Pimp your EEP!

[Bellimora]

Experiment time.  I wanted to see how tendrils would work in the sky.  Had a hard time finding a good texture I could work for the clouds.  After some searching I found something that looked almost veiny.  Slapped it in the sky.  Now I had this eye I made for a demon look that was designed to be used with emissive masking for the iris to make just my irses glow, but I figured I could throw it on the sun to make it a little more creepy bloodshot.  Results are this:  

 

It's trippier when you see it animate because the veins in the cloud layer cause like these ripples to roll across the sky highlighting veiny patterns.

Edited November 7, 2018 by Bellimora

[Bellimora]

Hmmmm mind was still on tendrils after poking around I found that gimp had a lava filter that when set to a black and white gradient looked like a pile of worms.  Just what I wanted.  Created a texture using that.  Smacked it with the "make seamless advanced" filter for gimp (google that, install it, you won't regret).  

Figured I'd need a new sun.  Eyes in the sky never fail to creepo so I googled some animal eyes, settled on a frog one and behold
 

[Bellimora]

While not as profound as my other skies, this was a thing that needed to happen. 

[Whirly Fizzle]

Couldn't resist some EEPing during the Content Creation user group.

[Macrocosm Draegonne]

On 11/8/2018 at 5:17 PM, Whirly Fizzle said:

Couldn't resist some EEPing during the Content Creation user group.

Nice!  Damn, I should have came in the EEP viewer, I didnt realize it would work on the main grid XD  I did notice the default (u aint go no eep) creepy sky tho.

[Bellimora]

I know off-hand that denby and Longfellow are eep-capable.  You gotta be on a Snack RC sim.  That's why all those skies I made as of late seem to be from Rider Linden's parcel on Longfellow.  He has an awesome pyramid next to another neat pyramid so it inherently makes nice horizons while being a place I can build skies.  Of course you can't slot any of these skies in a parcel you own, unless you're a linden or something.   However you can stash them in your inventory for later use when the ability arises.

Be careful though.  Weirdness can happen.  If you are in a non-Snack sim with an EEP viewer and you try to copy a sky, it won't appear to copy but the folder you dumped it in will report having one more item.  I'd JIRA that but it seems like one of those bugs that'll fix itself once it hits the full grid in full force.

[Macrocosm Draegonne]

13 minutes ago, Bellimora said:

I know off-hand that denby and Longfellow are eep-capable.  You gotta be on a Snack RC sim.  That's why all those skies I made as of late seem to be from Rider Linden's parcel on Longfellow.  He has an awesome pyramid next to another neat pyramid so it inherently makes nice horizons while being a place I can build skies.  Of course you can't slot any of these skies in a parcel you own, unless you're a linden or something.   However you can stash them in your inventory for later use when the ability arises.

Be careful though.  Weirdness can happen.  If you are in a non-Snack sim with an EEP viewer and you try to copy a sky, it won't appear to copy but the folder you dumped it in will report having one more item.  I'd JIRA that but it seems like one of those bugs that'll fix itself once it hits the full grid in full force.

I took one of the parcels in the EEP/Animesh testing zone and have been camping there lol, im bad sometimes I just leave SL running all day while im working on other things.  Its nice there though since you can temporarily own the parcel and test all the things.

[Bellimora]

And that is the core benefit of the beta grid and its EEP/Animesh Testing zone, having it on a parcel so you can play with elevations and others can see.  On the main grid I just apply the windlight locally and work from there.

Edited November 10, 2018 by Bellimora

[Bellimora]

Decided to try a spacey sky.  Core features are it has to have no clouds and atmospheric haze.

The sun is yellowish when viewed from the earth because the atmosphere strips high frequency light from the sun.  This light is glowed back at us (and some out to space) as a blue glow in the atmosphere.  Which is why the sky is blue and the sun is yellow.

This affect grows more pronounced when you get the sun plowing through more sky, which is why sunsets are reddish with an orange sky.  When the sun is coming in at you edge-on on the atmosphere it strips out lower and lower frequency light until more reddish colors survive.  

