. We've made progress since, though.

Nowadays we have this :



It is smaller, more efficient, more fun, it costs a lot less, it is called "RemVision".

The "Rem" part is a shorthand for "Remanence", the after-image you see on a screen or on your eyes after having been exposed to a bright image for too long. It is also a shorthand for "Remove", since, as you will see, it can remove your sight and hearing. It can also be a shorthand for "Rapid Eye Movement", if you like good music.

This blog post is meant to present the key features of RemVision first, then the second section is the actual manual so you know exactly what you're buying just by reading this page.




RemVision Presentation

So what exactly is RemVision ? It is a set of contact lenses coupled with a pair of earphones, and is designed to :

* Blind the sub like those Blackout lenses in real life.

* Deafen the sub, thanks to the ear pieces the RemVision acts like the Isolation Hood.

* Force the sub to watch pictures and movies, exactly like the HD Video System from Marine's Goodies, except the screen is worn on the HUD instead of in-world.


In other words, RemVision is both a blindfold and a television screen. How do you marry two concepts so radically opposed ? By projecting the movies directly on the eyes !


RemVision as a blindfold

First and foremost, RemVision is a blindfold, and uses the RLV 2.9 vision restriction features. When the restraint is locked, the sub cannot see beyond a certain range depending on the lock, from blurry to opaque, but she can still see herself if her viewer implements the RLV 2.9 spec (at the time of this writing, i.e. August 2018, Firestorm does not). If the sub's viewer doesn't implement RLV 2.9, her view is blocked by a prim worn on automatically on her HUD.


The purpose of such a blindfold is to look inconspicuous, meaning you can take your sub with you in public, wear the lenses to restrict her view or blind her completely, and nobody will notice. You decide of the actual look of the lenses, which can be realistic, plain or even cartoonish :


The opacity, color and even glow of the lenses can be completely customized by the top to give the sub's lenses the look they want.



Please note that the lenses are designed to go over the eyes, not to replace them. They are also certified to cover the Lelutka mesh eyes, if you wear them. I did not test with any other brand of mesh eyes though.

Please also note that the lenses and the ear pieces can be configured regardless of the current lock. For example, to take these pictures I had them simply locked on "Lock", I wasn't blindfolded so I could move my camera to the back and zoom in.


RemVision as an isolation device

The restraint features a plugin that acts exactly like the one from the Isolation Hood, as in, it allows the top to restrict the ability of the sub to hear chat and/or to receive IMs. It also allows the top to hide and show the ear pieces.



RemVision as a brainwashing device

This is actually the main feature of the product, but also the most complex and comprehensive one. If you have used the HD Video System, you know that you can make its TV screen display still and animated pictures in high resolution, as well as play sounds and music. Well, with RemVision, the equivalent of the TV screen is worn on the sub's HUD, locked so she is forced to watch whatever her dom wants her to watch. It has subtle differences, though, like the ability to be locked.

Please note that the movies in question are Second Life movies, not movies taken from YouTube or other external channels like that, they are SL pictures and sounds, some pictures being animated.

For example, if you want to condition your sub (or get her in the mood) by forcing her to watch bondage movies, you can copy one of the included tapes (or other tapes you buy separately) into her RemVision, start the movie and she has to watch it until you stop. You have control over how much space the RemVision screen takes on her HUD, its opacity (so you can do subliminal stuff), while she has no control.

On these pictures, I locked my RemVision on "Blurry", made the opacity of the lenses 10%, Blank texture, and the projection opacity is set to 50%. I am playing the "In red & black" section of the "Soft Bondage - Short scenes" tape.



You can see on these pictures that the image on the RemVision screen and the ones projected on my eyes is the same, except the projection is round and mirrored, obviously. If the image were animated, the one on the eyes would be too.

You can also see the other HUDs I am wearing, since the RemVision screen is locked. The other HUDs are my AO, RR Anim HUD, Sublimator, Diamond HUD, When You're Hot, Lelutka and Maitreya.

While the screen is locked (which it is by default when RemVision is locked), the sub cannot move the screen nor hide it under other HUDs. All she can do is click on it to zoom on the picture.

The projection is not just cosmetic, it allows the dom to see what the sub is watching at any moment.

It can have a powerful effect on the sub's mind ! Imagine a week spent being forced to watch pictures and videos of couples having sex in bondage.

This means a lot of content has to be produced, a lot of movies have to be made, and not only by me. The HD Video System explains how to make a whole movie, but I will write a blog post as a tutorial to make the procedure easier to understand and follow, as well as some pointers from my own experience at making movies.

This is why I have spent the better part of the past two months shooting erotic movies with different themes, mostly revolving around bondage and sex. I'll write a page to talk about them shortly.

Please note that at the time of this writing, the movies I have produced two years ago (Applicant Payback, Gina's Debut, Hot Mouse, The Wait and Rocket's Tail) are NOT compatible with RemVision because the tapes do not have a "Copy to RemVision" capability. But I'd like to add it to these tapes eventually so they can be played on the RemVision HUD like the more recent movies I am releasing at the same time as this product.

The big difference with the HD Video System is that some movies can be played as a random sequence of scenes in RemVision, unlike the HD player that can only play a tape sequentially. What I mean by that is that some movies are divided into sections and you can instruct RemVision to jump directly to one of them, and even define a playlist of sections, either manually or random (much like in VLC and Winamp). For example, one of the included tapes is "Short Bondage Scenes" which features many different and unrelated short scenes of bondage, as the name implies. Every scene has a particular theme so you can force your sub to watch only a handful of them and not the others, in the order you like.

While the sub watches the movie, she can click on her HUD and drag her mouse to zoom on it and pan, which is handy when watching high definition pictures. At the time of this writing, none of the tapes I produced features high definition pictures except the basic manual tape of the HD Video System, because I shoot my movies in Second Life, and I don't feel that HD pictures are justified in this context. However, real life pictures may justify producing HD versions of them in SL, which is the point of the HD Video System, and to an extent RemVision too.

I mentioned the HD Video System a lot, if you are familiar with it, you can see the RemVision plugin inside the restraint as the equivalent of the player + tape, and the HUD as the TV screen.

The product includes six tapes, as an initial content to start with, knowing that anyone can produce tapes to be played with this system :

* Dominatrix : This tape features over 60 stylish B&W pictures (ala Sin City, movie and comic book alternatively) with motivational, instructional or commanding text depending on the theme, which can be "Bitch", "Latex", "Legs", "Sex", "Sweet" or "Flash". It is meant to put the sub into the appropriate mood for play.



* Short Bondage Scenes : This tape contains over 250 pictures of short bondage scenes, some of them directly inspired from famous RL bondage scenes recreated in SL. It does not contain videos nor text, because I want the sub to imagine the stories herself when viewing the scenes several times, as she may come up with her own ideas of the stories driving the scenes. Some of the scenes are very short, others are mini-stories, all of them are very sexy.


* Long Bondage Scenes : This tape contains over 250 pictures of longer bondage scenes (but not long enough to require a full tape) with a beginning and an end, but still no text for the same reason as above. I could have written dialogs of course, but since those scenes are meant to be watched several times, probably in a loop, it is better if the sub's imagination is encouraged rather than directly telling her a story. One of the scenes features a video because I couldn't resist, that particular scene was too sexy to pass up.


* Ebony & Ivory (3 tapes) : Meet Mistress Suah the strong shemale from Liberia and her slave Sandy... yes, the same cute blonde who appeared in Gina's adventures (which are not over, by the way, I want to write more chapters). Watch those two having fun at home on the couch, in the rubber room, in the basement, with bondage, without bondage, while watching porn or while testing a new sybian... They just never stop. Once again, no text here because there is no need for it, it is all about having silly and sexy fun. The third tape contains excerpts from the movies below which are not included in the package. I chose the scenes carefully to be interesting to watch without spoiling those movies, while making you want to see more. But they are not advertisements, the excerpts never nag you to buy anything, they don't even point out what movies they are from, they are just sexy and self-sufficient and that's why they're here.



I am voluntarily refraining myself from posting overtly sexual pictures on this page, but be assured that picking the softest pictures wasn't easy. Most of them are quite explicit !


While designing RemVision, I also produced complete movies that are sold separately on the Marketplace. They are meant to be watched in the HD Video System as well as in RemVision :

* Overworking Girl (1 tape) : Jenna is a beautiful single mother, she's alone at work late in the day, she is overworked and feeling down because of it, and she has a slight drinking problem. What do you think will happen to her ? This movie is for those who like vanilla sex, as there is no bondage at all. But it's a cute fun story with a lot of hot sex involved. You'll like Frank, I'm sure.



* By A Thread (2 tapes) : The story of Linda who likes it rough, extreme and dark (literally as well as figuratively). This movie has no text because dialogs would make no sense, but the screen at the beginning and the second one at the end explain the whole story. The movie features a lot of nude bondage, hanging by the neck, sex, and sex while nude, bound and hanging by the neck. The first tape features hanging and humiliation and a little sex. The second one features more hanging, more domination, more darkness, more sex, and a twist.



* My Sassy Maid (2 tapes) : This girl likes to please her man, and doesn't lack imagination when it comes to surprising him. Today is no exception but things do not really go as expected because her sluttiness gets the best of her (again) and her lover has to keep her under control lest things go out of hand (again). As a result, although she is the nicest and most enticing girl, she still has to spend a lot of time in bondage. Both tapes have a different theme, the first one being vanilla sex-oriented, the second one being bondage-oriented. This movie must be my cutest one ^_^



* New Life (3 tapes + epilogue) : This movie might be the best one I've made, ex-aequo with Alis. The cute Ellen is kidnapped and wakes up in a dark cell, nude and bound. She will soon realize that she is not alone in her cell, and that, well... I don't want to spoil the movie, so all I'll say is "tentacles". Lots of it. And they strike fast and with purpose. Each tape has its own theme, the first one being dark and very hentai (with tentacles you've never seen in SL as I made them for this movie), the second one is the sweetest and my favorite, the third one is just as sweet while being more sex-oriented, and the epilogue wraps the story up and explains it all, offering a sweet closure. You will see there are at least two reasons for this movie to be named "New Life".



* Alis (3 tapes + epilogue) : Along with New Life, this is my best movie so far, and a very long one too. The mighty Samantha Ryder wakes up in a dark room (what's up with me and locking girls in dark rooms these days ?). She's held prisoner, watched, monitored, tested, pushed, she's reluctant, she has a bad temper, significant resources and will do everything she can to escape. But will she ? What is this place she is detained in ? They also seem to have a lot of resources, what do they want to do with her ? Who is she and why is she there ? The movie starts slow to introduce the main character, then goes crescendo, increasingly faster, to end on a long, powerful note that will come as a surprise. Like an orgasm. The epilogue also offers a good closure, with answers to all the questions you could have about the movie. It's like aftercare.




This concludes this short presentation of the new RemVision product.

You can find RemVision in any of the RealRestraintvendorsin-world. It is Modify, No-Copy and Transfer, and costs L$500. The product can be updated at will from any of the updaters in-world, and whenever an update is available it will notify you. Please note that the movies that are not included are sold separately on the Marketplace in my Maison De La Marquise store.

It is at the moment the last product in the list, right after the Jammer, so you may need to browse with the white arrows to find it.

There is no demo available but if you buy it and don't like it, you can send it back to me for a full refund within 7 days after the purchase.



Thank you for reading this far, and I hope you and/or your submissive will have fun with RemVision !

Marine


PS : Yes, the lenses have a little bit of a Black Mirror flair to them, with the Blank texture and the holographic projection. Additionally, one of the movies initial idea stemmed from an episode of Black Mirror as well, but it quickly takes a whole different direction with a different, much more positive ending.







RemVision Manual

In this manual, we will call "top" and "dom" the person who locks RemVision on the "sub" or "bottom", who must own the product for that, in the sense of SL ownership, i.e. having it in their inventory and wearing it on her own avatar.


Quick start to blindfold your sub

Click on your sub's eyes while she wears RemVision, press "Blurry", "Very thin", "Thin", "Medium", "Thick" or "Opaque" and she's blindfolded, regardless of what her lenses look like. If her ear pieces are active, she may also be isolated from chat and/or IMs (see the Earpieces plugin for more information), but by default the ear pieces are inactive, even though they are visible while locked.


Quick start to make your sub watch a movie

Rez one of the tapes or have your sub rez one of hers, click on it, keep your mouse button pressed for half a second and you get a menu. Choose "Copy to Rem" and wait a little. Once the copy is finished (you are notified in chat), click on your sub's eyes, go to "Plugins", "RemVision" and press "PAUSE/PLAY". Check that your sub is wearing the screen on her HUD by looking at the "Screen present" line on the menu. If it says "YES", then your sub should see the movie playing by now. The movie will loop by default.

The copy is finished when you see all three tracks (subtitles, audio and video) having completed their respective steps and you see "Copy done, xxx B free." on the chat. Depending on the amount of content in the tape, it can take a few seconds to about a minute.

Once the movie is copied into the sub's RemVision, the tape can be derezzed as it is not needed anymore, and the sub's RemVision will keep the data until another tape is copied, regardless of where she goes and how many times she relogs.


ATTENTION : If you are using a Catwa mesh head or a Lelutka Greer mesh head, you need to wear the two additional unrigged lenses contained in the box, otherwise you can just ignore them. The reason for their existence is that the aforementioned mesh heads do not have their eye sockets nor their mesh eyes aligned with the system eyes, which the base lenses are rigged to. Since the base lenses cannot be moved or resized, you need to use the two unrigged lenses and they will take over. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, I know this consumes two attachment slots, but I can't do anything else to solve this problem, and I am not the one who came up with such poor design decisions as making mesh heads not aligned with the system eyes.

When you wear or unwear the unrigged lenses, nothing will happen at first, you need to have the system update its looks either by changing the texture and/or transparency, or relocking the restraint. Likewise, the projection won't change either until a movie is playing and the current picture to show changes.




The RemVision system is used exactly like any other RealRestraint blindfold and hood. Wear it or have your sub wear hers, click on it and you get a menu (you must be less than 3 m away). On the menu, choose one lock from "Blurry" to "Opaque" (there are six levels in total) and voilà, the lenses are locked on the sub and her vision is restricted ! Unless you choose "Lock", in which case the lenses appear but the vision is not impeded.

If you (or your sub) are using a viewer that implements the RLV 2.9 spec, then once blindfolded your vision will be restricted to a short distance ahead, the distance being shorter if you choose a tighter lock, "Blurry" being the lightest and "Opaque" being the tightest. "Medium", "Thick" and "Opaque" also remove the textures from the sub's view, making the world look grey to her.

If you (or your sub) are not using a viewer that implements the RLV 2.9 spec, like Firestorm for instance, the RealRestraint_HUD will appear instead, blocking her view with a transparency depending on the chosen lock level.

The behavior of the blindfold can be controlled through the "Blindfold" plugin.

If you are new to the RealRestraint features that you find in every restraint I make, I recommend you visit this page to learn the basics.

Aside from the standard RealRestraint features that you probably already know (Blindfold, RealKey, Give Keys, RL time and Autolock), the RemVision system contains the "RemVision"plugin that is in charge of controlling how to force the sub to watch movies and pictures, as well as how the lenses look, and the "Earpieces" plugin that is in charge of showing and hiding the ear pieces, and of blocking incoming chat and IMs when locked. All of this is configurable by the the dom.


RemVision plugin

This is the heart of the RemVision system. Think of it as the equivalent of the VHS player in the HD Video System, as it is in charge of reading a tape and playing it. However, there are subtle differences.

Firstly, RemVision being a pair of lenses and a pair of ear pieces, there is no way to insert a tape anywhere, so the data has to come through another way. Plus, the person owning the tape and the one wearing RemVision maybe different, which is not the case with the HD Video System where you must own the tape and the player to play it on the screen.

To play a tape on the sub's RemVision, the dom rezzes their tape on the ground, clicks on it and holds the mouse button down for at least half a second to get a menu. If they simply click on it, the tape will look for the nearest player to insert itself into. The dom can also do the same with the bottom's tape, but in this case the content of the tape can only be copied to her own RemVision, not to anyone else's.

Once the dom gets the menu, they see two buttons : "Insert" and "Copy to Rem". Clicking "Insert" has the same result as simply clicking on the tape, it makes it want to insert itself into the nearest VHS player around. Clicking "Copy to Rem" copies the contents of the tape to all the RemVision around that are :

- Locked by the dom, or at least the dom owns the key, or the RemVision's key is available to all.
- Ready to Copy, which is the case by default but it can be switched on and off by the dom at will.

Once the copy is started, it takes a little time to copy all the tracks into the sub's RemVision plugin, the more data the more time it takes. There are always three tracks to copy (video, audio and subtitles), each one being of variable length. Once the three tracks are copied, the copy is complete.

