ValKalAstra

Sometimes I'm really into nerdcore. The juxtaposition of boastful tracks mixed with mythology or other nerdy culture just tickles me. Been listening to one song almost on repeat. Maybe because it's just a fun character (to read about, not to meet, the monkey king is a bonafide jackass).

Not for nothing, there's that saying about quiet waters. I can see it. /edit: Oh my god, it happened. I started making double posts too. It's too late now. Don't mourn for me, it's all down hill from here.

It is, isn't it? It was a gift at one of the shop and hop events. Sadly, there's no interior. I think it's meant for a combat sim of sorts. Still, I've been on the lookout for a cool fantasy variant like it since, just to occasionally cruise around with, aye? You're right about the size though. Here's my Avi for scale. I admit. We had a lot of fun with the idea of some random person looking out their window, seeing this absolutely massive monstrosity sail past and going "yup, that's Second Life I guess".

Derendering might be difficult with scripts but I could make a script that would automatically hose them with a spray of water if they come too close, sort of like how some raise stubborn cats. Could even add that psssst, psssst sound.

Always interesting to see what game randomly pops up in Second Life. That one would be the Rutledge Asylum chapter from American McGee's Alice: Madness Returns.

Haha, thank you, I'm always appreciative of people wanting to help and those are good suggestions too. The eyes were made in post. I just added cat eyes and tweaked the light a bit. Sadly I tweaked things too much in general because it seems like the cheeky twist of the picture got lost. Here's another angle. The background is a staircase. I moved a pose stand into a vertical position - then additionally rotated the picture so my avatar would seem upright again - but with a 90° flipped background. Then I edited too much and killed the twist by making it hard to make out. Oops!

Got it! Tried my hand at it but something just kept re-arraging my witch senses. https://flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53244916747/in/dateposted-public/

Probably? I think it would depend on the how and the why. Nothing about my shape or the choice of textures seems all that unique. It's fairly generic. Everything else they could already siphon off with a free HUD so why not use the chance to chat a bit about things? Yah, I think I would.

Cruising around random Sims on a random impulse, after I joked with a friend about having a battleship in my backpack. We went to a Sandbox, found out you could drive it - and went for a drive. Which inevitably ended in a zero second banorb but such is Second Life.

Aye, what @Emma Krokus said. You need a script enabled region for HUDs to work. Sometimes a region can also be lagged to the gills but that shouldn't be a persistent issue.

It was meant to be something humorous, not mean spirited but fair enough. My bad. I'll pull back.

You know there's a meme about german speaking people having a word for everything? Well there's one for THIS. It's called a "Steilvorlage" and you've got no idea how hard I had to fight back the urge to take it

There was a time when the ad thing did work for me (magazines mostly) - which granted, I'm probably the edge case with a niche product there. Still it more or less stopped with the search changes. So aye, need to dive back in and figure out the arcane workings again.

As a customer, I used to be a marketplace shopper. There was just something about late nights chatting with a friend and going through various stores on the marketplace - then grabbing demos to check out together the next day. I've also got some L$ from some sales of my own stuff so it's not like I need to watch my expenses that much. Still, my marketplace shopping time has all but vanished and the primary reason is the search. The changed results are useless to me. I either drown in gachas unless I jump through several hoops... And even then some slip by. Or I drown in two hundred listings of the same shirt, just in different colours. Or I drown in items that still advertise with Fitmesh and flexi. The search results actively fight me. At some point I stopped caring and looking. Now then my perspective as an extreme niche and small scale creator is that there was a point in time when sales just vanished. I've recently blown through an ad budget of 10k L$ for advertising in magazines for my niche and in world billboards where appropriate. I've also done passive advertising by just being present trying to be uplifting and helpful in my niche, figuring some might stumble over my profile pick. The result has been sobering. I have not made back my ad budget. I'm not bitter, I just write it off as supporting cool magazines and communities then but still. I can't help but wonder and then there are moments where I try to optimise my store page. Find out if I can improve some things and that's when I realise the new search doesn't even show my product unless I search for it by full name. Youch. I'm not angry or bitter, just befuddled somewhat. Feel like I'm flailing aimlessly.