This causes something interesting on mars, the martian air is normally too thin to scatter sunlight unless its coming in on the horizon, leading to blue-sunsets.  Otherwise it just shows up as the color of the reddish dust.

Since there is no atmosphere for a spacey sky you got a nice black sky and lower ambient color.

Lunar landing photos are actually pretty interesting.  Look at how dark those shadows come up.  The astronauts are all wearing heavily tinted visors so much so they are like reflective sunglasses.  Any images have to narrow aperture or fast exposure or whatever you do to dim the lights and miss subtle lights (hence it isn't catching any stars).  So this image is likely rather bright and harsh to unshielded eyes.  Horizons are always short on the moon because it's a smaller sphere.  Those factors combine to cause these photos to look "unnatural" or "faked" to people, leading to those sensationalist claims of hoaxes.  

Darkening ambient light in a sky only goes so far.  So I set alpha to about .5 (this was the lowest I could push it before colors started to get weird).  Ambient light as dark as I could.  Sunlight very white and brighter to compensate for the alpha darkening.

The default sun vanishes under these settings because the default sunglow is a function of atmospheric haze in SL windlight skies.  So, we supply a custom skin PNG I fished up on the net.  Set the cloud texture to none.  Do what you will with the moon.  If you are setting up a lunar scene you probably want to blank out the moon.  Make sure you got plenty of light sources on interior areas, also if you got a night cycle make sure some exterior lights come on at night or you'll have some rather dark drab scenes.

I went to the "moonbase" sim ( http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Moonbase/134/132/48 ) and snapped some shots with my work.  Here's how it came out. 

 

 

Edited November 10, 2018 by Bellimora

[Bellimora]

Since I was on the space mood I decided to make an alien sky.  And now one that is just freaky eyes and tendrils and stuff.

The thought was a gas giant in the background.  So I fished up everyone's favorite windbag:  Jupiter.  I tried placing it in the sky.

We had an issue though.  The black areas just render black when they ought to be blue (Sky glows over the blackness of space and everything else's shadows.

Also we had the not-quite-512 image being downscaled to 256, when displayed at near screen size it came out blurry as all get out.

So, first order of business, upscale it to 512.  Second order of business, use GIMP to convert the brightness to an alpha mask, and then use the curves tool to tweak it to add more "oomph" to the bright areas.  I also twiddled the hue so it's a not-Jupiter color to make it more alien.

Tried that, much more natural looking:

Only issue is if I use a starry sky it'll render right through the "dark" areas of this moon.  Time for some jira.  

Set the star to a blue color set the star glow to very faintly blue (be very careful with your sun light color you generally want to stick to those grey tones with a hint of the color you want, otherwise it'll come out real funky).

Added some slight tints to the sky dome and the clouds to make the sky a little more weird.

Focused the snapshot off of Zoober Linden's castle and back on to Rider Linden's pyramid since it's far more sci-fi.  His flock of birds only helped the shot.  ALl my photography is in linden village because that's the area that's Snack Enabled.

The moon is still a little blurry because it's 512 stretched to screen size, but I think it's acceptable enough.  It's more of a backdrop then the focal point of any scene.  Not enough of a hassle 

Pondered changing the cloud texture but I kinda like default lindo-clouds for natural scenes so I left them as-is.

Edited November 10, 2018 by Bellimora

[Macrocosm Draegonne]

I can hardly wait to start seeing all of these in the wild, it makes me want to go on hunts and explore, and its really inspiring my planned builds too.

[Whirly Fizzle]

[Whirly Fizzle]

[Coby Foden]

With all this awesome pimping going on, a question arises: "Can EEP produce amazingly beautiful natural looking skies and effects?"

[Bellimora]

Remembered I had a copy of a texture generating program, so I threw some frosty prefabs at it gave it a mug of hot chocolate and kidnapped a picture of hoth and out popped this.

[Whirly Fizzle]

7 hours ago, Coby Foden said:

With all this awesome pimping going on, a question arises: "Can EEP produce amazingly beautiful natural looking skies and effects?"

Yes absolutely.
If you post an image of a RL sky you like, I'll try to EEP it 

[Vanity Fair]

Wow, great pictures, everybody! I can't wait for EEP to be all finalized and rolled out!