When the copy is finished, the RemVision plugin lets the top control how the sub watches the movie.


Contrary to the HD Video System, the person who wears the RemVision and the one who owns the tape be played may be different. If you're the dominant, you may buy a tape and want your sub to watch it on her own lenses, without needing her to buy it as well. This required a significant change in the tape scripts in order to add a "Copy to RemVision" button. This also means that all the existing tapes before the release of RemVision do NOT feature the "Copy to RemVision" button. Those tapes are :

- Applicant Payback
- Gina's Debut
- Hot Mouse
- The Wait
- Rocket's Tail

Since a movie cannot be updated (movies in general are not updated after release, unless they are produced by George Lucas), those movies cannot at the moment be watched in RemVision. If there is demand for it, I will update those tapes and deliver updates manually to anyone who asks. But since they are full movies, they are not really adapted to be watched in a loop by a sub on a personal holographic screen, right ?


Main menu of the RemVision plugin

When you click on the RemVision lenses and go to the RemVision plugin, this is the menu  you get :


The top six buttons are actions or switches :

* "STOP" : Pressing this button stops the currently loaded movie and goes back to the very beginning.

* "PAUSE/PLAY" : This button switches between playing the movie and pausing where it is.

* "Ready to copy" : When activated, the RemVision can be loaded with any tape on which the "Copy to Rem" button is pressed. When deactivated it will not take any data until reactivated.

* "LOOP" : When activated, this switch makes the movie loop back to the beginning of the current playlist (see below) when reaching the end. When deactivated it simply stops at the end.

* "Freeze eyes" : This switch makes the wearer's eyes point straight to the front to make that "look into the void" vacant look, but only when RemVision is locked. The animation used is priority 2 so it doesn't override whatever HUD you are using to control your eyes, like Lelutka's head HUD (which is priority 3) or Lelutka's Axis HUD (which is priority 6, that one is very useful for making movies, I recommend it). RemVision does not prevent the eyes from moving at all, it just prevents them from automatically turning to look at whatever you are focusing on, or whoever is talking around you.


The bottom six buttons lead to sub-menus that will be explained below :

* "Sections..." : Leads to the Sections menu where you can decide what sections to play and in what order.

* "Screen..." : Leads to the Screen menu where you can choose the opacity, the position and size of the screen on the sub's HUD.

* "Lenses..." : Leads to the Lenses menu where you can choose the texture, the opacity, the glow and the color of the lenses, as well as the opacity of the projection on the eyes.

* "Earpieces..." : Leads to the Earpieces menu which is actually a different plugin (but it lets you go back to the RemVision plugin easily), in charge of preventing the sub from hearing chat and/or receiving IMs, as well as hiding and showing the ear pieces.

* "Main..." : Leads to the main menu of the RemVision system, where you can lock and unlock it.


Sections menu

Aside from the fact that a tape and RemVision can be owned by different persons, the other big difference with the HD Video System is that RemVision allows to watch sections of the movie directly instead of having to watch it all.

A section is simply a slice of time inside the movie that can be accessed directly. Once again, the five aforementioned movies do not contain sections but the new ones do, especially the ones included in the RemVision package.

Please note : If you watch one of the new movies on a HD Video System's TV screen, you will probably see subtitles like "!Prologue" or "!Sybian (Stand kiss)". Those are section names and they are not supposed to show, and they won't show on the RemVision screen. However, the HD TV screen is not yet programmed to ignore those entries, which are actually regular subtitles. There is an update available for the HD Video System to fix this problem so it ignores those entries as well.

Sections can be played sequentially, randomly, or even pre-programmed manually by the dom. Think of it as a playlist on VLC. To do this, go to the Sections menu :


After the copy of a tape is finished, the RemVision plugin contains the list of sections in order, with the duration of each section. Pressing "List sections" gives you that list on the chat.

For example, the tape "Soft bondage - Short scenes" would give you this list :

[08:51] RemVision (nose): Marine's sections
[08:51] RemVision (nose): ---------
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #0 : 00:00 - 00:00 (00:00) : Begin
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #1 : 00:00 - 03:20 (03:21) : Bound in the sun
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #2 : 03:21 - 06:01 (02:41) : Platic gym
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #3 : 06:02 - 08:22 (02:21) : Platic & rubber
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #4 : 08:23 - 12:23 (04:01) : Classy study
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #5 : 12:24 - 14:04 (01:41) : In red & black
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #6 : 14:05 - 18:45 (04:41) : Nude in leather
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #7 : 18:46 - 21:06 (02:21) : Fishnet strappado
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #8 : 21:07 - 27:07 (06:01) : Hobble dresses
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #9 : 27:08 - 28:48 (01:41) : Corset dress
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #10 : 28:49 - 31:09 (02:21) : Nude & strapped
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #11 : 31:10 - 36:30 (05:21) : Smoking hot Dita
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #12 : 36:31 - 42:31 (06:01) : Water & plastic
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #13 : 42:32 - 52:32 (10:01) : A day on the cross
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #14 : 52:33 - 59:53 (07:21) : Smoking whore
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #15 : 59:54 - 71:14 (11:21) : Pony gear saleswoman
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #16 : 71:15 - 72:35 (01:21) : White rope frogtie
[08:51] RemVision (nose): #17 : 72:36 - 82:17 (09:42) : Kidnapped
[08:51] RemVision (nose): 6482 B free.
[08:51] RemVision (nose): ---------

When you press "Random", the playlist becomes a randomized, scrambled version of the list of sections. You can press "Random" as many times as you like, you will always get a different list with the same number of sections, and each section will appear exactly once in the list. This is called the "playlist". At first, or after you press "Sequential", the playlist and the list of sections are identical, the list of sections changes only when you copy a tape, while the playlist changes when you randomize it or set it manually.

To set the playlist manually, press the "Manual" button. You are presented with a text box that asks you to enter a list of numbers. Look above at the example list, each entry has a number after the "#" sign. Simply enter the numbers corresponding to the sections you want to be part of the playlist, separated by spaces. For example, if you want your sub to only watch "Hobble dresses" and "Corset dress", you enter "8 9" (that's eight, space, nine) and then press "Submit".



Please note that SL has a throttle for chat messages which could be a real problem when using that button since it sends you several messages in a row (one message per section) when you request the list of sections or the playlist. To prevent that, the plugin refrains itself from sending you too many messages in a short time and should this occur, it would tell you that it is throttling itself, so you just have to wait a bit. If it did not do that, it could be a serious problem for you as you would be blocked from hearing any chat in that sim until it restarts. It happened to me during the tests and I had to restart my sim so it was important to include this throttle in the script.

Case in point, from this wiki page :

"There is a per-destination throttle of 200 messages sent over 10 seconds on channel zero. Thereafter, there is also a per-sending-object throttle of 100 messages on channel zero over 300 seconds (5 minutes). This throttle is relevant only after the first throttle is activated. Messages sent on channels other than zero do not trigger the throttle but, once it is triggered, the block applies to all channels. The block is region-wide and applies to all objects with the same owner. The block apparently lasts until the region is restarted."


If you want to go to a section in particular, press "Go to section ?" and enter the number of the section you want from the list that appears, which is the playlist and not the list of sections. If you choose a section that doesn't have a duration (0 second), it goes to the next immediately.


Pressing "RemVision" leads you back to the main menu of the plugin, like in any other sub-menu.



Screen menu

This menu allows you to control how the screen appears on the HUD of the sub. Please note that the screen is not necessary for the product to work, but of course without the screen there is nothing to show except the lenses and the ear pieces.


Notice the "Screen present" line on the menu to indicate if the screen is worn or not.

* "Lock" allows you to lock the screen on the sub's HUD so she cannot remove it nor edit it while RemVision is locked.

* "Sound" turns the sound on and off for the sub. Please note that at the time of this writing, none of my movies has any sound except for the HD Video System's Basic Manual.

* "Subtitles" turns the subtitles on and off for the sub. Even full stories can be fun to watch without any subtitles, letting the sub decide for herself what the lines would be, and on a greater scale, what the story could be.

* "Position..." leads you to the Position sub-menu so you can choose the position and scale of the screen on the sub's HUD.


The "Small" switch divides the size of the screen by two.

Please note that "Whole screen" does not actually take the whole view because the screen is purposely placed in front of every other HUD so that it cannot be hidden (after all, the whole point of the product is to force the sub to watch movies, right ?). However, there are some HUDs that are still necessary for the sub to use, such as AOs, mesh head HUDs and the like. That's why there is a little gap on the top and the bottom of the screen, and if her monitor is wide (16:9 or 16:10) there should be gaps on the left and on the right as well. Plus, it is a blindfold, not a way to block the sub's clicks, and she might still need to be able to touch objects in-world.

* "Background..." lets you choose the background of the screen. I recommend "None" or "Black", depending on how much you want the screen to block the sub's view, and on the content of the movie itself.


* "Opacity..." lets you choose the maximum opacity of the screen, which is 100% (fully opaque) by default. With a very low opacity you can literally deliver subliminal images to the sub, images that may or may not be seen, but that would still noticed at a certain level, especially the ones that move.



Zoom, pan, synchronize

This is not in the menus as this is something only the sub can do. When she clicks on the screen, it becomes bigger (as if the sub was zooming on the picture) and if she keeps the mouse button down she can pan the screen in all directions by dragging it over her view. This is an interesting option when watching HD pictures, i.e. pictures spanning over several prims, to see details that may not be visible right away at the normal size of the screen.

Clicking on the screen also re-synchronizes the different prims if the screen is displaying an animation and all the prims are not in sync (it happens when the sim is laggy or when the connection is too busy).


Lenses menu

This menu allows you to configure the appearance of the lenses, as well as the opacity of the projection underneath.



* "Lenses Opac..." lets you choose the opacity factor of the lenses, knowing that they already have a default opacity that depends on the current lock :

  - Unlocked : Invisible
  - Blurry : 75%
  - Very thin : 80%
  - Medium : 90%
  - Thick : 95%
  - Opaque : 100%
  - Lock : 100%

This default opacity is multiplied by the one you choose in the "Lenses opacity" menu :


"Always max" makes the opacity 100% opaque regardless of the lock.

For example, if you choose the "Medium" lock (90% by default) and an opacity of 50%, the final opacity of the lenses will be 0.9x0.5 = 0.45, in other words 45%.


* "Holo. Opac..." lets you choose the opacity of the holographic projection under the lenses (which have to be at least partly transparent in order to see it, naturally, and the image is mirrored since it is projected inwards). Unlike the lenses opacity, the holographic projection opacity does not depend on the lock so it is whatever you choose in the following menu, even when the lenses are unlocked (since the sub can still watch a movie while they are unlocked). It is 50% by default.

Please note that while the projection reproduces the current picture being displayed on the sub's screen, it does not preload the next pictures like her screen does. Additionally, if the picture or the animation is HD (meaning it spans over more than just one square), then the projection will display one of the parts randomly, and if the picture is animated, the projection will be animated too. This creates a really nice effect.



* "Texture..." leads you to a menu that lets you choose the texture for the lenses among a few predefined ones, but also lets you enter a custom UUID for a texture you've made yourself. I recommend making your own texture black and white as the lenses can be tinted.


You might wonder why there are four levels of transparency (from "Clear" to "Plain") while another menu already lets you choose the opacity. The reason for this is that the shine doesn't depend on which texture you choose, but dims down when you decrease the opacity of the lenses. So if you want fully transparent lenses that shine bright, choose "Clear" for the texture and "100%" for the opacity.

Pressing the "CUSTOM ?" button lets you enter the UUID of one of your own textures. To make a texture yourself, I recommend you use the following UV map (I have included the "Fake" texture to show where the iris and the pupil limits are, that way you know where to paint) :


Please note that some textures are alpha-blended (i.e. they have parts that are neither fully invisible nor fully opaque), and this conflicts with any other alpha blended texture above the lenses, like hair. Those textures are :

- Clear
- Transparent
- Translucent
- Smoky
- Foggy

When you choose one of those textures while the sub wears long rigged hair, there is a chance that it goes like this :


What you see is the alpha-blended hair texture going over the alpha-blended "Smoky" texture and it conflicts because the viewer is programmed to hide the underlying alpha-blended surface (here, the lens).

On the contrary, when selecting an alpha-masked texture (or a plain texture), you get this :


No conflict there (this is the Blank texture).

But there is a catch. As pointed above, the transparency of the lenses also depends on the lock so you will still get conflicts with an alpha-masked texture if you choose any other lock than "Lock" or "Opaque", which both have an opacity of 100%. In that case, I recommend you choose "Always opaque" in the "Lens opacity" menu to avoid this issue. Or choose different hair.


* "Glow..." lets you add a glow effect to the lenses. Starting from 10% and up, the lenses also become fullbright, as if they were lit. They do not project light, though. But that would be a fun and easy little gadget to create.



* "Color..." lets you choose the tint to apply to the lenses. It is especially important when you use the "Realistic" texture, as it is black and white by default but you may want it to look like real eyes.


Since it is primarily aimed at coloring the lenses so that they look like real eyes (or not too fake, at least), the available colors are the same as real human eyes :

- Quartz : Pink
- Ruby : Red
- Axinite : Brown
- Amethyst : Purple
- Amber : Yellow
- Jade : Green
- Diamond : White
- Sapphire : Blue

You can choose your own color by pressing the "CUSTOM ?" button and entering a RGB color.


* "Saturation..." lets you choose the saturation level to apply to the currently selected color, it is by default 100%. The less saturated, the more pastel it will look. Colors in real life are not usually fully saturated, so choosing a medium saturation makes the eyes look more realistic, less flashy. A saturation of 0% means the lenses do not have a color, they are in shades of grey.




* "Luminosity..." lets you choose how bright the currently selected color must look, by default the luminosity is set to 100% but you can select a lower factor if you want the eyes to look darker. A luminosity of 0% means the lenses are black, regardless of the chosen color.




Earpieces menu


This menu is actually a different plugin that you can access directly from the Plugins page, but it lets you go back to the RemVision plugin as well.

* "Visible" : Toggles the visibility of the ear pieces on and off, knowing that they are always invisible while RemVision is unlocked.

* "IM blockable" : This button is available only to the wearer and is a toggle that is off by default. When turned on, it lets the dom prevent the sub from receiving IMs by using the "Rec. IMs" button. when it's off, the "Rec IMs" button is not available to them.

* "Rec. IMs" : When available (i.e. if the sub has purposely activated the "IM blockable" button herself), this button switches the IM block through three settings : can receive IMs from anyone, can receive IMs only from the dom, and can't receive any IM at all.

* "Hear chat" : This button is a toggle and switches through three settings : can hear chat from anyone, can hear only the dom's chat, and can't hear any chat.

Hello there,

So as I mentioned in this post, I've spent the last month and a half shooting movies in Second Life.

If you want to take a look right away, let me point you to my store on the Marketplace.

The new movies are sold in separate tapes as most are too long to fit on a single tape :

Alis Part 1
Alis Part 2
Alis Part 3+epilogue
By A Thread Part 1
By A Thread Part 2
My Sassy Maid Part 1
My Sassy Maid Part 2
New Life Part 1
New Life Part 2
New Life Part 3+Epilogue
Overworking Girl

Each tape costs L$200 except My Sassy Maid part 1 and 2 which cost L$170 each because the tapes hold less content than those for the other movies. That doesn't make it an inferior movie at all, but there are just a little fewer textures (170 textures each compared to the 220 to 250 textures per tape for other movies, but that's still a lot of content).


By "movie" I mean a story made of still and animated pictures with subtitles. Think of it as an illustrated story, like the ones you see on Deviant Art, except a lot longer with a lot more illustrations.

You have already seen movies of mine before, but that was four years ago, Second Life technology has evolved since then and so did we. Meaning the new movies look better, of course. For example, we can finally have facial expressions, as well as custom animations for the hands and fingers ! This changes everything and makes the characters look a lot more life-like. Likewise, the bodies and heads are a lot better defined since we use mesh now, meaning crisper skins and better looking and fitted clothes (when we uh... wear clothes).

I've also worked on props specific for the movies (especially for Alis and New Life), some of them are so elaborate that I'm considering keeping working on them until I can make commercial products out of them. Especially the ones from New Life, if you catch my drift.

Believe it or not, but although these movies are erotic, the stories are the most important part. The pictures may be sexy and entertaining, if there was no story, a movie would be a bit boring unless there is constant sex action, which is not the case here. This is erotica, not porn. Well, sometimes it's clearly porn but I don't let it get in the way of the story.

So I have taken great care in writing elaborate dialog, stories and background, and I hope you will enjoy watching them !

These movies can be watched both in RemVision and on the HD Video System (with a caveat : you need to update your HD Video System and rez the new TV screen so you won't see the section names as subtitles).