Let me snow in with an example too, since I've had a bit of time and some friends to help out. Alright, first the raw image as it came out of SL (just in a higher resolution). I'm overall happy with the picture but there were a few things that irked me: Colours, elbow and mood. I did like the overall lighting of the scene but at some point the light had taken on an oversaturated look and because I was a dingus and ran on the PBR client, I started getting glitches so it wasn't a thing of just taking another shot. I went and adjusted the overall mood of the picture, added some more contrast, an overlay for lens effects I regret in retrospect and then added a seperate layer for the guy's skin as he needed a different adjustment to fit. The elbow (her left) is borked. Limitations of SL. I softened it a bit but the stripes made it hard to do more. Could have done more but I think it's good enough as is for me. Finally - some tweaking using a Lut, some more colour shifting and a vignette effect. Things I should have done more with: The Eiffeltower took on some weird blur artifacts when my PBR client started low-ressing objects (note to self, stop being a dingus and use viewer alpha versions to take your shots). Edit: I got timestamps since the topic was also about time! Start preparations with friend #1 at 18:19 Invite second friend at 19:13 Raw at 20:29 Final picture at 20:51

Okay, there seems to be some confusion. First: Are you sure that Louna's World "Content Giver Script" changes textures in any way? From a quick glance at the marketplace, it seems to be... well... a content giver script. These more or less copy the inventory of an item over towards a recipient. The usual unpacker items. While it's possible, I have never heard of a content giver script changing textures and can't find any mention of that in the store description either. Second: You will need to be able to modify the script you are using, if you are using the right one. llSetTexture is a script command and thus goes into a script. There probably are solutions where you can just feed in the UUID and that should be fine (via notecard whereupon it creates the script or something) - but again, would need to know which script it actually is that you're using.

We could have event days where the search actually works. That'd be like a whole sudden shopping event in itself. Can switch it on and off to give that dopamine rush. Petty snark aside: I think it's a natural consequence of the marketplace being a bit of an advertisement black hole. Creators look for other ways to sell. Events bring in more people. Thus creators seek events. Events then become very selective about who they let in or are expensive to participate in. Thus the need for another event is born, restarting the cycle. Personally I don't mind the quantity of events if they'd stick to a theme. Say an event about cute fashion probably shouldn't have beat up, bruised and abused, crying girls for ads and maybe a Science Fiction event could look into whether medieval clothing is a good fit. Okay maybe I'm still a bit snarky. Yah the amount of events is getting a bit silly but I can kind of see why it happens. It's a symptom of another sickness, that of a lack of discoverability. So I doubt we need events for the marketplace (ain't lazy Sunday doing that, BTW?) but rather much improved discoverability.

Did a quick test with scripts just to be sure. Nothing fancy, just a simple line spitting out which slot something is attached to, triggered on rez and then adding a few copies on various of my avatar's slots to see which loads first. The result is not entirely random but definitely not the listed order.

Heck, I don't even follow my own thoughts. One second I'm all "This is Dove Skipper X30 on final approach to alpha centauri" and the next it's "how in the flying FFFF did my mind get here?!". Jokes aside, I tend to auto follow threads I have made because it's usually because I need help with something or want it to mean something. I do check quotes and summons too but otherwise, I have got a tendency to bow out of topics when they get too heated for me.

That's the one for me! Even though I already dread the two months of inventory cleaning ahead of me. During my early days of SL, I've hoovered up so many gifts and freebies that it's quite a bit of a mess. I guess it's a good reason as any to clean house a bit.

