How to use SL Wind Light Day Cycle Editor
Friendly greetings! It’s Torley. Sipping my drink out here in the countryside ya’ll! It’s not a clear blue sky. There are clouds as you can see and that’s what I’m going to show you in this tutorial, how to gain control of the day cycle editor so you can change it up to your whim whether you’re doing photo shoots, machinima or you just want to feel really good ya’ll. I’m going to get hooked in that.
The first thing you’re going to want to make sure is the edit menu, preferences, and right here under the graphics tab make sure it’s either high or higher because the key thing if you have costumed check by the way that’s what I’ve got on is that atmosphere shaders be checked on otherwise the sky I’m going to show isn’t going to look as pretty. You’re going to lose detail. You need a graphics card which is good enough to support this so check out our system requirements and recommendations to be better. Now, it gets really easy from here and by that I mean I’ll just walk to the edge or just float to the edge rather and I’m going to get a good nice view so we can appreciate what’s going on. And by the way we get that if you find it’s hard to get a view, go to view menu and you can zoom out or CTRL A. So if I tap this three times it gives us a distorted in a pleasant way field of view so we can get a appreciation of the skyline in a broader angle.
Now, go to the world menu and environment settings and environment editor. Here’s where the magic happens when we dig a little deeper. Let’s click at that sky because we’re going to tweak it and let’s dig even deeper. You ever wonder what this button does, Day Cycle Editor. So this is going to give us access to Wind Light. That’s the code name for this sky setting presets. Each one has a key as you can see here and by the way I could just close those out because this is not dependent on it. I want to keep this open, however and I can scrub if you ever used audio recording software very similar. You can just click and drag to scrub through the day like that and I’m just going to click now. I mean I’m going to press the CTRL key or the ALT key rather and click so I can zoom like that and get a view. Hello Mr. Sun! And now I can scrub back and forth so at midnight or 12:00 a.m. and you can scrub to noon which is midday and then to a sunset which is what happens on the other side. It’s kind of hard to see from here but yes, I have a zoom even farther or further.
This is what we have. It’s really hands-on and the second thing you’ll notice now is if I set a length of cycle. Now, what does that mean? This is great for time-lapse animations sort of like Philip Class stuff here. Let me just change it to zero per minutes and 10 for seconds. That’s hours, minutes, and seconds so we have a really short-day cycle and now when we press play, it will automatically traverse from here left to right and repeat in a loop and if you’re familiar using the software, you’ll notice this is going to take about ten seconds, exactly ten seconds to make that journey, so right there like that. Now the power of this comes in when you’re going to customize and by the way use a state time is exact same as world menu, environment settings and revert to region default. See, same thing!
So, these are all local. You’re not going to affect anyone else’s view. This is just what you see. But let’s begin by deleting some of these keys so we can make our own day where actually, you can click any of these key frames and we go on. So, you change the time so you can either move it intuitively like that hands-on with the mouse direct feedback or you can adjust it in terms of entering numbers and if one is selected. Let me say 14, like that; 14th hour of the 24-hour day cycle. You can just delete keys like that and now each one gets selected and deleted and that’s how that works and you can add where this yellow pointer is. So now and I like to say the word “so” all apparently too,. I’m becoming very self-aware there.
Let’s go to about what we’re already here and you’ll notice that when you click this, you have certain presets like this. I’ve got a mega pack you can install. This is a tentative version of my next release by the way, so if we want to select, let’s go for a midnight sort of one. A night one like Anwar which is based on a rather very nice oil rig that I’ve seen out there, one of the London regions and add key. It’ll add it with that preset so here we have at midnight effectively with the zero hour, it has this Anwar. Now, let’s go to about noon alright. So we’re here at about noon and now we want to add a midday one and I’ll show it works basically with two. So I’m really happy with this nostalgically one that I’ve done recently. I’ll set it through that. Oops, actually I did something wrong there. Let me go back just like Anwar. What I should’ve done because you see this is still selected it means it still changes that. We’ll make sure this is at the point where you want to insert a new one and then you can add key. So now this one is selected and you change a different key and let’s go ahead and choose nostalgic and now we have two so we can scrub so you notice a transition not the most realistic. You want other interiority meet with your key frames.
The key frame of course is just each one is a preset and it interpolates between them. Meaning it blends between those settings so here we have a nice blend. It’s a great way to come up with your own inspired presets to using your own creations. So let’s go about here and add key and we want to and notice how neatly I categorize this to a sunrise. So hot sunrise and one more time to about 6:00 p.m. this is like sunset. Add and now we’re going to choose a sunset. Let’s see which one do I really like, Camp Champ. Okay, keep in mind this is not totally, physically accurate. There are things which can be tweaked within the settings but for an alien planet. Now remember what we did with our time there; 10 seconds and we can play to preview and the sky just animates like that. The moon just “wuchoo”! And vola! That’s how you customize the day cycle editor. You can keep adding little presets.
Now, when you’re done you can save your test day and it will overwrite the default one. Now, if ever you want the default one back you’re going to have to have a copy of it or reinstall Second Life and conversely, as you would expect. If you tweak the day setting around and mess with it or whatever and after you saved it and you want to restore, you can load your test day over set just as shown to what you had saved it as. Now it makes total sense, doesn’t it? Now one unfortunate thing, it’s a big thing too because names would lead you to think otherwise. You can save a lot of different sky presets. It’s true in water presets. That’s not on the scope if this tutorial but you can only save one test day. We don’t have a palette currently to select from a whole bunch of different days. However, if you go to this directory at least in my windows box, it’s something like this and it will always be named default.xml. So what I’m showing you here is I made a zip copy of it in case I ever wanted to back it up and it’s clunky because this means that whatever day you’ve customized, you must rename it to default.xml start Second Life and if it doesn’t automatically which it should. Then you’ll have to load the test day and it will recognize that. So it will be in a directory same like this and like I said, you know it says days it’s really just one day at a time for now.
Finally, there’s a popular question I get asked in a fair amount. It’s a beautiful lovely question and it is so I don’t have to keep in suspense. “Totally I want to have my Wind Light setting to persist across logins. I want to always be the same. How do I do that?” The answer is it’s a bit clunky but you can work around and use the day cycle editor and this is basically done by making a day with no key frames or one key frame that is. So delete those and you just have one. You set that to whatever you want it to be so like alien planet and then you save the test day.
Now when you re-log in Second Life, it will always show this setting for all the times of the day. Keep in mind this will also affect related functionality in the world menu, environment settings and things like this. There’s nothing there thrice as select parts. You notice they always a snap at certain times but because there are no other key frames, there will be no changes so you’ll always see this and I personally use a method somewhere because I use a custom day cycle like I was showing you because it adds a lot of spice and vigor to my Second Life and because I don’t have to keep changing back my settings each time. It gives you a very unique look if you’re taking a lot of pictures and especially after you crash or something like that you don’t have to keep resetting the same thing.
Keep that in mind and please go ahead and play with the Day Cycle Editor. If you make any cool pictures, movies, things like that, machinima, just let me know. I’d love to see your beautiful inspiring creations.
Thanks for watching this tutorial and have a gorgeous Second Life!
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