Camera fun

An avatar walks around with a camera.
Folks new to SL always have to get used to this.
But many peculiarities of this camera even experienced users don’t know about.
Even 5 discovered some new possibilities after a year!

Basic camera facts:
Walking and flying: the camera follows from behind, so how to see your face?
Using the arrow keys makes the camera swing, but the avatar too.
Using the mouse wheel zooms in and out.

Swinging the camera around:
Now for this you have to become a virtuoso on the keyboard! Press ALT and click on something, the terrain or an object or an avatar. Then while mouse pressed, move the mouse: the camera swings around in a horizontal plane. The vertical mouse movement gives zoom, for instance to see your own make-up or nose or beard.
To get it moving more freely (but without zoom), also press ALT CTRL, click on object, keep mouse pressed and move mouse! Freely means here in a sphere around the object.

Now to get further away from the avatar, you have to realize the camera is bound to the avatar, but it can escape quite a distance.
You can liberate the camera more using: Second Life menu-> client -> Disable Camera Constraint.
(Found no “client” in menu: press CTRL ALT D)
Then your camera can really roam through space.

Sitting Camera movement:
Sitting on an object gives other freedom. There are the same possibilities as before. But clicking an object somewhere and then using just the arrow keys makes your camera turn around this distant object! Quite fun!
Arrows up down, zoom
Arrows right left circle around chosen object or the avatar.
Page up and down (normally flying) give space up and down!
And then: ALT CTRL and SHIFT (in that order) and arrows gives parallel movement!

What I seldomly use is the Mouselook, Movements in Mouselook mode are somehow not convenient for me.

This sitting – arrow steering possibility is interesting.
The problem sometimes is that you want to show people something in Second Life in a public environment. But then they should have an avatar, most of them have no avatar nor experience moving around flying etc. It would actually be undesirable to have them roam the whole of Second Life. This sitting avatar is a solution for this problem. A Joystick can steer the arrow buttons, a wii remote control might do the same (bluetooth connection and GlovePie for instance). If the rest of the keyboard and computer is hidden, the public can fiddle with the view and the joystick and everything can be done, clicking, etc, without fear of the avatar drifting of!
5 can show the whole of the virtual museum like that!

Tele and Wide angle camera.
As written about before:
You can get quite nice shots for stills using different camera angles. Shortcuts CTRL 8 CTRL 9 CTRL 0
This picture 5 got by going to the limits (or over the limits...)

















Scripted camera.
This is fun too, you can script the camera to follow you in all kind of positions, an example is given here: http://slhomepage.com/lsl/FollowCam.htm
In this script the camera is not really free, which is for me: steerable by the keyboard. This is possible too!
I found a nice script: a "scan camera" script of ArianeB:
http://arianeb.com/secondlife.htm (bottom of this long and usefull page)
I turned this around in a camera steering from the keyboard,
for steering camera from arrows on keyboard mind the control permissions: http://slhomepage.com/lsl/llTakeControls.htm
but combining controls and camera parameters, the camera is freed and can follow a path, or steered by the keyboard, letting 5 take a break!
You can get away pretty far steering this free camera, the problem is: the drawing distance of your avatar! The world gets empty behind this limit.

Video
For making video’s, knowing the different possibilities of the camera is great. The walking avatar gives quite an instable image.
A problem is the speed of the normal camera. More convenient for good video making would be the possibility to slow the camera movement, resulting from using the arrows in sitting position. Maybe there is a shortcut for that too? Yes, deep down in the player:
Client (CTRL ALT D) -> Debug Settings ->in the textbox type Zoomtime.
Default is .4, but making this higher (10 – 20 sec) you get a very slow moving camera, great for nice steady zooming. You can let the buttons go and the camera stays on moving, slowly, comfortably, it is like sailing! But there are disadvantages too, the camera moves on and on sometimes, so for normal living, quickly reset it to the default of .4 sec!

Have fun, explore! I imagine even more can be discovered!