*sighs* Alright. Not gonna lie. This thread was hurtful. Some of the strawmen and weird attributions to what creators supposedly are and think were beyond ridiculous. Not sure where this hatred is coming from. Still I am willing to learn and I am used to taking the verbal abuse so: Hi. I'll out myself here. I've got a timed demo for my product because I wasn't sure how else to demo it. There wasn't any malicious intent and never have I thought the customers were stupid. I was simply looking for a way to demo what is essentially a script. At the time, I did market research and most scripted solutions tend to not offer a demo to begin with. This includes comparable products going up as far as 7.000L$ which have hundreds of reviews. I wanted to offer a demo and then looked into how to set it up. Since my product is a script, the usual methods of just adding a nagging floater or texture just don't apply. I'm faced with a simple problem: Don't limit it and there's zero reason to buy the actual product. Limit it too much and people can't actually demo it. Especially when it comes to the main selling point the decision is quite binary. Either I show it or I don't. If I show it and don't limit it by time or amount of times used, that removes the need to ever buy the product. So in the end, I have made the decision to setup a timed demo. It's setup to offer 15 minutes (I think, need to double check at the PC tomorrow) of active time (so no ticking while detached) with an additional grace period of 3 more minutes, while telling the users "hey the demo is coming to an end". I've also written a lengthy documentation, describing every function of the product in detail and linked it on the marketplace in a PDF file. At the time, I pondered a possible alternative: To have a max amount of "function" clicks. Say, you can click the HUD 300 times before it turns off but otherwise keep it on as long as you want. I have ultimately decided against doing that because certain HUD elements need repeated clicks and would tally up really quickly while the main functions would be one or two clicks. I could weigh clicks differently but that would quickly grow complicated to parse. So, how do I stop being Satan?

