Raul Crimson’s experiences in Second Life®
Home, sweet home… reloaded
After showing my home in a post two weeks ago i wanted to show you my house by the inside, so… why not to make a Machinima instead of taking pictures?
Was also a good oportunity to try to make a Machinima with Windlight, i moved the Graphics tab to Ultra, is the best graphics level, but the frame rate was quite low, so i’m sure you will understand the image “jumps”. 
As you can see the furniture and decoration follow the main lines of the house. Mediterranean, warm, some touches of arab style, carpets, tapestries, curtains… I’ve tried to find rich textured objects.
I tried to work the light with the “Enviromental Editors” of Windlight to make the image look as natural as possible, trying to show different moments in time, from the sunrise at the begining of the movie to the sunset at the end. I accelerated the movement of the sun also at the end to make the sunset faster, no edition of the movie.
About the movie in itself, i used two options, moving the camera by myself or with the Machinima Cam by CodeBastard Redgrave (I won one in a photo-contest in the SLBloggers group 
Thanks, Codie!!!!! It’s a great tool!). For the image capture i didn’t used the SLClient tool (it works bad and crashes often, anyway Data Linden told me that because they didn’t updated this feature since version 1.4 and is very buggy they are thinking in remove the feature from the client), instead of this i used a program called iShowU (only for Mac) and for the video-edition i used iMovie’08 by Apple (also only for Mac, sorry).
You can find the rest of my small movies in the Vod:Pod widget in the right column of the blog, in my Vod:Pod page or in my YouTube channel page.
Do you wanna date my avatar?
about 6 months ago - 2 comments
Some days ago i saw this really fun video of The Guild with a song parodying MMOs, well in this case WOW, but is totally adaptable to SL as you can see in the fun version of Lowe Runo below.
Lyrics are really fun, in The Guild video, the dances and the attitude of [...]
The beauty of Second Life®
about 10 months ago - 5 comments
Sometimes you can be upset, tired, bored… Sometimes you wonder why you are still in Second Life… then you see a video like this one, and you remember why you are here, what you love here…
This machinima by Sam Lowry made me smile and remember one of the reasons i have to love Second Life, [...]
Spelling
about 1 year ago - No comments
I’d like to share with you all this. Is a video i made of one of my latest works.
Is a 3D object i made for Vain Inc Gallery (SLurl), you can find more info about the gallery in some older posts. The theme this month was Muse.
I really love SLphotography, but at the same time [...]
Fantasy in Vain, a machinima
about 1 year ago - No comments
Some time ago i posted about Vain Inc Gallery, is a project by two really good photographers and really nice girls, Nyla Rossini and Toko Voom. They have one of the best fashion magazines in Second Life, but also wanted to go further away with and art gallery, a really new concept.
They wanted to have a [...]
Torley is awesomazing our experience… or something like that
about 1 year ago - No comments
I want to say it, i’m a big fan of Torley.
Lately some “critics” against Torley appeared in blogs, forums and other places. They criticise his apparent… how to say it?… “fake happiness”. He wrote a really interesting post about that.
I’m not writing this post because i think he needs a defense or something, as you [...]
Blowing houses
about 1 year ago - No comments
Actually this is one of the funniest things to do in Second Life.
Well, not really, but anyway is a fun thing to do, specially because it relaxes a lot. Just rezz your house and blow it!!!
Thanks to Havok 4 (the new physical engine on Second Life servers) it works pretty good, not adding [...]
A future world of shadows
about 1 year ago - No comments
Both videos by Torley shared under a Creative Commons license Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
OMG!!! /me drolls… Shadows in Second Life!!!!
Well, for what we can see in that video by Torley it seems shadows are the next big thing (hopefully after they fix assets servers and central database).
I know is not good that shadows are not [...]
Walking around… in the movies
about 1 year ago - No comments
Machinima is growing a lot in Second Life, and that’s a good thing. After Flickr opened the possibility of posting video a lot of people is experimenting and trying new things. Flickr, as a place to share creativity, helped a lot of people (including myself) to learn and explore with SLphotography, and now is doing [...]
Windlight and Machinima contests in Koinup
about 1 year ago - No comments
Koinup organized a couple of interesting contests of photography and machinima in SL. Be sure to take a look, i think both are really interesting.
Please, if you are interested check the Windlight contest rules here and the Machinima one here.
I still didn’t posted a Machinima for the contest… but i posted (for the moment) this [...]
More about issues in Hi-Res Snapshots
about 1 year ago - No comments
Some days ago i wrote a post about some problems i was having with Hi-Res snapshots to disk with the Windlight Second Life® viewers (not only the “Test Software” ones, also the “Main” client right now). I didn’t tried for the moment the new 1.20 release candidate, in the Official Linden Blog they said is [...]
about 2 years ago
Raul, your last home was gorgeous but this one is beyond words! Your sense of colour and placement is excellent, everything works so well together. I know I am gushing again, but I really do love what you have done with your home
about 2 years ago
You have captured the place far better with this than you ever could with still photos. I have never seen a home that better suits its owner either. It is an incredibly warm, welcoming and sensual place my friend and I love it.
about 2 years ago
Looks gorgeous, hon! =)
(of course, I would expect no less from you)
about 2 years ago
Thanks, friends. Of course you are invited when you want (well, Wolf knows the place, but is always invited anyway
).
About your description, Wolf, special thanks, my friend. I really feel this place as part of me.
about 2 years ago
yay Raul! this is going to the MachinimaCam showcase right now!
Now i just want to give you a few tips. You mentioned it’s laggy because you shot at high res. Well this is the trick; it is totally useless to do so. The average resolution for any movie is around 640×480, a little more for NTSC. So i found quickly it was totally almost useless to shoot in higher resolution. All my videos were shot in 800×600 and the cut/editing software I use resize it to 640×480 or NTSC. If you start shooting higher than that, especially with Windlight (I affectionately call it Windlag), well, you will get tremendous framelag. For shooting any machinima animation within SL, your client famerate should be at least over 12FPS. Over 15 even better.
You can use the Set Window Size in SL Viewer’s “File” menu. This is what I use all the time. This menu has been place there especially for shooting machinima movies. I really suggest you go no higher than 800×600. Because finally the cut/editing program you use will resample each frame and you wont really get a better resolution if you shoot in high resolution anyways. That’s unless you have one BEEFY machine that can do over 15FPS in full resolution, but such rig is bound to be bleeding edge.
In short, don’t bother with high image quality, you will see that the final 640×480 result will be surprisingly crisp anyways, and you will have no framelag or very little.
Hope this helps! Congrats on the gorgeous job despite the lagging problem, it’s awesome Raul! *muah!*
Codie
about 2 years ago
Thankies for the advices, Codie.
Still learning, but i love to learn, so my compromise is to make a better machinima soon.