Each tape (except for the epilogues) is 25 to 30 minutes long average, some being longer, a couple being shorter. The epilogues are 8 minutes long for New Life and 12 minutes long for Alis. It is not the duration that makes a movie though, but its content. Each tape contains 220 textures in average, some even more. This number includes the textures used by HD videos of course, as videos often use 16 textures (although I try to lower that number when possible).



* Overworking Girl (1 tape) : Jenna is a beautiful single mother, she's alone at work late in the day, she is overworked and feeling down because of it, and she has a slight drinking problem. What do you think will happen to her ? This movie is for those who like vanilla sex, as there is no bondage at all. But it's a cute fun story with a lot of hot sex involved. You'll like Frank, I'm sure.





* By A Thread (2 tapes) : The story of Linda who likes it rough, extreme and dark (literally as well as figuratively). This movie has no text because dialogs would make no sense, but the screen at the beginning and the second one at the end explain the whole story. The movie features a lot of nude bondage, hanging by the neck, sex, and sex while nude, bound and hanging by the neck. The first tape features hanging and humiliation and a little sex. The second one features more hanging, more domination, more darkness, more sex, and a twist.





* My Sassy Maid (2 tapes) : This girl likes to please her man, and doesn't lack imagination when it comes to surprising him. Today is no exception but things do not really go as expected because her sluttiness gets the best of her (again) and her lover has to keep her under control lest things go out of hand (again). As a result, although she is the nicest and most enticing girl, she still has to spend a lot of time in bondage. Both tapes have a different theme, the first one being vanilla sex-oriented, the second one being bondage-oriented. This movie must be my cutest one ^_^





* New Life (3 tapes + epilogue) : This movie might be the best one I've made, ex-aequo with Alis. The cute Ellen is kidnapped and wakes up in a dark cell, nude and bound. She will soon realize that she is not alone in her cell, and that, well... I don't want to spoil the movie, so all I'll say is "tentacles". Lots of it. And they strike fast and with purpose. Each tape has its own theme, the first one being dark and very hentai (with tentacles you've never seen in SL as I made them for this movie), the second one is the sweetest and my favorite, the third one is just as sweet while being more sex-oriented, and the epilogue wraps the story up and explains it all, offering a sweet closure. You will see there are at least two reasons for this movie to be named "New Life".





* Alis (3 tapes + epilogue) : Along with New Life, this is my best movie so far, and a very long one too. The mighty Samantha Ryder wakes up in a dark room (what's up with me and locking girls in dark rooms these days ?). She's held prisoner, watched, monitored, tested, pushed, she's reluctant, she has a bad temper, significant resources and will do everything she can to escape. But will she ? What is this place she is detained in ? They also seem to have a lot of resources, what do they want to do with her ? Who is she and why is she there ? The movie starts slow to introduce the main character, then goes crescendo, increasingly faster, to end on a long, powerful note that will come as a surprise. Like an orgasm. The epilogue also offers a good closure, with answers to all the questions you could have about the movie. It's like aftercare.







Don't forget, these movies were made after I made RemVision, meaning they have sections to let you access them directly and play them in a loop for you or your sub. This means that if you watch them in the HD Video System, you must update it and rez the new TV screen so you won't see the section names. If you don't update it, you will see the section names as subtitles for 1 second each.



A little personal note

Making movies is a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. Over the time I learned new techniques, bought more tools and overall got better with framing, animating and such. There are so many things to be careful about ! Every little detail counts and I try to avoid continuity issues as much as I can. I think I spotted one, maybe two, in all these movies so that's pretty good.
From the moment I released the HD Video System, I was hoping to see people make their own movies and sell them, but I didn't see any. I admit the Director's notecard included in the product is a bit daunting as it explains everything from a technical standpoint. Maybe what people need is not a manual but a tutorial.

It is an art, really, and not an easy one. I love telling stories, but I also want to inspire people to make their own movies and sell them. This is why I will probably write a whole blog post in the form of a tutorial, in which I'll explain in detail how I make a movie, from how I shoot pictures to how I process videos. This will be a big blog post, no doubt, maybe several blog posts, but I really want to see more movies pop out in SL. If you like telling stories and if you have an eye for detail, believe me, you'll have fun making movies !



If you leave a review, please do not post spoilers so other viewers enjoy the movies like you did, thank you :)

Marine

Hi !

So as usual, following the release of a new product, bugs show up that didn't show during the tests. It's like a universal law. The release of RemVision is no exception to this law, so an update is available to you that hopefully crushes all the remaining bugs. There are a few changes for convenience, too. Check it out :

* The screen no longer crashes ("stack-heap collision", meaning memory full) even with the longest tapes (for example "Soft Bondage - Long scenes" tended to make it crash before). We're never safe from a memory shortage but hopefully, with the optimizations I've made, this should be fixed now.

* The video track script contained inside RemVision should no longer crash either, I've seen that crash occur very rarely but there was still some optimization to be done to make sure it doesn't happen again.

* The screen is now modify. It wasn't supposed to be no-mod.

* The projection on the eyes now clear when the movie is stopped. Attention, they do not clear when the movie is paused, that is on purpose since there is still a picture on the screen in that case.

* The screen now moves out of the way when the movie is stopped, because there is no reason to let it take space on the viewport if there is nothing to show, especially since it puts itself in front of most HUDs.

* When RemVision is locked, the screen updates its position, in case the sub had moved it manually before. She can't move it manually after it is locked, since it becomes non-editable until it's unlocked.


The reasons for the crashes were multiple, but one of them, and not the least of them, was that the track scripts were preloading 25 pictures ahead instead of 16 like the HD Video System. This was because some (rare) animated pictures span over 25 prims, but it ate way too much memory so I reverted it to 16. Tests show that this is not an issue after all, and it even eases down the preloading of the textures in the viewer. I noticed a lot less blurry or grey images when watching a movie, even at a fast pace. Other reasons implied some optimization of the code, too. Hopefully the scripts won't crash anymore now.


How to update

To update your RemVision, please go to one of these locations :

My Little Shop
Chorazin's store
Roper's Dark Playground
Dark Wishes


Once there, click on the updater and follow the instructions. You absolutely need to choose "REPLACE" on the menu instead of "UPDATE" since every single object (including the free tapes) have seen at least one of its scripts updated. A simple "update" would not fix the bugs.

If you do not get a "REPLACE" option, contact me (Marine Kelley) to get a manual replacement.





Have fun !

Marine

Hi !

As you may know, I have released in 2014 the HD Video System that lets you watch movies in Second Life. Four years later, in summer 2018, I have released the RemVision system that also lets you watch movies except its screen is worn and can be locked, and it is more a restraint than an entertainment system. But both let you watch movies and what's more, make your own and possibly sell them !

However, making a movie is not a trivial task, it takes time and money and requires a lot of creativity because you have to be the director, producer and usually at least one of the actors. Having created a lot of movies myself, mostly erotic movies, I have learned as I went, developed new techniques, and I am happy to share my knowledge with you in this tutorial that will be so long that it spans over several blog posts. This is the introduction to this series of tutorials.

The HD Video System comes with a notecard named "Director's Manual". It's long, it's comprehensive, sometimes very technical, it's a manual. A manual tells you what you can do and how to do it, but a tutorial leads you by the hand from a fresh start to a finished product. Both are necessary, I think, to really grasp a complex product and become an expert at it. Think of a manual as a map to find your way through a maze, and a tutorial as a solution to said maze. It won't lead you to all the possible rooms, it will simply give you the quickest way to a certain result you want to achieve.

Here I will try to do a little bit of both. I won't make a whole movie and lead you through it from A to Z (that would be 100% tutorial, 0% manual), and I won't just say what you can do and how to do it (that would be 100% manual, 0% tutorial). I will do both, showing you how I do X and why, for example how many zoom levels you need depending on what you are shooting, or how to synchronize animations, etc. Think of these tutorials as tips and tricks for every situation one can think of.

I also provide for free some of the tools I made for myself (like the glow HUD, the video frame HUD etc) at my shop to help you through it.



What is a movie ?

The word "movie" will be employed a lot in this tutorial, so it is important to be clear about its meaning. Here, a movie is not one you watch on your real life TV, nor a YouTube video (or Vimeo or DailyMotion or Netflix or anything like that).

A movie here refers to a set of SL textures, sounds and subtitles that are displayed sequentially. A tape contains all those items and the Track scripts in it are in charge of retaining their UUIDs and to serve them to the TV screen inside Second Life when appropriate (i.e. when the player asks them to). In other words, it is like a slideshow, although parts of it may be animated and have sound, plus text. It's a story told with still and animated pictures. Which is exactly what a movie is.

This means that all the pictures you see on the TV or RemVision screen come from Second Life and not from anywhere else. The usual way in Second Life to watch a movie or listen to music is to tune your viewer to an external media source, which will be played over a particular texture, if the media is a video. Typically that's what most SL televisions do, although some now use media-on-a-prim to do that, but the result is the same. The consequences of this technique are :

- You don't control what you connect to, the source could be potentially malicious (that's how your IP is given away to malicious servers, for example).
- You don't control how long the video/music will be available so you can't really sell content.
- You can't be sure that your friends are watching the same scene as you are at any given time, so you can't really comment on what's going on without spoiling it for the others.

With the HD Video System and RemVision, all the points above do not apply as all the data come from the SL region you are in. Nothing comes from any external source, it is all in-world. In other words :

- The data is perfectly safe, you can't compromise a viewer with SL textures, SL sounds or text.
- You control the content and it is not going anywhere, no risk of an external source taking it away from you, if you own a tape you own the data in it (own as in you are able to watch it when you want, that doen't mean you own the intellectual property rights, of course, those belong to the author of the movie).
- You are sure that your friends are watching the same scene as you are at any given time, so you can comment with them without fear of spoiling.


Here is an example to illustrate this. This is the Basic Manual tape for the HD Video System :


And here is a part of its contents, at least for the work version (the one that is not finalized) :


As you can see, it contains scripts, sounds and textures (and also a notecard but you can't see it on this snapshot). This is the data that is served to the player, then in turn to the TV, to play to you when you watch the movie.

Once finalized, the contents of the tape look like this :


The textures, sounds and the notecard have vanished, all their data being contained in the three Track scripts. That's the kind of tape that is sold and watched by users.

So, to recapitulate, a movie is a set of textures (my tapes usually contain 220 to 250 textures average), a movie script, which is a notecard, not to be confused with an SL script which is a program. More about the movie script later.



Why make movies ?

If you're creative and like to tell stories, then you might already have some stories in mind but don't know how to tell them. Or maybe you already did on websites like DeviantArt, for example. Second Life has evolved so much over the years that it now looks better than most video games. I kid you not !

If you look at modern, "next-gen" video games with a realistic setting, they all have materials like Second Life. Some of them render materials better as they are PBR (Physically Based Rendering) while SL is not, but you can still go far with the "spec/gloss" shader model of SL, playing with the lighting

Mesh bodies and heads are for most of them more defined than the best defined video games characters and what's more, they deform along with your shape, as designed with the "Bento" features. What's more, most video games are designed to let you see your character only from pretty far (think third person shooters where you always see at least half of your character's body) while SL allows you to make closeups.

Of course, all of this is possible if you are willing to spend money to buy quality material. In my case, I use the Maitreya Lara mesh body (plus my Proud Girls for some characters and situations but not always) and the Lelutka Simone 2.0 mesh head. With those two, and with a little taste and patience when adjusting the shape, you can go very far and make very pretty snapshots. I often also use my When You're Hot sweat appliers and/or Need For Seed cum appliers when "action" is taking place.

As for the clothes, furniture and structures, a lot of creators in SL are 3D designers in RL so they are pretty skilled, letting you create good scenes as well. It often doesn't take much to make a good scene. Look at Alis for example, which takes place in a modified Restrained Freedom padded cell during pretty much the whole movie.

So, now that you know that you can make movies in SL, and hopefully know why and have the means and will to go through the amount of work this requires, let's move on to the next question...



Why sell movies ?

This question might sound a little odd, but the answer can be multiple.

One answer could be "to make money, of course". Honestly, I make movies because not only it is fun to tell stories, but it is also fun to make movies. The creative kind of fun. I don't do this for the money and I don't even think that given the time and money I have invested in them, I will recoup my expenses. It can be time-consuming of course, depending on how far you want to go, but I've never found it to be a chore. When I shot Alis, I spent 12 hours a day every day (including weekend) for one week and a half. That's a lot more than I usually take to make movies, but it involved making props and testing stuff, in particular the overlays, so it required a lot of work overall. Plus the movie itself is very long. The same went for New Life. Other movies didn't require so much work but were still fun to make.

Another answer would be "because I value my work and you should too", and that's a better answer in my opinion. Your time is worth money, and people tend to confuse value and price. Usually, the more money you spend to purchase something, the more you value it, regardless of its intrinsic value. Conversely, if you get something for free you tend to look down at it and not necessarily see its value for what it is, but for what it cost you. A good example of this is free software and free art. If you go on DeviantArt, for example, you can look at many very good pictures (taken in SL or otherwise, or drawings, or photographs, whatever) and although you find they are pretty good, you don't spend any money to watch them, so you switch to the next without a second thought. And that's a shame because some of these pictures and stories are really good, required a lot of time and creativity, so they hold a high value. Their price does not represent that at all.

Speaking of DeviantArt, some pictures have full stories attached to them, and some stories come without pictures. I find that the story is the lifeblood of the movie, its backbone. Take away the pictures and you still have a novel. Take way the novel and you have unrelated, random pictures (even if they are very good). In my experience, people tend to like stories a lot more than pictures and comment stories a lot more than text-less pictures, unless those are very original. Once again, it takes time (but no money) to write a good story, and your time must be valued.

Of course, nothing keeps you from making a movie and giving it away for free !



How to sell movies ?

Well this one is easy. Second Life has its Marketplace on which you can buy and sell products, purchases being made mainly in L$. All you have to do is put the textures, sounds and notecard(s) inside a HD Video System tape and follow the instructions from the Director's notecard and you're all set. I don't need to repeat them here, the instructions are straightforward and easy to follow, it's just a technical step to take after having spent most of your time into making the actual movie.

You don't actually need to own the HD Video System to make a movie, all you need to own is an empty tape and I'll gladly give you one if you ask me (Marine Kelley) in IM and don't want to buy a video system. I recommend having the video system or the RemVision system though, in order to test your movie during its making, otherwise you won't really know what you are selling.



How to make movies ?

Now THIS is the actual question, and this is the whole point of this series of tutorials. This is also where the introduction ends and the interesting stuff begins.

Are you ready ?

Let's go...


Or return to the menu page.

First of all, when you want to make a movie, you must be sure to take the best pictures you can. It doesn't look like much, but this skill is crucial to making something enjoyable to look at, and you will see that there is a lot to know, and a lot of details to be mindful of.

In this tutorial, I will talk about photography, some techniques that also apply to the real world and some tricks to make your photos look better. Of course, I explain here how I take pictures, your mileage may vary but maybe some of these tips will help you while others may sound like no-brainers, but I'm going to explain everything.
You might be thinking "well, anyone can take a picture in SL, all you have to do is press Ctrl+Shift+S, save it and done". Yes, but there are so many things to know to take good pictures, that I think a tutorial might still help.



Focusing the camera

In order to take a picture you must first know how to move your camera, of course, and how to focus on something, as by default your camera is behind your avatar and is not focused on anything. It's said to be "locked to the avatar".

To unlock your camera and focus it on something or someone, simply hold Alt and click on the subject of your attention. You can dolly back and forth and orbit around it left and right while you hold the Alt key down. Please note that in order to take good closeups you need to activate the "Disable Camera Constraints" option in the Advanced menu (press Ctrl+Alt+D if you don't see it) otherwise your camera won't go closer than a certain distance. That works only for moving the mouse with the Alt key down, it doesn't change the behavior when moving the camera with the arrow keys or with the mouse wheel.

While holding down the Alt key, you can also hold the Ctrl key to orbit left and right and up and down around your subject, and if you also hold the Shift key you can pan your camera left and right and up and down instead of orbiting.

When you focus your camera on something other than your avatar, the latter will look at the point of your focus if nothing animates your eyes. It can be a blessing or a curse as you may not want that. Fortunately, most mesh heads come with a HUD that lets you control your eyes, and if you don't have one you can buy such a HUD. More on that later.

Another blessing and curse of focusing on an object is the Depth of Field, if you activated it. It may or may not work well for what you intend to do, so feel free to turn it on and off at will.


Zoom level

This is the very first thing to think about when taking a picture. The default zoom level in SL is good for looking around, but not good for taking pictures as it deforms them, so it is necessary to increase the zoom level (or decrease the field of view, which is the same thing) in order to "flatten" the image. The same happens in real life. When you take a picture of someone, you want to take a few steps back and to zoom in, instead of staying up close and taking the shot with a wide angle. That's why selfies look deformed and selfie sticks are a thing.

