251 - Lights and lotuses

Dim Sum wishes people would stop walking and tripping over her while she meditates in this solemn place.


These six posts (#247 to #252) are catch-up posts. The images were taken and posted on Flickr last weekend in a big rush to take as many pictures as I could before the Fantasy Faire ended last Sunday.

The "Moon Lotus Fool Bloom With Stalk2" was created by Elicio Ember.

location: Fantasy Faire 2014 - Fairelands Junction

Technical notes

windlight: Phototools- Build 002 Light (modified)
water: Default (additional effects caused by prims in the water)

I am responding here to Zippora Zabelin's comment in Flickr about the lighting, because it's a bit too long of an explanation to put in the Flickr comments.

As with most of my images in this series, the lighting is more than just windlight. In fact, the windlight setting doesn't have as much effect as it normally does in most of my images.

In this particular one, local lights and glow are more at play:

1. The lotuses themselves are already bright, although I don't think they cast their own light. I think the remembrance lights on the far wall *do* cast a light, but I could be wrong too.

2. I added glow to make the remembrance lights and the tree lights brighter because they were too far away.

3. Dim Sum is wearing invisible prim lights (same as in another image) to add more light to the middle ground. (It lighted the shrub in the middle ground and the exposed tree roots across the water from it.) It's basically three light prims that are linked together and worn on her spine. They are positioned far away from her body and I adjust the position depending on how I want the scene to be lighted. These worn lights are perfect when the sim doesn't allow rezzing objects. The disadvantage is that, when she moves, so do the lights, so I have to force her into an animation where she doesn't move much.

4. The location is full -- really, really full -- of trees. I didn't think I could get some dappled light (which I love to use) through the leaves, so I was surprised when I got some on the boardwalk; otherwise, it would have just been a plain black swath by the foreground lotus. The trees made the scene a lot darker, so the same windlight would look very different elsewhere. I think all I did with the windlight is move the sun/moon so I could get just the right dappling and just enough light to bring out the fern leaves near the foreground.