This is unlike any shadowing technique you've ever seen in Second Life. You can walk through it and become enveloped in darkness, or just seem like a dimly lit hallway or street corner. Works well with megaprims too to add shadow and darkness over a large area. Makes cave entrances look amazing, dark alleys really can be dark now, and you can even change the color to white, add a tiny amount of glow, and it looks like a bright light being emitted from the end of a hallway or tunnel. The applications are many and the limitations are little to none.
Unselectable:
When using either the 1% alpha or 5% alpha texture for shadows or other effects, the prim becomes unable to be left clicked on, making it perfect for megaprim application. You can still fine tune the transparency with SL's transparency slider.
Megaprim Effects:
Try adding either the one axis on two 50x50x50 megaprims, or use the two axis sculpt on one and see how dark you can make a forest, or add a slight haze to your city, possibly a brightened and orange tinted view along a beach, all of these are possible, and easy, with this sculpt package.
One Prim:
There is only one sculpt map per prim to deal with, but with this one prim you can create amazing shadow and darkly lit area effects that you never could accomplish before. Even better, you can use megaprims to give any kind of environmental effect over a large area!
Sculpt Maps:
There are 5 sculpt maps included as well (copy and transfer on the sculpt maps) so that you are able to be listed as the creator of the build. There are 5 sculpt maps, one shadow is layered in one direction, one is layered in two directions, one in all directions, one for holograms or specific shadow texture shapes, and one is curved around 180 degrees like a tunnel.
Examples Included:
I have included several different modifiable examples on megaprims for environmental effects, as well as other examples like a cave entrance.
Easy Modifying:
Changing how dark or light the shadowed area is is as simple as changing the color or transparency values. Toying around with these values will yield a massive range of effects available.
Light or Dark:
You can change the color and make the shadow dark, foggy, light, dimmed, and more. There is so much you can do with textures, alpha transparency, and glow combination.
Also Included:
I have included 3 textures full permissions for you to try out the shadow prims with. These are very helpful because they have the following baseline transparency values: 1%, 5%, 25% and 50% transparent. This will help you modify it through a larger range.
- Create Dark Shadows, A Hazy Forrest, And More!
- Easy to Use - Quickly Modified - Full Permissions
- Sculpt Maps Included, Free Demo Available
- Fox Labs - Rest Assured, We Guarentee Your Satisfaction.
Disappointing
I thought this was like the picture shows, and like you sometimes see in SL- where you enter a cave, and you hit a "dark patch" where it not only looks dark, but you actually can't see while you're in it. I needed something like this for a "pit" I was building. But it's just a bunch of colored textures, and it doesn't create the desired effect at all. It's not what it appears to crack itself up to be. The search continues for my "dark spot".
Eight years after the last review, and I still use this regularly!
There are plenty of shadow sculpts and shadow meshes out these days, but this set has two things that I haven't seen anywhere else: the sculpt with all-axis layering, which is great for large areas and swaths of thick fog, and the HOLOGRAM SCULPT, which lets you import fancy text textures and turn them into 3-D signage that looks surprisingly solid at a distance. I have those all over my sim!
Environmental Shadows
The product is what it claims to be, mostly. I received the unpacker without problems, but there is no 5% transparency value.
Also, Billfox doesn't give any documentation with the product itself - which is definitely an oversight. Showing someone pictures of what ca be done is good, but an explanation, no matter how simple or straightforward it might be, is what would make this product much more attractive to people. Also, an explanation of what it /can't/ do would be great, because though I like the product, I can't use it because of my need for almost total darkness, while not being able to be selectable.
Either way, a well-made addition to your sim or build - but be prepared to figure stuff out for yourself.
This sculptie is made from about 80 layers of flat, parallel panels. Sure, I could have done it myself. Sure, it may be a little overpriced, costing about 4 times the price these textures would've cost to upload yourself. But seriously, which is easier, trying to learn how to create a sculpt to duplicate this, or just clicking a buy button? Even making the effect myself--by literally using 80 prims next to each other--would have been more of a pain trying to get everything to agree and align correctly, not to mention a huuge waste of prims.
This sculptie works decently well for it's purposes, but sometimes when one of the axises are spread too far, the slices can get spread out too far and look weird. Still, the shade looks reasonable from a distance, and people who are walking through the shade probably will have other things to worry about--like not being able to click on anything unless they somehow manage to get their camera between the slices. (See? In the end the giant slice gaps actually make it more usable!)
The package claims to contain a 1%, 5%, 25%, and 50% alpha texture for use with the sculpties, but the 5% is missing. That's okay for me, of course, because I happen to have a white to transparent gradient I can use instead (with some stretching it can look like the entire texture is a certain opacity). It doesn't really matter in the end, though, since no matter what the opacity of the texture is, you still can't click through it. You can, however, right click through almost transparent areas, so it might be okay in the end.
So to recap, this is an okay product if you're lazy like me, but if you really like your lindens and are good enough at sculpting (or have a TON of prims to waste), you can do it yourself.
I bought this for L$350 in July 2010.
Awesome set. I'd love to see some new shapes added in, especially a cylinder to make fitting to caves and arches easier but i haven't run into anything I wanted to do with these that I haven't been able to make work.
Really interesting effect..makes interiors of caves dark! I too though would like more examples included with the pack, but overall way cool!
7-18