To change the zoom level, simply press Ctrl+8 to zoom out, Ctrl+9 to return the zoom to default and Ctrl+0 to zoom in. The numbers are the row above the letters on your keyboard, not the numbers on the keypad. It works whether you are using a QWERTY or AZERTY keyboard.

When I talk about "zoom level" I mean the number of times you press Ctrl+8 or Ctrl+0. So if you press Ctrl+0 twice, I call that "two zoom levels" or "zoom level 2". It doesn't mean "zoom x2" but you get the idea.


Let me show you :

Here is my face at zoom level 0 with the camera right in front of me. As you can see, my nose, my eyes and my lips look big and my head looks round. Also notice the door behind me that looks like I can't walk through it, as it is several steps in the back.



Now for zoom level 2 with the camera moved back a little. Isn't it much better already ? Still a little deformed but a lot less than above.




Zoom level 4 with the camera moved even further back. My head looks flatter and prettier, the door looks bigger :



Zoom level 6, the camera keeps moving back so my the top of the shoulders are on the bottom of the frame and the top of my head clears the top of the frame by only an inch. The differences with the one above are subtle but if you look closely, the proportions look better. Also the door behind me looks bigger.



Zoom level 8 now. The photo looks a lot more professional than the first one, and you can see that I actually fit through the door now. In fact, I could keep moving the camera back and zooming in (provided there's enough clearance behind the camera so it doesn't go through a wall), and eventually I'd reach what is called an "orthographic view". But the zoom is limited in SL so we can't have that.



And if you wonder how I look with zoom level -2 (remember that means press Ctrl+8 twice from the default zoom level) and the camera practically on my nose, well... let's just say it can be a wanted effect, in fact I used that effect twice in New Life to simulate a certain uneasy feeling. But usually I steer clear from negative zoom levels when taking pictures.



Zoom levels are very important for taking good pictures, and you probably guessed that every situation has its own preferred zoom level. Here are the zoom levels I usually set depending on the kind of photo I take :

- Zoom level 2 : A single standing character from head to toe, two characters who are talking but are not very close to each other, or a closeup when I have very little clearance for the camera (when moving back makes it clip through something or someone).

- Zoom level 4 : A single standing character taken from the waist up, a whole character sitting on something, two characters close to each other taken from the chest up.

- Zoom level 6 : A single character taken from the chest up, an interesting small object, a closeup on the faces of two characters standing or sitting close.

- Zoom level 8 : A closeup on the face of a character (or two characters kissing), or on any other part of their anatomy, a small object with something to read on it.

Remember that the higher the level, the further back you have to move your camera. This means that you must select the "Disable camera constraints" in the Advanced menu (Ctrl+Alt+D to have it show if you don't see it). Also make sure to have enough view range especially if you activate the dynamic shadows (more on that later).




Portrait height

There is something to remember when you shoot someone's whole character, standing (which usually means zoom level 2). When you look at pictures of famous people taken at an event, for example at the Cannes festival, you often see them deformed, especially women. This is because the photos are difficult to take since there is a crowd so the photographer has to stand where they can and shoot from there, usually at face level with a wide angle. The result is a mildly deformed top and heavily deformed legs, like this :


Now don't get me wrong, the subject is sublime and the photographer is a professional, but the photo itself is still not good because it was taken too high, too close with a wide angle. See how you see her face normally but her feet from above ? That's deformation you don't want because it makes the top of her body look bigger than her legs and you don't want the legs to look short, especially on a woman, double especially if she is wearing high heels. That's a faux pas (pun totally intended).

If the photographer had had more time and space (*), he or she would have crouched a little further back, increased the zoom and gotten a photo like this :






See how divine she looks on the picture above ? She's the same woman (Blake Lively). This is because this photo was taken at hip level (the photographer was crouching) from further back with a higher zoom. The result of this is that the deformation is a lot less visible and the model looks like she is towering the spectator. This makes a all the difference.


(*) At the time I wrote this, I checked the same web page... and found out that all the other photos of the same set were taken at head level from the same distance. All the full-length photos are just as poor, so I could not take any one of them to prove my point. This is why the second photo comes from another website. Still, I do not criticize the first photographer's skill or choice of tools, because I certainly couldn't do better, not being a professional photographer myself.


All this to say, when you shoot a model in full-length, lower your camera so it is at crotch level, move it back and zoom in, two or four levels are enough.

Here is how the first photo would look in SL with the camera at head level, not from from the subject and without zoom :


And how the second one would look when following the advice above, camera at crotch level and moved back a bit, zoom level 2 :



Rule of Thirds

Like above, this tip comes from real life photography, and is not really a rule, more like guidelines to make your photo more enjoyable to look at.

Imagine your screen being divided in nine rectangles, like this :


On that picture, I "naively" tried to put the focus on the right road and on the horizon line, the perspective point being right in the middle of the screen. Let's discuss how to make it look better.

The four intersections are the nexus points to which the eyes are naturally drawn when looking at a picture. Same for the lines themselves, which are where the eyes scan first for interesting information in the picture.

For example, it is a good idea to keep the horizon on the lower 2/3rds line. Likewise, if the subject is not just a character but a character with its surroundings, it is good to make the character match with one of the two vertical lines or occupy one of the two outer columns instead of standing in the middle. When taking a portrait up close, for example the face, you want the eyes to be on the upper horizontal line and the lips to be on the lower one. Here we go :


What's the focus now ? I have simply panned the camera to the left, now the buildings are on the left and right vertical lines and the "horizon" is on the lower third line. This makes the photo more interesting to look at.

For a character in a scene it would look like this :


Notice how the two points of interest, the flower and the eyes, are both on nexus points.

As for a closeup on the face, we get this, with the eyes on the upper line (and the leftmost eye on the upper left nexus) and the lips on the lower line, allowing to see the chin and neck but not the top of the skull, which makes for a better framing. In this picture, the eyes of the spectator are naturally drawn to the eyes of the subject first, then on the rightmost part which is the window, as if she were expecting something there although she couldn't possibly be looking through the window since she is turning her back to it :


Although this "rule" is very well known among photographers, like any rule, it is sometimes a good idea to break it when you feel doing so would make your picture look better, your mileage may vary.


Rule of Tangents

Another real life "rule", although this one is (to me) more important than the rule of thirds. This rule comes directly from comic book drawing. In short, you don't want your spectators to think that two objects are connected when they are not.

Actually there is so much to say about this rule that I will not develop here or it would take a whole page. Instead, I will point you to this link.

However, here is an example of two bump-up tangents, one with the top of my skull bumping against the top of the frame, the other with the side of my head bumping against the side of the cabinet, plus one line tangent between my leftmost shoulder and the leaf of the plant behind me, making it look like it is part of my clothes (that one wasn't actually done on purpose so you see it's easy to get tangents without noticing) :




Advanced Lighting Model

When you shoot photos in SL, you absolutely want to activate Advanced Lighting Model or ALM to get dynamic shine and dynamic shadows. Your computer might not be powerful enough to handle the latter, but you can turn them off and keep the dynamic shine, which is not taxing on the graphics card.

To turn ALM on, simply go to your preferences, to the Graphics tab and press "Advanced Settings...". Depending on your viewer the window may look different, but on the SL viewer and on the RLV it looks like this :


Locate the "Advanced Lighting Model" check box and activate it.

If your viewer slows down too much for you, choose either "None" or "Sun/Moon" in the "Shadows" drop-down list :


Same for Ambient Occlusion, which I keep turned on (except on these pictures but don't mind it), it tends to eat a lot of GPU time but makes the picture look better, and the shadows smoother.

If you use Ambient Occlusion too, you might want to increase the "dirt" effect in corners. You can do this by modifying the following debug settings (Advanced > Debug Settings) :

- RenderSSAOEffect : x=0.6
- RenderSSAOFactor : 1.0


Speaking of shadows, I also use specific settings to keep them from looking weird. Here is an example of a cube and a rod standing on it but not clipping through it, under two different projected light sources.

Something is odd in this picture. The rod touches the surface of the cube but the shadows make it look like it is hovering above it. This is with the default spotlight shadow debug settings.


But with the right debug settings, you can get this :


The debug settings I use are :

- RenderSpotShadowBias = 0.000
- RenderSpotShadowOffset = 0.010


As for Depth of Field... I'm torn about it. It really depends on the situation. Depth of Field makes a picture look better by blurring whatever you are not focusing on, like this :

Focusing on the flower on the table, without DoF. Looks strange as I and the rest of the background should be blurry. Here taken at zoom level 6 (remember, 6 because I'm focusing on a small object) :


With DoF :


The problem occurs when you focus on yourself or on another avatar for a closeup while wearing a rigged mesh head and/or body. The DoF goes crazy ! It becomes frustrating to have your face crisp and the rest blurry. You most likely need to wear something unrigged and invisible on your face to focus on, making it a pain. There's also the problem of the animations you use, for example if you shoot yourself while standing and having your Animation Overrider activated, chances are you will move a lot. Then the time window when your face is crisp on the photo versus when it leaves the focus will be narrow.

Plus, particles actually blur whatever is behind them when DoF is activated. This is a bug but it can really ruin a photo when you shoot at the wrong time. I had this problem in the Magic Shower scene of the "Long Bondage Scenes" tape, as well as in New Life, which was shot entirely with DoF on. Alis and Ebony & Ivory never use DoF.

All in all, DoF makes a picture look better, but can be a real pain in the butt. I generally use it when I want to emphasize the setting or when I want the spectator to focus on a particular detail in the picture, but I turn it off otherwise, especially in "action" shots.

If you really want to use DoF, I recommend the following debug setting :

- CameraFocalLength = 10.0 instead of the default 50.0

That way it is easier to get a crisp face while keeping the background blurry.


It gives you more "crisp depth" than the default, for example on this picture my view is focused on the "Flour" pot :




Windlight settings

This one is relatively easy but oh so important for many reasons. First of all, you want your scene to be lit just the way you want it. I'll cut to the chase right away, the default Windlight settings and the default day/night cycle are not good for taking pictures. At all. You need good Windlight settings instead, either custom ones or the ones issued with Firestorm (which I don't use so I don't know about them, instead I made my own).

Here is a scene with the Midday setting where the sun comes exactly from above :


The same scene in the "Hot day" setting I had made for the movie "Hot Mouse" :



A good and easy to make Windlight setting is one I called "Pitch Black", which is good for simulating total darkness. To create this Windlight setting, simply set the Blue Horizon color to black, the multipliers and altitude to the maximum, and the sun/moon and ambient colors to black. That's it. Of course you have to use local lights to see something in this setting, as it is completely black otherwise.

Another reason for a fixed Windlight setting instead of a free day/night cycle (either the default one or one you made yourself) is continuity issues. You don't want to start shooting a scene in the morning of the sim you're in, interrupt yourself, then come back to shoot the rest of the scene not noticing that it is afternoon and the light has changed, making you redo the whole scene.



Lighting

Now this is a big subject but I will stay general, as everything is subjective and depend on your personal tastes, and on the mood of the scene you want to shoot.

Generally, in real life, you do not want your subjects to be hit with direct lights. Instead you want them to receive indirect light, light that bounces off white walls or other neutral surfaces. This is why you often see umbrellas in studios.

You cannot simulate indirect light in SL as the light doesn't bounce off a surface, SL does not use ray-tracing for rendering as it would be way too costly for the GPU.

So instead, you want your lights to be not too strong, and multiple. In fact it entirely depends on what you want your scene to look like. You generally want to avoid sharp shadows on the face as they tend to make the character look older, sometimes even weird (hence the use of face lights, more on that below).

I'm not an expert at this but I usually set two or three lights. One to the left, one to the right (with different intensities, the more intense one being the main light, giving its color to the scene) and one behind and slightly to the side, acting as the fill light. Those lights are regular lights, not projectors, as I reserve projectors for scenes where shadows matter. Some shadows are even a subject of its own in some pictures.

Lighting your scene is a matter of preference and often artistic taste. For example, in Ebony & Ivory one of the lights is red and the other is blue, creating a stark contrast between both sides, emphasizing the volume of the scene.

In dark scenes, I like to light the character with a single, very low and small light to emphasize the consciousness of the character of her body, leaving the rest in the dark. I did that a lot in By A Thread and in Alis. The light I use is usually yellow with intensity 0.1, range and falloff 0.5. In Alis it was a projector but not in By A Thread, I don't know which option is better.

Here is a picture taken from Alis in the dark with such a light, which lights only the top half of the body, and not much :


Face lights are often a good idea (except in the dark) because they help removing the hideous shadows on the face of the avatars. I don't go overboard with my face light, it is very subtle. I wear it attached to my nose (or any head attachment), just for your information here are its values :


With this kind of light, the face shadows are greatly reduced but the rest of the body and the surroundings are not washed by a strong light.


Projector lights are also very interesting for making the scene look more real, as they project shadows accurately (don't forget the debug settings I pointed out earlier). Without at least one projector light, your scene looks like it is lit uniformly, which may or may not be what you want. It works for a bright scene like a hospital or a sci-fi spaceship bridge, less so for a dark themed setting.

For example, here is a shot taken with a strong overhead light without a projected texture :


The same scene but this time the light is a projector, with a blurry white circle as the projected texture :


The values for this projector are the following :


The texture I use to make this projector is this one, feel free to download it and use it for your own projectors :


One thing that is very important to keep in mind and that can quickly ruin a shot when using a projector is that the alpha-blended rigged surfaces such as hair are lit when inside the light radius regardless of them being inside the cone of light or not. For example, when your head is inside the light radius (here within 8 m) but not inside the cone of light (but still inside the maximum cone of light, the one it would have if its FOV were set to 3.0), the alpha-blended parts of the hair will be lit and not the masked or opaque ones and it will look ugly :


On this picture I am turning my back at the light and standing outside the cone of light. Notice how some of the hair strands are lit and others are not.



Framing

The art of taking a picture is the art of showing the right thing and hiding the right thing. What you hide is as important as what you show.

A good framing is a matter of taste and situation, but here are a few tips that should help you.

Firstly, make sure to hide your HUDs with Alt+Shift+H so you're not confused by whatever HUDs you are wearing on the sides of your screen and shoot off-center without noticing. I know I fall into that trap all the time. Also hide your inventory window because it too can lead to a mistake with centering your snapshot, since it is usually a big vertical opaque window that is put either on the left or on the right of the screen.

Secondly, you may want to use animations that have from the look of them nothing to do with the actual action the character is supposed to execute on the picture, and take only a part of the character's body. Let me illustrate this with a concrete example.

Suppose the character is sitting in a chair at a table and talking to someone sitting next to her :


Now suppose you're at a point in the dialog where you want the character to look like she is pondering an idea, but you don't have the means or the time to make the pose yourself. And suppose you do have such an animation in your Animation Overrider, but it's a standing animation, not a sitting one. Something that looks like this :



You could really use the upper part of the body right now, while sitting on the chair. This is what we're going to do.

First, make sure the chair is phantom, because the character is going to stand where it is :


Now stand where the chair is, clipping through it, and lower your Avatar Z Offset until the character's height makes her look like she is sitting on the chair, at least when seen from across the table (here I chose -0.47 for the example) :


Now move your camera back to where it was and shoot when the time is right :


To the spectator, the character is sitting on the chair and pondering. The rest doesn't matter as it is outside the frame of view.


Emulating movement

Sometimes you want to show that the character is moving, for example walking across the room. And sometimes you don't want to use two shots to do that, as the second one brings very little information compared to the first one.

The two techniques I use are "walking in place" and "shooting off-center". Let's start with the first one, walking in place.

Shooting a picture while walking is a recipe for disaster, you don't really want to do that. And in SL, when you walk your camera loses its focus and goes back to the "locked" state (see above), so it simply doesn't work. So if you want your character to look like she is walking, you have no other choice but to trigger a walking animation and to let her walk in place. Whether your Animation Overrider is modifiable or not, you can grab a copy of one of the walking animations it contains (provided said animation is copiable) or at least double-click on it from the AO's inventory to bring the animation popup with the "Play Inworld" and "Play Locally" buttons.

For this example I chose the "SexyWalk3Slow" walk animation I made for the Sassy Pony AO. It is sexy and makes it clear that the character is walking :


I was not moving while taking the shot, I was just standing there with the animation playing.

The second technique is even easier. In the shot above, I look like I am about to cross the doorway to the next room. But if it doesn't matter for the story which room I am going to, but rather which room I am walking out from, then you may want to make the character look like she is leaving the room, rather than entering the next one. To do this, I shoot off-center, putting the focus on the area the character is leaving and the character way off-center, almost at the edge of the picture, like this :



Cheating with angles

Sometimes you need extreme precision in a character's position, for example when she is pushing a button, grabbing an object or touching another character's body. And it can be rather impossible (or extremely time-consuming) to do so even with all the animation HUDs you may have. So sometimes you need to cheat. Remember the tangent rule ? This is a case where you want to break it. The art of making a movie (or even taking good pictures) is the art of illusion after all.