And here's the second part. How to make use of that isolated image because that's a bit of a science in itself. If you take your image and paste it into photo, you're immediately going to notice that it looks out of place and there are several reasons for that. The two central ones are: The lighting is all wrong Colours don't blend So let's get to it! Although holdup, confession time. When I wrote the previous part of the tutorial I hadn't planned to do this part until a friend told me "yah and where do I go from here?". You see the picture I took last time works perfectly fine for a flat background like the forums. There's very little in the way of shadows - it's a pretty flat picture in terms of colors. The second you put that into a photo or something else, you're going to run into the trouble of having to hand paint lights and shadows and that's just a huge pain. Let's be a bit more efficient about it this time around. So let's say you've already got a background in mind. For this example I am going to use a free photo from here as the base: https://unsplash.com/de/fotos/ein-feldweg-mitten-im-wald-kjFFsaexpGs License checks out as: Free use, commercial and uncommercial use, attribution appreciated, can't resell without significant changes, can't be used on a competing image service. Give or take, losely translated - I'm no lawyer. Always read these on the og source yourself. Either way, sounds good for my purposes here. So you've got this absolutely beautiful picture and want your second life character to be in it. Let's look a bit closer at the image: Most striking is a strong and warm light in the back. You can actually use the color picker I have shown in the previous post to get the precise information. Just click somewhere with typical light for the scene - and then in the top right, you can switch your colour selector to Tool Options and then read out the RGB values, like here: We can already tell that we are going to need a strong backlight for this. Any object in the scene will have a strong light in the back, strong enough to cause a light halo around the trees. We can use that information in several places. For now, it informs us about where and how we want to light our avatar soon. The shadowcasting is a bit hard to make out here but that's alright, because we already have got such a strong light source that it's kind of obvious from where the light is coming. It's a hunch but with the bushes so deep in shadow, this is likely cast from a sun close to the horizon and with the fog and haze present - this looks like a lovely morning scene. Don't worry if this isn't exact. Some images will naturally have much more pronounced shadows than others. Yet still, we have got a strong light source and a vague idea that the light is coming from the image left at a low angle. This is information that we're taking into SL. I'm going to show you an alternative to using a strict greenscreen that will however follow the same basic principles. You can do this with the greenscreen just as well but why not use the chance to learn something new? Alright, hello Second Life! You may notice that I am floating in the clouds and there's a reason for that. We're going to use EEP and personal lighting to prepare our avatar and this works best when you're somewhere unobstructed by anything that can cast a shadow on you. This doubles as a very cheap alternative if you don't have got the option of creating your own sets. Just fly up somewhere, load the pose and use personal lighting. And click Personal Lighting. In this case I have used above RGB code to give the Sun the right color and then positioned it close to what the target image has got. Almost immediately we're seeing a problem. We're gonna need us some more light. We've got the highlights but one side of my avatar is obviously way too dark. There are now various ways on how to go about this. Some prefer to continue using the Personal Lighting and tweak the Ambient Color. I personally find that this quickly tends to drown out any details but others have great success with this. Give it a try, find your own balance there. I suggest using a different approach. We're going to take four screenshots and we are going to use prim lighting. Normal Highlight Shadows Depth So prim lighting is what happens if you create a prim like in the first part and then configure it to emit light. There's a whole lot you can do with this but in this tutorial, we're just going to use quick omnilights. Let's set that up first. Create three prim in a sandbox somewhere. Like in the first guide, right click, create and click. Give it a name and then head on over to the faetures tab. The settings you want are at the bottom. Check [X] Light. Click the color and here you can set which colour the light will have. In the example, I have configured it to be the same type of light as we have in the image we want to put our avatar in. Since we will only be using an omni-light and not a projector, ignore FOV, Focus and Ambiance. Intensity is how strong the light will shine. Radius and Falloff govern how far it shines and how quickly the intensity falls off. We're going to create: One Light for the Sun One Light for the Shadows One Light to fill Here's how I have set mine up for this example. One light in the back mimicing the direction of the sunlight. One light opposite it with a darker colour to simulate shadows. I've opted for a dark turquise color in this. The third light is a fill light. This is used to smooth out harsh shadows on the body and uses the same color as the light in the back just with less intensity. The resulting image will be our normal shot. Take a snapshot (Avatar -> Snapshot, Save As). Next, switch to a completely dark EEP like, say Phototools - No Light. Alternatively you can just set the sun color and ambient to black. What we are