Hello and welcome to the first of a series of technical / photography tutorials that I am planning to share with you on the Modavia Fashion Marketing blog. I have decided to start showing how do I use the local lighting feature, and how do I work with them to obtain unique, in-world light effects in my pictures – after several of you asked me about them, thought it’d be nice to write this post where I’ll try to be as accurate as possible – and if I am for instance missing something, be sure to point it out in the comments and I will make sure to include it, by editing the post.

And now, without further ado, let’s get started!

Please click on the images to see them larger.

The very first thing to say is that I generally use the following viewer: Second Life version 3.0.5.240927 – where I found that the local lights I build, besides the sun light, are able to produce SL shadows. That leads us to the second point, which is that to enable this effect, you have enable shadows in Second Life which is done by doing the following steps:

Go into the Preference menu -> then click into the Graphics bar -> and then set your graphics to ULTRA.

Tick Lighting and Shadows.

Go into “Build mode” and rezz one ball. Right click on it with your mouse and choose “Edit”. Go into the “Features” Menu of the Edit tab and be sure to check “Light”. Then, on the right of the word “Light” that you just checked, you will see two small quares, a white one and a grey one, one for the texture of the ball and one for the color of the light projected. Click on the right one (grey one) then just click on “blank” (for now). Your ball will immediately start producing light and you should be able to see it (in the pic above you will see my light very bright, it’s because i’m using two balls to make it more lighter)

You can click on the second little square (the right one), to start using “projected textures” (you will find out in a moment what is it). In my picture, for example, i chose from my inventory the texture named “Occhio di bue” but you can choose any texture you have in your inventory, a grayscale one or a colored one as well, the bright part of the image will bring the light so the whiter you have in your texture, the brighter your light will be.

So, now the light has changed, from square to round (according to the shape of what I had on my texture, that is a small circle in this case).

You can, as i said, work with any other textures, which is actually funnier: you can see how in this picture I selected the Modavia Fashion Week alpha logo as texture and how, now, the light projected is actually the logo itself projected. And you’re done!

How to obtain cool effects with local lighting

I recently did an unedited picture with a shiny wall and several of you asked me how did I obtain that effect without retouching the photo. Here’s how:

Select the wall, go into the Edit menu and then choose a nice texture for the wall: you will find out how different can be the effect when you change textures. Then apply the texture on the wall and turn your projector (your ball) towards the same wall.

Keep the Edit menu of the wall open, and change “Shininess” to “High”. The light will be reflected as if the wall is shiny in a clean way. You can also play with this, as i did in the picture above, adding other bumpiness effect – in this case, I have set it to “Darkness”.

You can move the wall lights forward or backwards, and change the size of the ball you rezzed – you will obtain different effects, different light reflections; moreover, you can your local light texture, the various bumpiness effects and of course the Repeats/Face values. You can also rezz multiple lights, as I did in the picture above, to have a shinier wall.

NOTE: Probably you won’t see more than 3 lights at one time, maybe 5 if you are working on a super- pc… that’s normal and it depends from your graphic card.

The last step consists in making your local lights balls transparent by selecting them, going into the Edit menu and choosing the Texture tab, where you can control the transparency of your objects. Position yourself where you prefer, and all is left is shooting!

I hope this tutorial was useful to you – have fun with your shootings!