Here is an example.

Suppose I want my character to press a particular key on the keyboard of this computer :


To do this, I use the "bend_90_parted "pose (provided for free with a few of my products), lower my Z offset down to -0.07 (that's what works best for my avatar with this keyboard), and I tweak my pose with my Animare HUD until my hand points at the key I want. Oh, and I use my Maitreya HUD to animate my left hand into a pointing finger, like this :


Now suppose the key I want to press on this keyboard is the "Q" key. You see that my finger is near it but not exactly over it :


Animare angle steps are too coarse to precisely move my finger to the left so it hits the "Q" key exactly, so what to do ? I don't want to turn my character either or my hand would go way off the keyboard, and I don't want to move the character to the left side either because I can't see the result easily, and it would be too coarse a movement anyway. Well, an easy solution is to shoot from an angle that makes it look like my finger is over the "Q" key, and what's more, touching it, like this :


To take this shot I did not change anything in the position of my character, only the camera angle. Since the zoom level is rather high (level 6 here), the difference in size from the perspective is not obvious. The higher the zoom level, the less an object shrinks when it moves away from the camera. In orthographic view the sizes wouldn't change at all.

It's cheating but it works. I have used this trick a few times (but not often) in the movies I made. Before you ask, there was no such cheating going on during any of the kissing or sex scenes I shot :)


Continuity errors

They are the bane of every director, and I think most movies (as in, 99.9% of them) have some, as tiny as they are. It can be the weather changing brutally from scene to scene (in Batman The Dark Knight Rises, the attack on the stock exchange begins during the day but it is night time when Bane walks out, although the whole scene could not have taken more than 15 minutes), or an object changing place on its own (the pen on the desk in The Shining), or a piece of clothing that changes color, or a piece of jewelry missing, etc. It can be anything.

This is because movies are taken in several takes, over several months, and SL movies are no exception (except you hopefully won't take months to shoot your own). Suppose you spend a few hours with friends shooting a scene, and you have to call it a day because at least one of the members of the team has to log off, so you all agree to pick up where you left the next day, or the next week, or whenever.

When the day has come, everybody must go back to the same scene dressed exactly like they were before without omitting anything. But depending on how much time has passed during the two takes, things may have changed, memories may be blurry, and the props may have changed places especially if the stage is an actual living area and not just made for the movie. If it has known some use between the takes, there's a good chance there will be continuity errors.

How do you make sure you avoid those ? You can't. You can only be very attentive to details, review all your snapshots before picking up where you left, and controlling everything. You must be Kubrick-level of control freak, at least. Then again, even The Shining has continuity errors.

But you know what ? It's fun for a spectator to spot continuity errors, it gives them some insight of how the movie was taken :)


Resolution, ratio

This is a technical tip and specific to the HD Video System and RemVision. When you take a snapshot in Second Life, the resolution depends on that of the monitor your viewer is, and how much screen space it takes. For example, I have two monitors, one being 1920x1080 and the other 3840x2160, on which I usually make SL run (except when taking videos, I need the smaller monitor for that). Since I keep the SL viewer (or rather RLV here) maximized, it takes all the space on the screen but you can still see the Windows 10 task bar and the viewer's top bar. This means that when I take a picture, it defaults to the resolution 3840x2066. I find that to be too high for my personal work (your mileage may vary), so I tone it down to 1920x1033. It is not really important what resolution you choose as the uploaded texture will be 1024x1024 anyway (except if you want to go HD and span your snapshot over 4, 9, 16 or even 25 prims), but what is important is to stick to it or be prepared to have to specify the ratio for every texture that doesn't respect the default ratio.

Speaking of default ratio, you need to do the math and calculate the one corresponding to the resolution you prefer. For example, 1920x1033 gives a default ratio of about 1.886 because 1920 / 1033 = 1.858664. This number goes in the description field of the tape so the VHS player or the RemVision plugin knows what ratio to display the textures at.

Attention, if you switch monitor to take videos like I do, check the resolution again when you get back to taking snapshots, sometimes the resolution changes by itself and is off by 1 or 2 pixels. It's not a big deal, but it is better to stay exact.


Taking many pictures

For every picture I upload to be part of a movie, I usually have taken three, sometimes up to ten, sometimes I get it right at first try. It entirely depends on you but the more pictures you take the more time you need to sort them out and decide which ones you want to upload. The Alis movie contains exactly 588 uploaded textures (not including videos which generate their own textures, making it 777 textures in total), 463 pictures were rejected and not uploaded, so that's a pretty good ratio.



Adding glow

Adding some bloom to your picture can be a good idea, it makes it look prettier, brighter. However you can't do that with a HUD as HUDs can't glow, so it has to be an object in-world. I have made such an object that follows the camera, always taking the whole view and overlaying what you see with a subtle glow. I used this trick during the epilogue of Alis because I liked how the volumetric light looked like during the movie and I wanted to reproduce the effect in a scene with no volumetric light as well.

See for yourself :


The back face of the object has a visible center the avatar can focus on, in case you are taking photos of someone talking to a camera so they can focus on it.

This object will be available for free at my shop with the rest of the tools I can provide.




This is the end of this tutorial about SL photography, you can move on to the next one about positions and animations...

Or return to the menu page.

Marine

Poses and animations are what makes your movie lively... unless it is all about landscapes and buildings, of course. But if you have characters in a scene, you will want them to look alive and natural.


What you already have

Most people use an Animation Overrider loaded with animations to make themselves look prettier. Nobody likes the stock stands and walks every new SL avatar comes with. My preference goes to Vista (now with Bento support) and Oracul, but there are many other good brands out there. Good AOs make your character look more natural, less robotic, but when taking snapshots it is not important to be well animated, all that matters is to be well posed.

Some AOs now use Bento, meaning they also animate the fingers and the face. You may or may not want that but it contributes to a more realistic look overall.

The latest Vista AOs also come with accessories such as a cigarette and/or a phone, those are very well animated and add to the personality of the character.

Furniture often come with animations as well. Even the simplest chair animates you when you sit on it.

If you want to play one particular animation that is not in your inventory, simply edit the object that contains it (for example your AO), go to the Content tab and look for the animation. Double-click on it to open its popup with the "Play Inworld" and "Play Locally" buttons and voila, you can play it at will.

A good trick to use is to rez a poseball (you can find many poseballs on the Marketplace, they're inexpensive) and to insert an animation in it. I used one of Sylva Petrov's poseballs for By A Thread while in the cage, to make it easier for me to position myself inside that tiny cage. This allows total control over your positioning and keeps you from moving inadvertently and ruining the shot since you're sitting on the ball instead of standing (regardless of the animation you make it play).

All this to say, you probably already have a ton of animations at your disposal without even knowing it so start experimenting :)



Synchronizing and restarting the animations

If you are a RLV user and your viewer uses my RLV code instead of RLVa (so for example the original RLV that I make and maintain, or Kokua, or Cool VL, or any of several others), there is a handy shortcut to restart all the currently playing animations of every avatar around yours, and yours as well. That shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+A. I use it all the time. Careful though, it may be a problem if you have several animations of the same priority animating the same body parts. For example, if your AO is priority 4 and you are using AnyPose or Animare, which tweak your animations with priority 4 poses for each individual joint, chances are the tweaks won't show after restarting the animations and you will have to refresh on the corresponding HUDs manually afterwards, which can be a pain.



Waiting for the right time

Every photographer will tell you that to take a good photo takes a lot of patience and good reflexes. The same goes in SL because your character is most likely animated (for example by the AO they use, or by the furniture they are sitting on) so the time window is short to take the picture you want. If you miss the opportunity, you have to wait until the animation goes back to the same frames before trying again.

Fortunately there is a trick for that. Open the Develop menu (if you don't see it, press Ctrl+Alt+Q) and go to Avatar > Animation Speed and click on the top of that menu (the area with the double bar, highlighted orange in the following picture) to tear it off so it stays visible even after you close the Develop menu :


With this menu you can accelerate and slow down the animations of everybody around you (the effect is visible only to you and it doesn't slow down other stuff like moving objects, particles and all), reset the speed of all the animations, and slow down only your own animations. This menu allows you to take the photo at the right time without having to constantly restart the animations because they are going too fast.



The tools to own

With all this in mind, you need tools because you cannot always rely on the animations you have. Here are the tools I use to animate myself and other avatars, with links to where to get them :

- The HUD that comes with  your mesh head : Most mesh heads come with a HUD that allows you to animate it. You can also often buy more animations and moods.

- The HUD that comes with your mesh body : Most mesh bodies come with a HUD that allows you to animate the hands. Maitreya does, with it you can animate each hand individually with predefined poses (victory, point, hold, give the finger etc).

- The Sublimator : This is a HUD I make and sell that includes a lot of poses (not animations, although nothing keeps you from adding your own), this is a good start when you want your avatar to be in a position close to what you want.

- AnyPose : This HUD is the one I use the most, it allows you to tweak the rotation of any limb with priority 4 animations. It can also save and recall poses, and animate another avatar than yourself, with their permission. The free version works only with a pose stand, but the most expensive version is the one I use since you can animate anyone with or without pose stand. It can also move your eyes and animate your face if you're not using a mesh head. I've been using it since Gina's Debut so you can see it's been a faithful companion for a long time

- Animare Plus : Like Anypose, this HUD allows you to tweak your current pose on a per-joint basis. Unlike AnyPose, every joint has 3 degrees of rotation (AnyPose has only 2 and it can be limited sometimes). The downside is that Animare is less precise than AnyPose. I chose to use the Plus version because with it I can animate another avatar, and I can save and recall poses as well.

- Lelutka Axis : This HUD allows you to tweak the face of your mesh head in any way you can think of (it can also move the head and neck, as well as the eyes). Although it is primarily made for Lelutka mesh heads, it uses Bento animations so any Bento mesh head (Catwa and others) will be affected by it. It works very well and although it is a bit pricey, it is really worth the money spent on it. My only regret is not to have found out about it sooner, I could only use it in the Ebony & Ivory tapes, which I made last. Although at the time of this writing, it is very new and was likely released only a couple weeks ago, so I would not have been able to use it on any other prior movie anyway.

- Lelutka Orchidea : This HUD is a set of predefined erotic expressions for Lelutka mesh heads. I don't know how good it looks on other mesh heads, but on my Lelutka Simone it looks quite good. I often use it as a starting point and tweak afterwards, either with the Lelutka HUD or with Axis.

- Black Tulip full perms animations for hands (hold and sexy) : Those animations animate the hands specifically (provided you are using a mesh body that includes Bento-compatible hands like Maitreya does). They are good when the HUD for your mesh body is not enough for your needs. Like Lelutka Axis, I found out about it very late and only the Ebony & Ivory tapes make use of the Black Tulip animations.

- Chrysantemum's adjustable facial pose HUDs : I used the Smiles and Surprise HUDs in New Life and Alis, combining with other facial animations with good results (that's how I made Sam Ryder's hilarious "I'm cumming quietly" face, combining Lelutka's Sad expression with a subtle smile, all with a red face and a lot of sweat). Honestly though, if you have Lelutka Axis you won't need these HUDs.


I'm sure there are more tools around, but these are the ones I use. You don't need to own all of them of course, it could be costly for you, but at least a few of them, Animare for example.



Positioning

Just like a good framing, a good positioning is key to a good photograph. It is easy when you are sitting on something since you can move that "something" (for example a poseball, as explained above), but a lot harder when you are simply standing and relying on your AO. Moving with the arrow keys makes you take long strides and moves you way too far for the precision you most likely need. However, you don't want to always change the animation in a poseball when you're simply standing, you want to rely on your AO, so how do you position yourself precisely when you're not sitting on anything ?

For the movement, simply hold Page Down to crouch, and walk like that, it makes your avatar much slower and easier to position.

For the rotation, it is a bit trickier. By default, the avatar rotates only when the camera rotates by more than 60° while locked to the avatar (it doesn't rotate if you rotate the camera around something it is focused on, obviously). But that angle threshold is often way too big and you want finer precision. To do this, open the debug settings and change :

- AvatarRotateThresholdSlow = 5

With that value, every rotation of more than 5° will rotate your avatar, making you a lot more precise.



Body Language

Aha ! There is so much to say about this subject, entire studies have been done to decipher the body language to find out, for example, if somebody is lying. Some people consciously try to hide or blur their body language so they are harder to see through, others are open books.

Here, we are doing it the other way around, we want to add body language to an avatar that otherwise has none. When someone speaks, their body follows, adding meaning to the words in a subtle manner. You want to reproduce that with your own characters to give more credit to what is being said.

For example, suppose this character says "Aww ! That kitten is so cute !" with this picture to illustrate it :


The face expression is not bad (I'm sure it could be better but that's not the point), but the body language is not there. Firstly, her head is turned the other way, which is a sign of disgust, inconsistent with the emotion we are trying to convey. Secondly, where are her hands ? It looks like her body is not following her thoughts.


This is better, her head is turned correctly, the lips look better and more importantly, the hands are touching the cheek softly, conveying a feeling of tenderness. Even without any text you can guess the girl is looking at something cute. Ok the hands are positioned a little weird but I did not take the time to tweak them precisely, I chose an animation from my AO where the hands are near the face just to make a point without having to spend 15 minutes positioning the arms and the hands :p

There are many details that convey an emotion through the body language, I could not enumerate them all here even if I wanted to, so instead I'm going to point you to this site.

Something to keep in mind though, someone who is dominant will stand and move in a different way than someone who is submissive. I have several AOs for both modes in order to emphasize my state of mind or relationship to the other party. Likewise, a fighter stands and moves differently from someone who is not skilled in combat. Keep all these details in mind when creating a character. You don't want a dominant character like an executive to constantly keep her hands behind her back, looking down or keeping her legs together.



Clothing language

Like the way you move, the way you dress speaks volumes about you. It depends heavily on the gender of course, but a good way to convey a mood and a social level is to dress your character appropriately. Don't put your female character in a sexy tube dress unless she is about to go to a party. Don't dress your male character in track pants and hoodie if he's an executive. Some executives might dress like that, but this is too far from the stereotype to be believable (unless there's a good reason for it, that the story explains, of course). If your character is a woman of low education and social skills, don't dress her chic and fancy, make her look like she has no fashion taste and/or she can only afford discounted clothes. It might hurt your eyes but it is better for consistency.

I know that this is Second Life and we all look and dress sexy but if you want your movie to be believable, you need to keep a firm control over how the actors and actresses are dressed.

Also pay attention to jewelry. Women like good jewelry, men almost never wear any.



Eyes

The eyes are the window to the soul. It is even truer in movies, where the eyes are often what we focus on, and what indicates what the spectator should look at.

A character naturally looks at whoever is speaking to them, unless the induced emotion is too strong. This is where DoF (Depth Of Field) can get in the way because if you focus on the speaking character with your own avatar, but want to shoot your own avatar listening, chances are the face will be blurry.

A good way to avoid that is to focus on yourself instead, and to tweak the gaze with any HUD you have at your disposal, like your mesh head HUD or Axis. That way you can use DoF and focus on yourself while pretending to look elsewhere.

The gaze is also a good way to draw the attention of the spectator to a detail in the photo. Like I said above, the spectator will first look at the characters' eyes, then will follow their gaze when appropriate. A clever use of the gaze will immediately make them focus on what you want in no time. One thing to remember is that the gaze tends to go to the center of mass of whatever object or object part they are focusing on. In case the object of the attention is the character, they usually focus on the eyes. Or the lips if they want to kiss them.

I personally like to occasionally break the fourth wall (i.e. look directly at the camera), most of the time for a comical effect, especially when the character is surprised. It's a bit cartoonish but it makes me laugh.

Oh, speaking of eyes. Don't let your characters blink, like ever. They always blink at the worst time. Turn off that "Blink" switch in your mesh head HUD.



Off-balance

When shooting a moving character, try to not make her look like she is off-balance. For example, when walking, don't do this :


Prefer this :


Of course, if she's supposed to fall, do shoot your character off-balance.



This concludes this tutorial about poses and animations while shooting movies. Or rather, taking photos as videos are another story, which will be covered in the next tutorial...

Or return to the menu page.

Marine

So here we are. The HD Video System and RemVision are both capable of displaying an animated picture over several prims, from 1 to 25, allowing for long clips, much longer than what we can expect from a single prim. Think of those animated pictures as those animated GIFs you see on the internet. The best ones are smooth, have a good resolution and loop well, as in the break when we reach the end of the GIF and return to the beginning to play it again right away is barely noticeable, if at all.