goint to do now switch off all the lights except for one. First the Highlights. For this, turn off the light that casts the shadow and the fill light. Take a snapshot like you would normally do. Next, the Shadows. It may seem weird to do that because obviously, how are you going to capture the lack of light? But the reality is that shadows are rarely just black. There's always some bounce light bleeding in. That's what we simulate with the shadow light we made. So, turn off the prim for the sun light, turn off the fill light and then take another shot. The fourth shot will be of the depth map. In the Snapshot window, select the drop down menu with "Color" and select "Depth", then save this too. The reason we're saving the depth map as well is that you can do fancy things with it. In more complex scenes, you can actually use this to more finely control the depth of field effect via your editor. Our resident spring of sunshine, @Orwar, has made a cool tutorial for that: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/464058-a-crash-course-in-dof-editing-vs-viewer/ In our case, you may almost immediately notice that our avatar is completely black while the background is completely white and that's just one step away from being an alpha mask in Krita. This is an alternate method if you can't whip out a greenscreen. That said, the more complex a scene becomes, the less likely this is going to work well. In this case it's us floating in the sky so we're good. You should have something looking like that: And now the magic happens. Let's head into Krita. Load in the image you want to place your avatar in. Then you will want to load each of the four pictures, hit ctrl+a to select all and then copy paste it into the target image. All four of them. Then select all four layers and Group - Clipping Quick Group them. Order not important yet. The result should be something like this: So why have we done all of these steps? First, we have taken seperate shots of the highlights and shadows, so that we can more easily tweak them in the end result. This gives us an easier way to adjust just the highlights or just the shadows. While you can always adjust levels in an image program, I find it much easier to do this seperately. Especially as you can adjust and paint more easily this way. The depth image we can use for depth of field (not relevant in this case) but also - much in the same way as greenscreen. If you remember, it doesn't have to be green. Just a colour that isn't found anywhere else in the image. Thus all the techniques from the first part still apply, just you already have got your transparency mask. Kind of. Let's set it up properly. Drag your depth image to the top of the pile, like in the image to the left. Right click your depth layer and click Convert -> Convert to Transparency Layer. Due to the way how Clipping Groups in Krita work, this will now apply the transparency mask to all the layers within the group. Thus any changes to the mask we make, we make to essentially of the images. Useful especially if we're compositing the four of them into one result. At this point I have gone and ordered the layers in the following order. Depth (as Transparency Mask) Highlight Shadows Normal/Neutral And now begins the tweaking. This is a time consuming process. In essence, you will use the various blend modes of the layers to blend together all these into one picture. For example, in my case I have set the Highlight Layer from "Normal" to "Screen" and, the Shadows layer to "Darker Colour" at a low Opacity. There's no one size fits all solution here. I suggest using both the Levels and Colour Adjustment Curves (Filter -> Adjust). Still, there is one more element that's important to have and that's a shadow. Right now, our avatar is just kind of floating in the picture and while getting the precise colour values right is a lot of experimenting, creating your own shadow is not. For this we will make use of your Transparency Mask. Do you see the tiny image next to it? This here? The one to the left of "Transparency Mask" that's black and white? Good. Hold Control and click that. You will now see your avatar surrounded by the famous ant lines. That's the line that keeps moving around it - kind of like little ants. Create a new layer outside of the clipping group and while the selection is still active, select the fill tool, pick black as a color and fill selection. This gives you a completely black copy of your avatar. What good is that? Well, you can turn it, set the opacity quite a bit lower and would you look at that... a shadow. Saves us a lot of time of handpainting it in and that's mostly it. The rest is a lot of busy work to properly blend the image. A lot of going back and forth, painting colours, adding elements from the picture such as light halos, further adjusting things like image warmth or adding some blur to the parts of the image that are further back. Here's what I came up with. Not perfect but I'll say it's good enough for a demonstration. Bonus points! Nina, why are your hands so **weird**? Because I'm a dingus and forgot to lock animations and didn't notice until I was several hours into writing this tutorial. The hands are the result of the four images I took not having the exact same pose for the hand. Easy mistake to make and I left it in to show what happens and totally not because I really didn't want to trace back hours to retake the images and all subsequent ones. No sir. Alright, that's me done for now. Like before, I've been at this for a long time and I'm also brushing against the forum software here. If I have skipped over important steps, please let me know and I'll expand on them and update the tutorial. With these two parts though, you should be good to go. Bonus points part 2: Anyone else not notice the yellow diamond traffic sign til now?!

