Saturday, September 10, 2011

Welcome to LumiPro3

Its been since June 2010 that i made a post on the LumiPro blog as i rolled out LumiPro L2. L2 was a big deal for me as it was the first attempt at a serious productization of anything on secondlife and the feedback as been overwhelmingly positive. And for that I'm humbled that people of the caliber that create virtual photographic art make LumiPro their primary choice.

Over the last 13 months I've been working on LumiPro L3. We introduced L3 at the Second Life Community Convention 2011 in August. For those curious, my slides and recorded presentation can be found here.

L3 is a big step forward in making a complete solution for photographers. Some improvements in L3 include:
  • I now include all 4 of the basic lighting setups (Rim and Split now join Butterfly and Rembrandt).
  • Knowing that Viewer2/Firestorm would support more than 6 total lights, i updated L3 to allow control over 4 models total or a total of 12 lights. The system was reworked so now you have individual fine control over each model's lights.
  • Fine color control. Further fundamental color filters from RL camera bags and Photoshop are included along with an ability set the transparency of the filter. For example i typically like about a 40% warming85 filter on my lights given my skin tone.
  • I've completely reworked the pose system. Lumi3 can now independently manage and pose 4 models. I've included a catalog system that allows cataloging by gender. The next/previous pose buttons now work within the selected gender only. I've included a backup server concept so just in case SL freaks out you don't loose all your gender choices.
  • A way to manage the model's eye, sometimes called a gazer, is now included. Gazers are not a new concept, but I personally think L3's gazer is a significantly better solution as the gazer arcs around the model and the "joy stick" allows fine control easily
L3 contains literally 50K+ lines of scripting in multiple objects each involved in a surpringly complicated dance. Having multiple huds in the same room is always fun as they run the risk of talking over each other. That has been addressed as well as several bugs others have posted. I'm sure there are still some hidden bugs in L3 but I hope that you'll let me know about them and fixing them is my highest priority.

I'm thrilled to have Colleen Criss and Corinne J. Helendale as part of my team. Colleen was the general manager of PhotoLIFE for well over 2 years prior to this assignment and brings a wealth of experience and connections into the photography world. Corinne Helendale is a highly recognized photographer and PhotoLIFE Master Photographer and both provides amazing feedback as well as doubly amazing content for our promotion and presentations.

As me and the team begin planning L4, I plan on taking some time to record training videos not only about L3 but about lighting in general. I'd love your feedback and ideas for videos. My next post will be the intro videos to L3.

I hope you consider joining the LumiPro SL group as well as the flickr group (click here).