This is the goal here too. Film a character doing an animation (or two characters engaged in a couple animation, or three characters... you get the idea), film the whole animation (or the two or three animations) with a capture software, then process the video with a special script to make it a video that the HD Video System and RemVision can display.

If this sounds complicated, that's because it is. Fortunately, I've done all the heavy lifting for you. All you have to do is point, shoot, cut, run a script then upload (and pay the price for the upload, which is L$10 per image so a single video can potentially cost you L$250 if you use 25 prims to display it).

In this tutorial, unlike the ones before it, I'm going to be very technical and explain from A to Z how to take a video, how to process it, how to check its integrity and what the result will be.



Setting up the tools

First of all, you need tools to shoot more than one picture on your viewer. Before I go further, let me show you the list of tools you need and where to download them. They all are open-source, free, well-known and reliable :

- Python 2 or 3 to execute the scripts.

- VirtualDub to process videos (make sure to grab the 64-bit one).

- ImageMagick to process images.

- ShnTool to process sounds.

- AviToTextures.py to process videos into textures ready to upload to SL.

- HdTextureToSdTextures.py to cut a big picture into several smaller ones, ready to upload to SL.

- WavToSounds.py to turn a long sound or music into chunks of 10-second-long WAV files, ready to upload to SL.

Don't be put off by this list of tools, I know it sounds geeky and if you don't have any technical knowledge it might sound like a difficult task but don't worry, those tools are there to help you and won't get in the way. Simply download and install them with the default parameters and you'll be fine. Also if you don't plan to use sounds, you won't need ShnTool at all, since it is used for cutting music into 10-second chunks in order to upload them to SL. Same thing for WavToSounds.py, and this tutorial won't cover HdTextureToSdTextures.py since it is about making videos, not HD pictures, so you don't need to use those two scripts either.

I used to use VirtualDub's built-in "Capture mode" which worked very well... until my laptop fried and I had to buy a new computer with Windows 10 and a new video card. Since then, VirtualDub stubbornly refused to let me use capture mode again so I had to buy a License for Debut, a video capture software. It is not free (well it is for the first few days but then you have to pay) but the license is not expensive, like $30 or so. I also tried Bandicam which is good but I think its license is more expensive so I chose Debut after some debating and I'm not regretting my choice. Same for FRAPS.

There are other video capture software, like the free CamStudio that I used to use at work a decade ago. It works not too bad but it wants to install a lot of spyware along with it, so don't let it do that. If you really want to use it, follow this page to know how to install CamStudio in a clean way, avoiding all the shady stuff that comes with it. I did that once and was not infected with any malware, as CamStudio itself is clean.

Frankly, if VirtualDub's capture mode works for you, stick to it. It's free and easy to use and has no malware in it.

Since I'm talking about VirtualDub, this software will not only serve as the capture tool (if you can) but also as the convert tool (after you've trimmed the parts of the video you don't want) and as the process tool that will cut the video into squares that will later be processed by ImageMagick. It's there the whole time. I use VirtualDub 1.10.4 as well as the Xvid codec which is necessary for saving AVI files without eating all your hard drive space. When you have installed Xvid, run VirtualDub and go to Video > Compression..., choose "Xvid MPEG-4 Codec" and press "OK".



Once done, you want to add a filter to whatever video you will open with VirtualDub, that filter will simply trim the borders of the image so you only see what you are supposed to film.

To do this, go to Video > Filters...


Click "Add".


Then locate "Null transform" and press "OK".


Now that it is added, click on the "Null transform" filter on the previous window and press "Cropping...".


Enter the following numbers : X1=553, X2=553,   Y1=139, Y2=87 and press "OK" twice.


Now you're set, any video you load into VirtualDub (until you quit it) will be trimmed the way you want. Please note that the numbers I gave you work well for a 1920x1440 monitor with a SL viewer maximized, it lets you take 800x800 videos. You may want to test with different numbers but those are the ones that work for me.

And why do they work for me ? Because they match a simple HUD I've made that hides all my view except the area that will be taken on the video :


With this HUD on, I know exactly what I will see on the video. The rest is blackened almost opaque. This HUD also hides the name tags from the view so I don't see "Marine" over my head on the video, that would be silly. This HUD is available for free in a box at my shop so you don't need to make your own.

It is important that the video is square because it will be cut into squares by the processing script further down the line. It could in fact be rectangular and I think this would work (I did not actually test that) but it would certainly stretch each frame and look bad in the final textures.



Taking a video

Now that whatever video capture tool you'll use is ready, you can start taking a video. There can be a number of differences between your setup and mine, for example the number of monitors you use and their resolution. I move my viewer to my 1920 monitor to get more FPS (frames per second) while Debut is on my 4k monitor, and it is configured to capture a specific area on the smaller monitor (-2880, 917 ; 2880, 1620, those are the numbers that work for me and represent the full screen on monitor 2). Of course if you use another video capture tool, it may be configured differently.

In a nutshell, here is what will happen. You will start the video capture mode with a key press and the video capture tool will capture the whole screen where your SL viewer is located. Let it capture what you want to capture, then when you're done you will press another key to end the capture. Depending on the tool you use, it will either save the video directly where you want or keep it in memory until you save it manually.

Since you have captured the whole screen while wearing the video frame HUD, only the area in the middle will not be blackened and that's the part that will be part of your video after trimming it with VirtualDub.

I'll lead you through the whole process, from video capture to processing the video into textures.

First, let me take a video of me doing a silly dance. I don't exactly know how long that dance animation lasts, probably 30 seconds, and my goal is to take it in a video that will be looped as well. In other words, the video will have to take exactly as much time, to the frame, as the animation.

The very first thing to do is check the background, the scene where the video will take place. In particular, you want nothing else to move or change lighting or appearance in any way. This includes choosing a fixed Windlight setting so the sun does not move while the video is shooting. Here I'll be in a bedroom with no moving parts and no change in lighting :


Zoom level is 2 because I'm taking myself full-length, but I'll move the camera later to make sure the whole dance is properly focused and I don't move out of the frame.

Next I wear the video frame HUD and start the animation to make sure I'm centered correctly in the video. I let the animation run a few times to make sure I do not go out of frame too much (some dances make you move around a lot but not this one). I also want to shoot with the camera a bit low, lower than the crotch, to exaggerate the length of my legs. While the animation plays, I familiarize myself with its noticeable parts and for any break that would give away the moment when it ends (this one has no such break).


Don't mind how the text on my Sublimator looks, this is due to me having dragged my viewer from my 4k monitor to my other one, which resizes it and changes the font size at the same time.

I must also check that nothing crosses the dashed line of the black HUD, including whatever window is open in the viewer (I did not let them show in this snapshot but there are a few windows and menus visible as well on the video).

There's another thing I change when I take a video, I don't want to let the viewer notify me when a friend logs on or off. My inventory is so big that whenever such a notification arrives, there's a micro-freeze and I don't want that to occur in the video, so I go to the Preferences, Notification tab and turn off "When my friends log in or out" :



Now we are finally ready to take the video ! Animations in Second Life are normally no longer than 30 seconds, but I have seen some taking longer than that. Maybe we can do 60 seconds now but I haven't seen any yet. Let's assume this dance is no more than 30 seconds long. What we want is a looped video of this dance without any break so we need at least 30 seconds of footage, of course. However, to err on the safe side I usually shoot two or three times the estimated duration of an animation because the recording FPS and the rendering FPS are different so frames are not always smoothly recorded, there may be freezes and jumps which complicate the task of finding good looping points later (you'll see what I mean below).

For now, let's record.



This is the raw video (converted to FLV for the blog post but the original is in AVI format and a lot more crisp, see below for the link). It lasts 1:11 to be sure the dance animation plays at least twice, assuming it is no more than 30 seconds long. Don't mind my Winamp bar playing over the viewer window, I wanted to keep the location and L$ balance hidden. Notice there is no name tag over my head, this is due to the black video frame HUD using a RLV command to do that. It's much quicker than to turn the name tags off in the preferences every time you want to shoot a video.

For the rest of this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to cut and process this video so I recommend you download the original file from my dropbox (it is zipped but it doesn't make a big difference in size). That way you can do the same steps yourself, which is the best way to learn.

There are few things to say about this video. First, the dance makes me move around a lot and most of the time I simply tap my feet on the floor. But there are a few noticeable moments when I move my arms above my head, for example. Those landmarks are what we'll use to make sure to loop properly.

Now that the raw video is taken, let's process it.



Processing a video (step 1)

There are two steps to process a video. The first step is to cut the parts you don't want while trimming the areas of the screen that are blackened by the HUD at the same time (the trimming is done automatically by the Null Transform filter you've added earlier in VirtualDub, but the cutting is done manually by you), and the second step is to run the resulting video through the "AviToTextures" Python script. The result is a set of textures that you will upload into SL and put in your tape for the VHS player and/or RemVision to play as an animated picture.

First, you need to cut and trim the raw video. Load it into VirtualDub (it should already be open if you have already added the Null Transform filter), you should see something like this :


The left part is the current frame in the raw video in input, the right part is the same frame but gone through the filters (here there is only one filter, "Null Transform", which crops the input frame into something smaller). This is the output you'll get. Notice how all the black parts including the HUDs are not part of the output, only what's inside the video frame is kept. This is the reason for the numbers in the Null Transform filter, and the size of the video frame HUD itself.

The bottom part is the scrubber and the entire length of the video, numbered in frames.

This is where the creative part takes place. First, we need to find a noticeable frame where the movement of the body is slow, practically immobile. The best candidates are when the arms and/or the body change direction. By experience I know that it is best to select a frame where the body is in a tense position, ready to expand. In this dance, that means when the body is the lowest and is about to spring back up. For example, this frame 62 here :


This frame is a good candidate because the arms are up (which is not the case during most of the dance so this position is easy to recognize) and the body is down, ready to change direction so it moves slowly. Let's mark it down with the "Home" key to set it to be the beginning of our selection.

Now we scrub the video until we stumble on the next moment where my arms are up like that, after having played the whole animation exactly once. Playing with the scrubber a little, watching myself dance until I finally turn around and move my arms up again like the first time, signalling that I'm close to reaching the same position as before, I find that frame 826 matches well with frame 62, so I mark it down with the "End" key to set it to be the end of the selection. Notice that there are 25.5 seconds separating the two frames, because frame 62 is 2.067 s in the video and frame 826 is 27.533 s in, meaning the animation itself is very close to taking 25.5 seconds in time. It is not far off my 30 seconds estimate.


To compare both frames, use the "[" and "]" keys to switch back and forth between the first and last frame of the selection. In this video, while doing that notice that both positions are very close to each other, but not exactly, there is a slight movement of the right leg. Honestly I could be satisfied with this but I prefer two exactly identical frames, so let's keep searching. But before changing frame, let's ask ourselves, why are the two frames not exactly the same ?

This is because the recording rate (30 FPS, set in Debut) and the rendering rate (which varies, the SL viewer does not have a fixed rendering rate, but in my case, on this 1920 monitor and in this skybox wearing these clothes, my rendering rate is around 80 FPS average) are different and not a multiple of each other. This means that since the recording rate is so much lower than the rendering rate, there are frames that are not recorded. This is the case here, the frame we want has not been recorded as the viewer goes too fast for the recorder. It used to be the other way around on my laptop which was less powerful, the recording rate (30 FPS there too, set in VirtualDub) was higher than the rendering rate which was around 20 FPS, sometimes less, so I had a lot of repeated frames in the video.

Anyway, now we know the theory, but what do we do about it ? We need to choose other frames. It just so happens that moving one frame to the right both the beginning and the end of the selection works a lot better, so we choose frames 63 and 827 instead of 62 and 826. The duration is the same but those two frames are a lot more identical so the loop will be a lot more seamless.


That's it, the creative part is done, now what's left is the straightforward, automatic processing. We're going to cut and save the video now. Go to "Edit", select "Crop to Selection"


We get this, a video with exactly 764 frames (it begins at frame 0 but frame 764 is grey, the last frame is always grey) :


Save it to AVI by pressing F7 or going to "File"> "Save as AVI..." :


If you have correctly installed and selected the Xvid codec in the Video > Compression menu, you should get a file that is a lot smaller than the original one. Firstly because it is less than half as long, and secondly because it is not the same compression. Raw AVI are big, Xvid makes AVI files that are a lot smaller. In my case, I get a 4.55 MB file, compared to the initial 36.0 MB file. You can download it here if you want to work on processing an already cut video instead of cutting it yourself. You can notice while playing that video that there is no break when it comes to its end and loops, you don't notice it unless you look at the timeline of the video in whatever player you use (Windows Video Player, VLC or anything you want).



Processing a video (step 2)

Now, all that is left is to process it, which means making textures out of it. There are a few choices that are up to you and they basically revolve around choosing between smoothness and resolution, or making a compromise to get something in-between.

First, you want to make sure that the "AviToTextures.py" file is correctly configured. Open it in a text editor like Notepad, Notepad++, SCite or whatever your favorite editor is and locate these lines, near the beginning of the file :



I have the habit of installing my programs in D:\Apps\ instead of C:\Program Files because I try not to put anything of value on the C: drive, should I have reinstall Windows at some point (I'm old school, coming from a background when we had to reinstall Windows 95 and 98 often, and kept that habit). Chances are you have installed VirtualDub and ImageMagick in different places than me, so you need to change the paths as well. Please install the two tools in a folder without spaces in it, it confuses Python big time. Simply modify the lines 26 and 32, replacing the "D:\Apps" part with the place you have installed your tools.

Save and close the file, you won't need to edit it anymore.

It is a good idea to copy the AviToTextures.py file where your video is, so you don't have to write the whole path to it (normally Python has added its own path to the system Path variable of your Windows upon installation so you don't need to worry about that). I'll assume that this is what you do here.

Open a command prompt (type "cmd" from the Windows Start menu) and go to the folder you have both the AviToTextures.py script and the cut video. For the sake of this tutorial, let's assume that folder is in D:\Video, so type :

D:
cd \Video

Once in the right folder, type dir to make sure you are in the right folder (aka directory) you should see both the video and the script in the list.



Now, before you run the script, you must know a few things :

- How many FPS did you set your video capture tool to. My Debut is set to 30 FPS but your setting might be different. The video I am using for this tutorial was shot at 30 FPS, retain that number.

- How many frames the cut video has. You can find this out by opening the cut video in VirtualDub and looking at the last number on the right of the timeline. In the video we are working on right now, the last number is 764, this is the number you seek.

Then, you must determine whether you want more resolution or more smoothness, or something in the middle. Before I explain that one, let's just run the script once.

For this test we are going to run the script with "naive" parameters. Let's say you only want one texture (because you know you will have to upload it afterwards and you don't want to spend too much money on this), with as much smoothness as you can, i.e. 30 FPS. Therefore you write :

python AviToTextures.py "Video 206 cut.avi" 1 763 30 1.0

The first parameter is the name of the video, here "Video 206 cut.avi", which must be written between quotes since there are spaces in the name.

The "1" parameter means "1x1 texture". You can set it to 2, 3, 4 or 5, generating 4, 9, 16 or 25 textures respectively, giving you much more resolution. That's what makes a video "HD".

The "763" is simply the last relevant frame number of the video, which is the last frame number in VirtualDub minus one. You always have to subtract 1 from the last frame number because that frame is grey and you don't want it. So the last real frame in the video is frame 763.

The "30" part is simply the frame rate with which you recorded your video, it doesn't change unless you change that setting in your video capture tool.

And the "1.0" part is the decimation factor, going from 0.1 to 1.0. "1.0" means "don't decimate", "0.75" means "remove 1 frame every 4 frames", 0.5 means "remove every other frame", and so on. The smaller the factor, the more frames are dropped, allowing for more resolution at the cost of frame rate.


You get this texture as a result :


You can download the corresponding AVI video here. This video is the copy of the "tmp.avi" video created by the Python script during its work. It does not delete the video afterwards so you can check the result before uploading anything. I recommend to always play tmp.avi after running the script so you see if there's a problem with the frame rate, the resolution (or both), or if there's a break at the end when it loops, because what you see in tmp.avi is what you'll get in-world if you upload the corresponding textures.

As you can see, the resulting texture is 27x27 frames of 37x37 pixels each, giving 729 frames that can be played at 29 FPS. The name of the texture contains all those parameters. The video is very blurry, you can barely distinguish a thing, but at least it's smooth.

It may be a result you want, but if you want more resolution, you only have two options. Either you reduce the frame rate to get fewer frames hence more space for each frame, or you span the video over 4, 9, 16 or 25 textures. We will do the latter here and see where this gets us.