And there it is:

Alright, sat down for a quick minute or two! This is meant for Second Life and the pictures will be from the Firestorm Viewer. It will also be using Krita - because that's a free and powerful piece of software and I am a firm believer in learning the tools and concepts first before buying anything. With that out of the way. I'll first get into setting up a greenscreen and then will also list an alternative. Chroma Key The basic idea behind chroma key compositing is to pick a colour that is neither represented in the image nor adjacend to any of the colours present. In common use, this is usually a very aggressive green colour, lending itself to the colloquialism green screen. However it's important to note that every colour can work for this and in fact, sometimes it is necessary to pick a different colour. Got a green top? Greenscreen ain't doing it that day. So ideally you want a colour that is not found in the image. Furthermore, you want that colour to be as clean as you can get it. We'll get more into what that means for Second Life in a hot minute. Setting up the screen First, you want the actual screen. Let's make ourselves a nice little prim that we can lug around, attach or rez as needed. Find a Sandbox or use your own home territory, doesn't matter as long as you can rez something. You'll want to make a basic prim. Right click on the ground, create and then pick the cube icon. You'll rez one of the standard prims and I'll run through what settings you pick and why. In the General Tab: Give it a name. Any will do, it's just so you can find it again because my inventory is a black hole and these things vanish somewhere In the Object Tab: Give it a decent size. Doesn't matter much, just needs a starting value, you can always change it here later. You want it big enough that it covers your screen when you are posing in front of it. Personally I use: X: 8.0 Y: 0.05 Z: 4.0 In the Texture Tab: Check [X] Full Bright. Reason being, you want the chroma key to be uniform in colour. That means you want as little noise on it as possible. Light and shadow creates noise. Full Bright avoids this. Leave Transparency and Glow at 0. Especially Glow. Same reason. No noise. Color - Remember what I mentioned above. It needs to be a colour not otherwise found in the image. Click the white bar. You can then either enter the seperate values for the color in the color picker or just paste the hex code into the Hex Tab of the color picker.: Green Red: 0 Green: 177 Blue: 64 or Hex: 00b140 Blue Red: 0 Green: 71 Blue: 187 or Hex: 0047bb Texture - Remember, we want as little noise as possible. Thus the texture has got to go. Click the wood texture and in the new window select "Blank". It should look something like this: You've now got your fancy greenscreen. In case you're not familiar with how to move the object, you can select it and then either drag the arrows to reposition it or hold the CTRL (control key, bottom left usually) and then rotate it by dragging the circles. Should both fail, you can also manually tweak rotation in the Object Tab. You can rez this at any time you have got the rights to rez and if not, you can attach it to your avatar too! In this case, right click the new item in your inventory (pick it up first, maybe :P) and then select "Attach To >" and pick Avatar Center. Why the Avatar Center? Because that's the node of your body that isn't moved with animations and poses. Setting up the Viewer Alright, we're not done yet! Remember, we want as clean an image as possible and this needs a few more steps. The next steps aren't a surefire way as it's often a complex interlocked mesh of settings and it's sometimes hard to tell what is causing noise in your image or not. Luckily, in Firestorm you've got a Phototool for that purpose! You can click World, Photo and Video -> Phototools. Although if you're going to use it often, I recommend setting up your toolbar for it. In this case, click Avatar - Toolbar Buttons and then drag the icon for Phototools into one of the four corners of your screen to pin it there. Now, which settings can cause noise? Most of them weee. Okay that's not helpful. Remember: You want as little noise in your picture as possible and almost all of the settings can introduce noise into your picture if configured in a certain way. However from my experience, glow and ambient occlusion are the biggest culprits there. Let me show you what I mean. For this I gave the greenscreen a glow value (don't do that) to demonstrate this: If you notice that the screen is bleeding into your avi like this, you will want to check for sources of glow or set iterations to 1 in the DoF/Glow Tab. Obviously if you rely on glow to make certain details pop (such as cybernetic lights and such) you'll have to tweak the settings here until you find one that doesn't bleed into your avatar. Likewise, Ambient Occlusion can lead to noisy fake shadows under certain conditions. If you notice odd visual artefacts or anything not uniform, do check your Ambient Occlusion as well. I wouldn't recommned turning either off, just... tweaking them as needed. But first though, take the shot! If you can, try to take these at high resolution because the more pixels it has got to work with, the easier it will be in the end. It's time to head into Krita! What's Krita? Well, you know but someone else might not. It's a free graphics editor you can find here: https://krita.org/en/ Using Krita From here on, we've got a few different options how we want to go about this. First, there's a very good short video on this from Katverse, if you're the type that learns best with a video. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp-zSFOnH0I In case you're not, the method shown in the video works really well but has got a fundamental flaw. It's what's called destructive editing. Sounds dire but essentially means that you destroy parts of the image. In this case you destroy the parts you don't want - but it's generally a good idea to keep that around as long as you can and edit it in a way that allows you to always go back and tweak things. You can't do that with destructive editing. So, let's start! Open Krita and select your image. It will probably look something like this: Hi! What we are going to do is be a bit cheeky. First, on the right, see the Background Layer? Selected and blue? Right click it and select "Split Alpha" -> Alpha into Mask. Masks work in a simple way. Every black will become invisible, everything white will be visible and the values inbetween are various degrees of transparency. You are going to need to get familiar with the colour selector shown here: You can go and experiment a little. Remember, dark colours turn that part of the layer transparent and bright colours make it visible again. From here on out, we're good to go. The basic workflow in this step is to switch back and forth between the Background Layer and the attached Transparency Mask. We'll need this tool here: It allows you to select a color. You can now select the green and will have selected most of it. In some exceptions, you may need to tweak the settings of the tool. In which case, you will find them in the top right corner under Tool Options. It would go beyond this tutorial go go through all of them here though. Either way, let's use it! First - Select the Background Layer as that is where we want the color information from. Second - Select the Color Selection Tool. Third - Click any green spot. Next, select the Transparency Mask on the right. Remember - every black in the transparency mask becomes transparent. Thus we now want to paint the selected area black, thus turning it transparent. You'll want the fill tool as a first step: Grab it. Top right, set the colour to black and then click any of the green areas. Keep clicking the green areas until you're left with little frayed areas. We definitely don't want that. Now some masochists might head out and handpaint every single strand and yah, sure you can do that. Or you can make it much easier on yourself. First. Make a new layer. Click the plus icon below the layer selection and you will get a Paint Layer. First, click this little α (alpha) icon on that layer so it looks like this: This means it will inherit the alpha from the layer below. Useful - because now we can grab a brush and paint over! Next, do you see where it reads "Colour" for me? It will say Normal for you. Click Normal while the Paint Layer is selected and pick Colour. With that we're almost good to go. Deselect your selection (right click, deselect) and then let me show you the final two tools we need. Color Picker Brush Got it? okay! Let's roll. Select the colour picker and pick a colour next to the green areas. Then switch to the brush and while in your paint layer - just plain paint over it. You'll see something like this now: Good but still looks like the dog chewed it up. Don't fret, this is why we're doing non destructive editing here. Remember how we created the transparency mask earlier and how - repetition, wee - black is transparent and white is visible? The chewed up effect here is because the selection tool was a bit overzealous. So let's head back to the transparency mask and grab the brush, pick white and set it to a smaller size with an opacity of something like 40% then... get painting. You don't need a good eye, you don't even need to be careful because we can always just paint it back in with the inverse color. And... that's more or less it. Et voilá: Where's the rest of the damn image, Nina? Don't know. Sue me, I am lazy! Questions? Shoot! (Been at it for a while so if any part is a bit sparse in info, skips important steps or needs more details, please let me know and I'll fill it in). Edit: A second part about how to continue from there will follow tomorrow or Friday, depending on time. Sorry, forgot to mention that.