[Coby Foden]

18 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Yes absolutely.
If you post an image of a RL sky you like, I'll try to EEP it 

Ok, thanks. Something like these. Would it be possible with EEP?

[Bellimora]

On ‎11‎/‎20‎/‎2018 at 9:28 PM, Coby Foden said:

Ok, thanks. Something like these. Would it be possible with EEP?

The godrays are a feature added to EEP.  Two layers of clouds are not in the current implementation.  However, someone suggested the idea of making a custom sky-dome, and Rider was keen on that.  With that idea you could put those feathery cirrus clouds on the skydome layer and have your faster moving roily clouds on the classic cloud layer to accomplish something more akin to the lower picture.  

Now, clouds remain largely of a similar nature that they are now.  Sorta-two-dimensional but with some sort of bump/normal map to make sunlight play off the edges like it were 3d.  You can throw in custom cloud textures to try to make the roiliness more to your tastes.  But 3 dimensional towering cumulus clouds won't be a thing.

[Bellimora]

So, I talked to the owner of the "Lower Planes" sandbox and adult fantasy sim and we managed to wrangle it on to bluesteel and wrangle me rights to edit the parcel windlights there.

 

The results are interesting.

I have that bloodshot sky I did earlier installed in the desert area and rigged it into a day cycle.  (Note:  Stars are only rendering near ground level likely related to earlier Jira I did about the star parallax being off.)

Black hole sun won't you come and cast a strange purply illumination about the ground level sandbox area.

That's the stuff.

I got the underground areas rigged to their own custom cycle-less day that constantly dark with no sun or moon above the horizon and only ambient light working things.  Gamma darkened a bit to make it dreary.   That way all the light sources can cast illumination and you get no weird underground day cycles.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lower Planes/111/109/2026 is the sim if anyone is curious.

I will note a couple of those skies had a sculpy aurora in them which is still there in the photos.  So not alllll the affects you see in the sky are EEP

 

Edited January 29, 2019 by Bellimora

[Angelon7]

Did a little playing around this afternoon.  Loving it so far!

 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Enzyion/25/217/387

Edited March 23, 2019 by Angelon7

[Imagin Illyar]

I understand that eventually, EEP settings will be something that can be sold on the marketplace.  If someone was to buy one, how would they go about installing it?  Is it something that can be done easily in the viewer (she asked hopefully)?  I'm wondering as a landlord who just wants to be prepared for when this becomes mainstream.  I'm hoping that my tenants will be able to use it on their parcels.

[Whirly Fizzle]

1 hour ago, Imagin Illyar said:

I understand that eventually, EEP settings will be something that can be sold on the marketplace.  If someone was to buy one, how would they go about installing it?  Is it something that can be done easily in the viewer (she asked hopefully)?  I'm wondering as a landlord who just wants to be prepared for when this becomes mainstream.  I'm hoping that my tenants will be able to use it on their parcels.

Yes it's easy.

Once the EEP setting is in your tenants inventory, they can just right click the setting & choose to apply it to themselves locally or apply to parcel (if they have rights to do so on the parcel) or apply to region if they are an estate owner or estate manager.

[Rider Linden]

On 3/31/2019 at 8:56 AM, Imagin Illyar said:

I understand that eventually, EEP settings will be something that can be sold on the marketplace.  If someone was to buy one, how would they go about installing it?  Is it something that can be done easily in the viewer (she asked hopefully)?  I'm wondering as a landlord who just wants to be prepared for when this becomes mainstream.  I'm hoping that my tenants will be able to use it on their parcels.

Your tenants (as long as they have rights to modify the parcel) may select the environment from their inventory, right click it and select "Apply to Parcel" to immediately apply that environment to the parcel.  They may also go to "About Land"/"Environment to make more granular adjustments (timezone, length of day, environments at altitude, etc)

[Imagin Illyar]

Thank you very much, Whirly and Rider.  This is perfect and I think will give the land business a boost as many will want to try this.  Thank you for making it easy to implement!  Just one more question - how will we open the "My Environments" window?  Will this be a tab on the Inventory?