Flash quiz : Why 729 frames ? The video is supposed to be 764 frames long so why 729 and not 764 ?The answer is easy : 729 is the highest square number that is less than 729. As you see in the picture above, the whole texture is square and the frames are squares too (if they weren't, there would be a deformation), so the resulting number of frames has to be square as well, the highest possible one. If it weren't a square, you'd have white frames at the end and it would show during the video, a whole portion of it would be just white. The fact that the resulting number is always a square is important to keep in mind, you'll see why later in this page.


Let's play a little challenge. You see on the raw video (and the cut one) that I am smiling while dancing. I want the resulting video to let my smile show as well. Think we can do that ? :)


This video is supposed to show a dancing animation, so we'll favor smoothness over resolution (while still showing a smile). Let's keep the frame rate factor to 1.0 and span it over 4 textures, i.e. 2x2 :

python AviToTextures.py "Video 206 cut.avi" 2 763 30 1.0

Notice that the only parameter that changes is the first one, becoming "2".

The results are these pictures and this video :

As you can see, the result is better, the resolution is 75x75 pixels per frame (there are still 729 frames in total) and the video would span over 2x2 prims, hence 4 textures to upload.

But you still can't see me smile while dancing. Do you see where this is going ?

After a couple tests, I think the following parameters are good enough for what we want :

python AviToTextures.py "Video 206 cut.avi" 4 763 30 0.75

With these parameters, we span the video over 4x4 = 16 textures, the frame rate becomes 21 FPS (don't ask me why not 22 but you can change that yourself in the name of the first texture), each frame is 178x178 pixels and this time there are 529 frames in total.

The result video is here and the result textures are here, that's 16 textures in total. If you wanted to upload them, it would cost you L$160. Making a movie can be costly ! Since a single tape can hold around 250 textures (video textures included), you can expect to spend L$2500 per tape just for the production, if you are making a full movie.

But with this amount of data, you can see me dance clearly and smoothly enough and what's more, you can see me smile !

Challenge completed !


Now all you have to do, once the textures are uploaded, is to put them in the tape and to add the name in the tape's notecard (more on that in another page). For this video here, the entry would be "$Video 206 cut 4".



Things to keep in mind

Now that you know the theory and have a little practice if you have followed the tutorial above, let's discuss a few pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Firstly, I have pointed out that the resulting number of frames would always be a square number, due to the nature of the algorithm and how animated pictures are created. This means that if you aim at keeping the whole frame rate (i.e. you set the "decimate_factor" parameter, which is the last one in the command line, to 1.0), you need your input video to be as close as possible to a square number of frames.

In the example above, the last frame was 764 while the highest square number below it is 729. This means that keeping the same frame rate makes you lose 764 - 729 = 35 frames in total, which is 4.6% of the total video. It is acceptable, especially since the decimation of the frames done by the Python script (or more exactly by VirtualDub when called by the script) decimates pretty evenly over the whole video so you won't even notice the missing frames. VirtualDub favors duplicate frames first when it has to decide which ones to remove.

However this is not true in all cases. I had the problem with some videos in the Ebony & Ivory Rubber Room tape, because I wanted very short videos (in number of frames) so I could have a lot of them without having to cut the number of still pictures of have to span over two tapes. As it happened, I got a lot of short clips spanning over 30 frames. And that's not a good number at all because the highest square number below 30 is 25, which means losing 5 frames, in other words 16.7% of the video removed ! The decimation algorithm made it so there was a clear break at the end of the video, making all looping pointless.

The solution to this was to shoot not 30 frames, not 60 frames but 90 frames, i.e. three times the same animation (since a single animation spanned over only 30 frames). This is because the highest square number below 60 is 49, hence a 18% loss, even worse than with 30 frames, while the highest square number below 90 is 81, hence only 10% loss. It's still high, but acceptable as the removed frame are evenly removed, the break didn't show anymore.

All this to say, try to keep the number of frames of your cut video as close to a square number as possible (but not equal to it as the last frame is always removed since it is grey) so you get as little loss of frames as possible. For the videos we've done in the previous section, the ideal number would have been 730, but it was not possible for obvious reasons.


There's a strange behavior I noticed when working with these short clips, too. Sometimes when choosing a 1.0 decimation factor, I would get twice as many textures as I expected, half ending with "-0" and the other half ending with "-1". This is ImageMagick renaming them and the result is that the "-0" ones are correct and the "-1" ones only have one frame in them, which is the repetition of the last frame of the corresponding "-0" texture. The solution to this is to delete all the "-1" textures, and to rename all the "-0" textures to remove the "-0" part.


As I pointed above, always check the generated "tmp.avi" video before uploading, because what you see in it is what you get in-world after uploading the generated textures. You want to check the resolution, the frame rate and the break at the end if you intend the video to loop seamlessly. If it doesn't satisfy you enough, run the script again with different parameters.

When writing your movie script, try to reserve as much time as you can to let a big video preload. Textures are preloaded by the VHS player or RemVision 16 textures in advance, but it may take time for a viewer to download all these textures, because they may take like 1 MB each. This is not a problem with still pictures which stay on screen for 8 to 10 seconds (or more if you want), but for a 4x4 video you want the 16 pictures to be displayed at the same time so you want them all to be already downloaded by the viewer before starting the video. This means that once the video is started, not only it should have had enough time to preload (or you get grey or blurry parts on the video), but the following textures only start to preload now. If the next entry in your movie script is another video, you must make your first video stay on screen long enough to let the next one preload itself. This is why I often separate animated pictures with still pictures in my movies, to give time to preload and avoid getting grey textures.



What about sounds ?

We did not talk about how to turn long sounds (for example music) into 10-second chunks that SL can read and play. The procedure is pretty easy.

First of all you need to modify line 26 in the WavToSounds.py file to write the path to ShnTool. Once again, avoid spaces in the path because it confuses Python :



Save and close the file.

Open a command prompt like you did for the video, type

python WavToSounds.py "my looped music.wav" 77 1

Where "my looped music" is your sound or music to cut in chunks, "77" is to be replaced by the duration of your big sound in seconds and "1" indicates that it must be looped.

Once done, a certain number of WAV files are generated and you can upload them directly to SL. The first one is named in a way that the HD Video System understands how to play it (for example, how many sounds constitute your big sound).

To have it played in the movie, simply write its name after a "%" sign instead of "!" or "$". See the next tutorial to find out what this means. It is also explained more clearly in the Director's Manual.


This concludes this (very long and technical) tutorial about how to make a video for the HD Video System and RemVision, the next one is about how to write the movie itself.

Or return to the menu page.

Marine

In this tutorial, we are going to talk about how to write a movie script to turn a series of still and animated pictures into a full story.

What is a movie script exactly ? You've certainly seen and read real life movie scripts before, those are documents containing all the dialogs in the movie, generally without any picture, and sometimes (but not always) with a few descriptions just to describe a scene before it begins, or to relate some important actions. But generally, a movie script only contains the dialogs between the different characters, scene by scene.

You are going to do exactly the same thing in Second Life, except that you will also add the references to the pictures (still and animated), sounds (if any), and all the timings. Sounds like a daunting task ? Maybe, but I have done my best to make it as painless as possible. It is time-consuming though, as you literally have to write a whole story up front, and to fill it with dialogs that hopefully convey the emotions well enough, with the help of the pictures.


Let me say right away that the movie script is the lifeblood of your story. If you don't take any pictures and don't include any sound, what you are left with is simply text, making your story a novel. But if you only have pictures and no text, it is more a slideshow than a story, unless the pictures follow up closely enough to build a story without needing to explain anything with text. It is not necessarily a bad thing but it is a risky gamble.

That's pretty much what I did with By A Thread, which has no text at all during the movie except in one picture at the very beginning and another one at the very end, both pictures explaining the whole story that unfolds in-between. Likewise, all the tapes included with RemVision do not have any text at all, although some of them have what looks like a short and silly story to them. That too is on purpose.

On the DeviantArt website, you can post drawings and pictures (most of the time erotic ones) and the most successful ones are the ones with a good story attached to them, so there's that. A good story beats a good picture (or 250), every time.



Some things to keep in mind

Before we begin, you should know the pitfalls to avoid.

Firstly, your dialogs have to be written with a proper spelling and grammar (whatever language you write them in), and in a manner consistent with the characters personalities. It sounds like a no-brainer, but making spelling mistakes screams amateurism and does not help getting into the story at all.

Every character must speak and act in a way that is consistent with their education (unless your plot specifies that a character is undercover or something like that). A street gang member will not speak like a book, and politician will not use slang. An introvert will make short, to-the-point sentences while a salesman will never stop babbling.

Be careful of other kinds of inconsistencies, which may be as silly as "Look to your right" while the character is pointing at the other character's left, or more insidious like "Do you remember last year when we did X" while that event happened more than a two years before in another movie. Try to avoid contradicting yourself.

Also make sure your scenario makes sense. Write it as if you were preparing for a barrage of questions from nerds who want every single detail explained. If you can't explain a detail in your movie (even if nobody asked about it since you're still making it), then you certainly have a plot hole and you should plug it. You must be able to justify every single detail in your movie.

Most characters should be able to speak and therefore be heard by the spectator, but it is up to you to decide who the spectator will be able to hear think. For Gina's adventures, I took the decision of letting the spectator hear Gina's thoughts, and only hers. I surround her thought text with tildes ("~") and I make the text a little more grey to distinguish it from words spoken out loud. In some movies, I may shift the "thought language" from one character to another. In some other movies, I don't give access to any thought at all. It's really up to you.



Sketching the story

The first step when making a movie is to write some kind of draft to the story. Think of it as the general idea, what it will talk about, who the characters are and what their relationships will be. There are many tried and true patterns for writing good stories so I won't go there, I'm not going to tell you how to write a good story (because I don't know), but rather how to write a story and how to make it a movie for SL.

Ideally, you write the whole script first, with dialogs and scene descriptions, the works. That way you know exactly what to shoot and how your pictures and videos will look, and you know what props to buy if any, all of this ahead of shooting the movie. That's what I did with pretty much all the Gina movies.

The problem with that approach is that it is difficult to move away from it, should you have more inspiration and ideas while taking the pictures. I don't know about you, but my stories tend to write themselves. I just write some kind of backbone to the story, start shooting, sometimes I don't know exactly where I am going (I just know the general direction to take) and scenes unfold in my mind as I am shooting the ones before them. It works well when you're in the right state of mind, "in the zone" as you could call it.

So what I often do is write a few lines to describe what's going on in general as well as the key dialog lines, and immediately get to shooting the movie. I do it that way because it is easier to adapt the dialog to the faces the characters make, rather than the opposite. This is how I did it with Overworking Girl, Alis and New Life, for example. A text can easily be changed, but redoing a snapshot can require a lot of work, if at all possible.

For this tutorial, I'm going to write a very shot scene with a few dialog lines and a few pictures. I'm not going to take all the pictures (that would not make sense) but a few of them to describe the scene.

But first, let's talk about the characters.



Characters

If the story is the lifeblood of the movie, the characters are the lifeblood of the story. They are what is the most important part of your movie, and the part that you should craft with as much attention as you can. Writing good characters is key, in my opinion. You define a character's personality and you try to keep their reactions consistent with it. It is easier said than done, though.


I generally give my characters a nature and an attitude. The attitude of the character may change but never their nature. Remember Vampire : The Masquerade pen-and-paper RPG ? That's where the idea comes from and it makes a lot of sense, even in real life.

So I give every character their own nature that is proper to them and that won't change. For example, Gina is hot-blooded and adventurous, the Marquise is devious but cares a lot about others, and both will stay that way whatever the story they feature in is and whatever happens to them. I give them an attitude too but that one may change over time. Gina is sarcastic at first but may become more assured and calm, the Marquise is snobbish at first but may open herself to others later, etc. The attitude may also change according to the character's mood, too. But the nature never ever changes.

As a spectator, as soon as you understand what the nature of a character is, you can start predicting their reactions. Successfully predicting a character's reaction is the sign of a successful identification to them, hence of a good character. It is also very rewarding for the spectator.

Of course, the nature of a character itself is often not enough to explain their reactions and behavior. A character has interests, bias and relationships that complicate their personality. But making a personality complex does not mean making it unreadable. If you can't read a character you can't "own" them, therefore you can't really believe the movie. You must let the spectator build a picture of your characters in their mind and hope that picture will be close enough to the one you have in your own mind. If you and your spectators are on the same page, then your movie is a success.

In this tutorial, we're going to feature two characters who will be part of an upcoming series of movies that I'm still brewing in my mind at the moment (although a lot of dialogs and scenes are already written, but I haven't taken any picture yet).


The first character is Emily Stanford, a modern, fun and outgoing city girl, and Tiffany Giordano, a shy, sweet and introvert girl. Both are good friends and the scene will take place at Emily's apartment after she totaled her car. Emily's nature is to be cheerful, curious and outgoing, even if it sounds like an attitude, I decide to make it her nature because I want her to always be like this. Tiffany's nature is to be caring, helpful, sometimes to the point of putting herself in a bad position just to help a friend in need. She's also a loner, having only a few but loyal friends.

Emily's attitude depends a lot on her mood. She can be sarcastic, blasé, she tends to let her own flaws take the best of herself sometimes, and she smokes (that's an attitude since it can change). Tiffany's attitude is to be shy, she tends to not impose herself on others, and she rarely has the last word even when she knows she's right, because she doesn't want to hurt anyone. Especially with Emily who is a good friend but also a loudmouth.


A scene

Now that the characters are sketched (you can't really say they're defined, they become more and more defined as the story unfolds), we can start writing scenes and even dialogs.

In this tutorial, the scene will take place in Emily's apartment in San Francisco during the evening, while the weather is very poor outside. Knowing this already tells us three things :

- We must make a Windlight setting that makes the outside weather look crappy, possibly foggy and rainy. I made one long ago so I'll use that.

- If the weather is poor, it is probably raining. Find something that looks like rain, either particles or animated rain. I personally use Best Weather by Xavier Novelli. The name is tacky but the product is quite good. That's what I used for the "rain" snapshots in the When You're Hot blog post.

- We must have an apartment setting. This is the hardest part, building a whole stage for a movie. I did that for the upcoming movies I have hinted about above, and most of the snapshots I took for this series of tutorials actually take place in Emily's apartment (which I built for that purpose), so I will use it here too.

The entire scene will take place in Emily's living room.

Knowing all this, let's have a shot at it :


The ambient light is not bad, it is clearly nighttime outside and we can see the rain. Other shots, possibly closeups on the characters, will show the rain better.



Once the setting is ready, we can think of what happens in it. For this example, I want the two characters to sit down around the table after entering the apartment, running from the rain.

Now, the characters in the scene must be dressed a certain way that is consistent both with the movie and with their personalities. For example, I pointed out earlier that Emily is an outgoing girl, so she is most likely wearing a pretty dress and fancy heels. If she is coming back from work, chances are her outfit is business-like more than party-like. Tiffany, on the other hand, is more casual so a t-shirt and jeans will do. It's pouring outside so they both should be drenched. Bonus points if at least one of the avatars has access to wet hair.

Here is Emily :


And here is Tiffany :


We get the girls seated around the table, and we're ready to script.



Or are we ? We can already see that we have a few issues here.

Firstly, Tiffany's hair is parted the wrong way. She would look prettier seen from the other side, so I guess the two will have to switch seats.

Secondly, the flower and its pot look huge on the picture because they are on the foreground. But we don't care about the flower, it's distracting. It will surely get in the way of closeups. Sorry, huge flower, you're gonna have to go.

Thirdly, Emily's sweater looks good but is just not appropriate, and it clips through the hand during some poses, so she's going to have to wear something else.

Fourthly, I don't like the stark shadows on the side of the faces of the two characters. A soft light in the middle should fill them.

Oh, also a little depth of field would not hurt.


So, let's try again :


I like this a lot better. It is not a problem that they are both pretty far apart, this scene won't need shots including both of them in the same picture. Since it is a dialog, the camera will switch back and forth instead. Notice that the clothes are in the off-white and beige, to avoid clashing with the overall beige and brown style of the room. If Emily wore a pink blouse (which would make sense considering her personality), it would clash and constantly draw the eye away from the face. The colors chosen here allow to focus on the faces and not be distracted by anything else. Speaking of faces, I turned the small flower into a soft light (2 m radius, 0.75 falloff, golden color) to get rid of the ugly shadows. It makes the faces shine more because of the water droplets, but that can be arranged easily.

They are also seated here in a way that the rainy city will be in the background of most of the shots (except maybe the tightest closeups, who knows), making it almost a third character in the scene. It's always there, subtly reminding the spectator that the girls are getting shelter from the elements together, which strengthens the bond between them. It also serves to establish a stark contrast between the poor weather outside and the coziness and comfort of the room. The characters clearly prefer being here than outside, and the spectator should feel the same way too. For this, I have made it so the overhead lamp lights the room not with a white light, but with a yellowish light, making it feel warmer. I also made the table top tan and not white for the same reason. As for the flower in the front, it comes with an attached blue lace which would have clashed with the rest of the picture, so I simply moved the pot down a little to hide the lace under the table.