Agreed - it's a really lovely effect! Especially with the little hint of a shadow there and with two very pretty pictures. I think that's the essence of it though, isn't it? Trying something new and having fun doing it! No such thing as too much if you learned something from it and in this case, it's tastefully subdued and totally not too much. Allow me to be a bit frank here. When I started doing this a while ago, there were so many that inspired me with their art. They made these absolutely stunning pictures that seemed like they were from an entirely different game. I sat there wondering "how did they do this?!". Today, some of them are still making these pictures. Keyword being... these. For the two years I have been here, they've essentially made the same picture time and time again. They're great pictures for sure - but there's no evolution, no improvement. Stagnant. Others have continously evolved and still make new pictures. I think it's important to keep moving, to keep on improving, to keep trying and to reinvent yourself as much as you can. Don't fear doing too much. Try and find out! We wouldn't have those two very lovely framed pictures without you trying. That's relatable. If you like free stuff and seeing how you mention greenscreen, let me give you two hints that helped me a lot! First is an option in Second Life. You want to turn off the glow effect when you are using greenscreen. The reason being that Second life by default bleeds colours to smoothen the image out somewhat. You can see that quite well if you pose in front of a greenscreen and your character suddenly gets a halo. That halo will absolutely mess up the greenscreen and it's a result of "glow". The other hint is: https://www.photopea.com/ If you place a picture there, go to selection and find the entry "Remove BG" which will quite somewhat remove the background of an image. It's not perfect but if greenscreen ain't working for you, this might work better. If you're a person that loves to get super technical with lots of computer headaches - another option might be a segment anything plugin for krita but installing that is *very* technical. (github, torch, etc). Still - I'd try greenscreen without SL's glow and then you can just select color with a slight feather, that way you really should not be left with any artefacts. /edit: If you want, I can make a quick greenscreen tutorial for SL and Krita.