As you can see, every little detail matters.


Dialog

Ok, now we are ready to write the dialog. Let's not bother about how the pictures will be taken yet, nor with the body language, let's just write the dialog.

Here, the scene is about Tiffany and Emily rushing to Emily's apartment from the hard rain outside, after Emily has totaled her car on a street lamp. Tree. Wall. Whatever, it's not important what she crashed into. Emily is unscathed but her car is destroyed, she crashed precisely because the weather turned bad rapidly and the street became slippery in no time. After having her wrecked car towed and paperwork filled, her friend Tiffany came to pick her up and drive her home. Now they discuss the aftermath of this event.

You can guess that Emily must be pretty upset, even though the stress of the crash has worn off now. So let's write this short scene. To avoid repeating the names every time, I write a dash when the other character speaks, like in a novel. When a character speaks two lines in a row or more, the second and next ones will begin with a ">" sign. Sometimes I remind who's talking by writing the initial of the character so you're not lost. When a detail is important to know when shooting the picture, I write it after a "#" sign after the line of dialog (you'll see below why that sign and not another one).


Emily (pissed): Can you believe it? I bought a new car less than a month ago and it's already a wreck!
Tiffany (calm): You're not hurt, Emily, that's what matters.
- Thankfully. I owe that to the safety of my car, obviously not to my crappy driving skills.
- Well, seeing how bad the weather is and how quickly it turned to crap, I don't think your driving skills are to blame here. # looks out the window, concerned
> How much does your insurance pay you for the car?
- 5000. # looks down at the table or at her fingers
T: Huh? That's it? It has cost you more than 8000! # looks surprised
- Yeah. I'm what they call a "young driver". Code word for "public menace". Wait for my next car crash, they will surely pay me even less. Unless I pay more up front. # looks disgusted
> Crap. I don't have the money to buy another car, I'm gonna have to buy a piece of shit. # looks disgusted and distressed
- Can't your parents give or loan you the missing 3000? # looks at E, eyebrows up interrogatively
- My parents? I am so not looking forward to telling them the news. And no they don't have that money to spare.
> I'm gonna have to borrow money, while I'm still paying my student loan back. Or take a second job on the side. Shit.
- Not if I can help it. # subtle smile, eyes seductive
- You? What do you mean? # looks surprised and interrogative
- I could loan you the missing 3000. You'd pay them back later, no interests, no strings attached. That way you can buy a new car in a day or two and move on. How's that?
- But I... That's... I didn't expect that... I don't know what to say... Thank you, Tif! # looks surprised and happy at the same time


Ok. This is a short dialog for a short example scene, so don't expect some real inspiration here. lol. However, it suffices for an example and shows a few things.

Firstly, notice how the emphasis is put on the characters' facial expressions. A facial HUD like Lelutka Axis would really help here, but even if you only use the base HUD that comes with your mesh head (if you have one), you should be fine. The basic Lelutka HUD allows you to control the lips, eyelids and eyes independently, as well as choose moods and expressions, you can go pretty far with it already. I don't know about the other mesh heads, you might have noticed by now that I'm pretty partial to Lelutka.

Secondly, the dialog is written in a way that the camera goes from one character to the other all the time, but you don't really want to only take two pictures and alternate them one after the other, it would be boring. Plus there are expressions to show anyway. Ideally, each line of dialog should go with its own unique picture. It is more expensive but more natural that way.


Now, to turn this dialog into a movie script. Well, it is already a movie script but something is missing : the timings. During the movie, the lines of dialog will show as subtitles and they need to show long enough to be readable without distracting from the picture too much. You don't want the spectator to spend their time reading subtitles as fast as they can and not enjoy the movie. Also think of those whose English (or whatever language you write your story in) is not their native language.

Fortunately, you don't have to think about timings yourself, the tape scripts calculate them for you. All you have to do is decide how much time there is to spend between subtitles, because usually in a movie one subtitle does not replace the previous one right away, there's always a one second gap. This is what we'll do here. But first, allow me to explain a little theory.


The Theory

Every tape contains exactly four scripts. One is called "Master" and the other three are "Tracks". The Master script is in charge of providing the menu and communicating with the VHS player before insertion. The three Track scripts are all identical except for the parameter in their names (making them behave differently) and serve as the memory banks for the movie. Each track memorizes a different type of data. One memorizes the pictures and videos, another memorizes the sounds and musics, and the last one memorizes the subtitles, the text.

When you write a movie script, you write entries that are grabbed by each Track script depending on their nature. If an entry is a subtitle, it will go in the Subtitle track. If it is a picture, it will go in the Video track, etc. Here, we are going to write a script constituted solely with text for now.


+1! :: - Can you believe it? I bought a new car less than a month ago//and it's already a wreck!
+1! :: - You're not hurt, Emily, that's what matters.
+1! :: - Thankfully. I owe that to the safety of my car,//obviously not to my crappy driving skills.
+1! :: - Well, seeing how bad the weather is and how quickly it turned to crap,//I don't think your driving skills are to blame here. # looks out the window, concerned
+1! :: How much does your insurance pay you for the car?
+1! :: - 5000. # looks down at the table or at her fingers
+1! :: - Huh? That's it? It has cost you more than 8000! # looks surprised
+1! :: - Yeah. I'm what they call a "young driver". Code word for "public menace".//Wait for my next car crash, they will surely pay me even less. Unless I pay more up front. # looks disgusted
+1! :: Crap. I don't have the money to buy another car,//I'm gonna have to buy a piece of shit. # looks disgusted and distressed
+1! :: - Can't your parents give or loan you the missing 3000? # looks at E, eyebrows up interrogatively
+1! :: - My parents? I am so not looking forward to telling them the news.//And no they don't have that money to spare.
+1! :: I'm gonna have to borrow money, while I'm still paying my//student loan back. Or take a second job on the side. Shit.
+1! :: - Not if I can help it. # subtle smile, eyes seductive
+1! :: - You? What do you mean? # looks surprised and interrogative
+1! :: - I could loan you the missing 3000. You'd pay them back later, no interests, no strings attached.//That way you can buy a new car in a day or two and move on. How's that?
+1! :: - But I... That's... unexpected... I don't know what to say... Thank you, Tif! # looks surprised and happy at the same time


Here I copied the dialog from earlier, removing the names at the beginning, prefixing all the entries with "+1! ::" which means "this entry is text and must last as long as necessary for the spectator to read it". I kept the dashes and removed the ">". Every entry that begins with a dash will mean (for this scene) that the camera must move to the other character. If it doesn't begin with a dash, that means the same character is saying something more.

The "//" signs mean "go to the next line" so the long lines are cut in proper places.

Notice that I kept the parts after "#". This is because "#" for a Track script means "everything after the # is a comment and must be ignored". This means that the following entry :

+1! :: - 5000. # looks down at the table or at her fingers

is actually memorized by the Track.subtitle script as :

+1! :: - 5000.

completely omitting the "#" and what is after it. But your notecard will still have it so you can read it. Which is good because it contains information about how the picture should look once you take it, it is a reminder you write for your later self.

The part before "::" reads as "one second later, there is text that must stay on-screen for as long as necessary". The part after "::" is the actual entry, in this case the actual text.

You could have written "+1/+5 :: !- 5000." instead and it would have worked as well. It would mean "one second later, keep the following entry on-screen for 5 seconds, and by the way this is text". Notice that the "!" sign is after the "::" and not before this time. This is good when you want to control how much time a text must say visible, for example the title, or interludes like "One hour later", things like that.

I won't explain all the options here though, everything is explained in detail in the Director's Manual provided with the HD Video System. You can choose the color of the text and its position by appending options after the text itself (but before the "#", if any).


Your first movie script

Create a notecard and call it "*Track audio video subtitles", that way it can be read by all 3 Track scripts. Paste the movie script above inside it, then insert that notecard in the clear tape that comes with the HD Video System. Click on the tape and choose "Record all" on the menu, then wait a little. Once done, press "Insert" so the tape inserts itself into the nearest empty VHS player that you own (if any, if not you have to rez one with its screen), then press Play on the player. You will quickly see the text shown on the bottom of the screen with enough time to read each subtitle.


Congratulations ! You've written your first movie script.

Of course, to call it a movie there got to be pictures and videos (or at least pictures) as well, maybe sound too, so that's what we're going to do now.



Taking the pictures

Now that you have your script, at least the text version of it, you have a good idea what the pictures should look like. We won't make a video here, there would be no point in this scene and you already know how to make one if you've read the Video tutorial page.

Here, we're going to take one picture per entry. Well, I took the pictures for you and zipped the whole bunch, you can find them here. One of them is missing, Snapshot_004.jpg. This is because it is very similar to 005 except it had a problem with DoF so I didn't select it among the pictures to upload.

Let's talk briefly about some of the snapshots taken, and how I took them. First of all, most of them were taken at zoom level 8 since they are closeups to the faces, showing a little neck and not much hair, respecting the rule of thirds that way. I mostly used combinations of the moods, expressions and eyes and lips controls of the stock Lelutka HUD, except for Snapshot_005 where I had to move Tiffany's neck with the Lelutka Axis HUD (AnyPose and Animare are able to do that too). The expressions I used for Emily are "dislike", "snarl", "wow" etc. Emily's mood is mostly "irked" and "somber", becoming "pleased" near the end. I like to use "Part Lips A" and "Part Lips B" to override the mood and expression, making the character look surprised. For the chair animations (the chair is "Dining Chair Leeloo CHEZ MOI" by nanda Marjeta), I mostly used "Chat", "Waiting" and "Tension".

There's a lot of body language in them, too. In Snapshot_008, Tiffany has her head turned the other way, indicating disgust because she is badly surprised at the low yield of the insurance company. In Snapshot_010 and a few others, I have taken the picture from a little above Emily's head, to make her look a little more miserable.

Snapshot_014 is good too because there is no wall part in it, there is only the rain and Tiffany's face, most of her hair being out of the view, symbolizing that we don't know what she is thinking at the moment. She is touching her neck with her fingers, a sign of tenderness. Her smile and her eyes are seductive, almost as if she were hitting on her friend. Her eyebrows are relaxed, she is looking straight through the rain part of the picture, calmly, as if she didn't even notice it. She's up to something.

I think Snapshot_016 is the best of all because it conveys a lot (that's when Tiffany offers to loan the money to her friend). Firstly, I have taken the shot from a little below, at lip level, making her look more powerful since she has the power to solve her friend's immediate problem. Secondly, I shot her from the front while most other pictures are shot from one side or another, making her take more screen space, giving her more presence and breaking the rhythm, indicating a pivotal point in the story. She looks to her left but up, because she looks up to her friend, even though they are both sensibly the same size. And her head is literally what separates the rainy part on the left and the non-rainy part on the right, shielding her friend from the crappy weather. Also her face is less wet than in the previous pictures, on purpose.

Same for the next and last snapshot, where Emily is no longer facing the rain, which is behind her now while it was in front of her before, and her face and hair are less wet than before. She too looks upwards because she looks up to her friend, while before her gaze was more level, when she dared to look at her in the eyes at all (she looked the other way a lot, a sign that she was ashamed of herself).

As you can see, body language adds a lot to the mood with unspoken messages, even in still pictures.


Now that you have the pictures, it is time to integrate them into the script to make a real movie.

I like to leave two seconds after a subtitle disappears before switching to the next picture, then wait one second before displaying the corresponding subtitle. I find it works well, keeping a good pace without going too fast. So between each existing entry, I will add one like this ("xx" is a number) :

+2 :: $Snapshot_0xx

The "$" sign indicates that this is a picture entry (or video entry, which is the same thing since videos are animated pictures) and will therefore be read not by the Track.subtitle script but by the Track.video script. You could actually make one notecard for the subtitles and another one for the pictures but I think it is easier to mix them both.

The resulting notecard looks like this. The empty entries at the beginning and at the end are for clearing the screen. You can copy the contents of the linked file and paste it into the notecard you've created, and record again, then play the movie and you'll get the final scene on TV !

That was easy, wasn't it ?

Oh, right, you need to have the pictures in SL too, of course. Don't upload them and pay L$ for that though, I already did it for you and put them in the example tape in the gift box at my shop. They are full perms so you can literally put them in your own clear tape and record as if they were taken by you, their UUIDs will be available to the video track script since their permissions allow it.


Default Ratio

Remember when we talked about the default ratio of the pictures ? Now is the time to attach that piece of information to the tape so the VHS player and the TV screen know what the proportions of each picture is. For the snapshots I took, the proportion is 1.886. That's 1920 / 1033. Simply write that into the Description field of the tape :




Finalizing the movie

Once you have finished your movie and are ready to sell it, copy the tape to your inventory to keep a work version (a version in which the notecard and the textures are still present) and click on the tape in-world then press "Finalize" then "Yes" to confirm. This will wipe the tape from all the resources except the scripts which keep the data in memory. Set the permissions to Copy and Mod (that's very important or the tape won't link to someone else's VHS player), and now your tape is ready to sell !

Please don't forget to check the Modify bit on your tape after picking it up, as it becomes no-modify when it reaches the inventory. This is because the scripts inside are no-modify (this is an SL bug that has been around forever). If you do not do this, your tape will be no-mod and won't insert itself in a VHS player.


This concludes this tutorial about how to write a movie script and to put it all together. I hope you enjoyed this series of tutorials, and that you will enjoy making your own movies as well !

Marine


PS : Thank you to those who proof-read the tutorials and spent time to try to follow it, including the making videos themselves !

Heya,

Here is the latest version of the RLV with many bug fixes (including a very annoying one about Bento attachments that deform in goofy ways), and up-to-date with the latest code from Linden Lab.

Here is the list of changes, I'll develop a little on a couple of them after that :


- fixed : While wearing a Bento-compatible attachment and detaching something else, the Bento attachment could get deformed. The fix is not really a fix but a workaround that resets the skeleton when receiving an appearance update message, which also solves other similar problems with attachments that deform the skeleton (Bento or not).

- fixed : When under @unsharedunwear, we couldn't detach clothes or physics even when they were in the #RLV folder.

- fixed : When @showinv is active, there was a way to get access to the inventory anyway (or rather a view of it) (thank you riejinno for the heads-up).

- fixed : @shownames_sec did not work at all (thank you Keiyra Aeon for the report).

- fixed : "Zoom In" defeated @camunlock (thank you riejinno for the heads-up).

- fixed : When blocked from changing group, being invited to a group changed to the new group anyway. The fix for this is to not allow to join a new group when under @setgroup, because otherwise the change is dictated by the server (thank you Aida Beorn for the report).

- fixed : When under @showloc, there was a way to still get the information about where we were (thank you riejinno for the heads-up).

- fixed : @shownames broke urls with spaces in them (thank you Chorazin Allen for the heads-up).

- fixed : When someone else wore a HUD imitating their name, when that HUD was speaking we would not see the chat in white as if it were a regular attachment (thank you sungim for the report).

- fixed : When under @sendim, don't allow attaching custom messages to payments (thank you riejinno for the heads-up).

- fixed : When under @recvim, don't allow seeing custom messages attached to received payments (thank you riejinno for the heads-up).

- fixed : When sitting and under @sittp or @standtp, don't allow moving the object we are sitting on, and only it (it used to be any object that anyone was sitting on, which was confusing).



The Bento bug was the worst one to track and fix, and the fix is not really one. The problem was when wearing at least one Bento attachment (like the VaJayJay vagina) and something else, and detaching that something else.

If that other attachment was not a HUD, not only you but any observer using the RLV would see the Bento attachment become stretched beyond reasonable, vertices going all over the place. If it was a HUD, only you saw the issue.


This bug occurs only in the RLV and any viewer that uses my code, so there is a good chance that it comes from a mistake of mine... but at the same time, it could come from another source. I've never actually found the real cause of this problem and not wanting to spend a week tracking it, I decided to code a workaround, something to fix the consequences of the bug instead of the bug itself. I know it's bad. Please don't tell anyone. But at least it works.

The "fix" is to force a "Reset Skeleton" action on the avatar that has just detached an object once the detach is confirmed by the sim... and that's it. It may actually also "fix" other problems like attachments that deform your skeleton in the first place.


About the @setgroup issue, for now it prevents you from joining a group (don't worry, it cancels the join before you pay so you don't lose money), but I know it is not ideal. I will keep working on it in the future and try to automatically switch back to the old group when joining the new one so you don't waste time.


One last thing, this viewer is the "hardcore" version of it, because over the past few months, the feedback I got was overwhelmingly in favor of it (like 10 against 1). So I pretty much think I'll take the hardcore route now.


You can grab the Windows version here :
http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows executable is :
7f55ef493497cfd38b77ceaf111b523b


Have fun !
Marine