Ideally, one day we will be able to place a "Secondlife viewer layer" in any flash movie, apply effects to it in flash, and get this exact effects except from a live SL viewport. Until then...here's a little nifty thing-a-ma-jig.
Cool Logo over water or sky effect using second life. To pull this off, you should ideally be fairly adept at Second life building, graphics in general, video editing, and have some flash experience, but anyone can try it! Results will vary!
To do this you need fireworks or photoshop, some kind of motion screen capture program, land in second life you rent or own, a program that will convert an AVI to an image sequence and allow you to crop/resize (I use after effects), and flash.
1. Open fireworks. Create a new image with a fully transparent background, 256x256. Save it as a PNG file called "completelyclear.png".
2. Now in fireworks, open your logo. Find a logo that is fairly hi rez or in paths/vectors (eps or something).
3. Make sure there is a 10-15 pixel wide edge all the way around the logo. Resize the file to width or height 256 or 512 or 1024 pixels, 72 dpi. The width and height BOTH have to be ONE of those numbers.
4. Make sure the background of the logo is transparent. Now save that as a file called "myLogo.png".
5. Open second life. If you dont know what second life is, or dont have an account there, its all free just visit www.secondlife.com.
6. Go to your land where you can build, with water/sky in the background.
7. Ideally if you have an island, you can open the evironment editor and tweak the sky and water to be precisely what you want.
7B. SAVE your environment, remove all the little change over time thingies, so it freezes right where you want it.
8. create(rez) a cube.
9. Upload the texture "completelyClear.png" to second life. It will cost you 10 lindens. If you have no lindens, you'll have to earn some or put some money into your Second life account.
10. make the entire cube have the texture "completelyClear".
11. Upload your logo. Put it on one side of the cube facing you, with your lovely sky/water background behind it.
12. Stretch, position, rotate the cube with your logo until you have it right where you like it.
13. Once you have a nice little view going, open your motion capture program.
14. It helps here if you have two monitors, but if not its ok. Just try to capture a good area around your little scene in second life to an AVI. Since you'll be looking for a nice repeatable loop, I would recommend capturing around 60 seconds of video even though you wont use it all.
15. Once you have your AVI that you are happy with, save it somewhere.
16. Open Adobe After Effects (or whatever movie editing software you like)
17. IN AE, you create a new composition. Make the composition roughly the aspect ratio you want for your website. I made mine 700x300 pixels.
18. Resize and crop your captured clip so it fits right in the composition with no edges showing.
19. Set the length of the composition to whatever you like.
20. Render a "jpeg" sequence of your file. Its a good idea to save the sequence in its own folder.
21. Open Flash. I use Flash professional CS3 but this should be pretty much the same in anything CS and higher.
22. Create a new file with the exact dimensions you want your flash movie to be.
23. Leave flash, and go to your "image sequence" folder. Try to find a nice series of images in there using "view thumbnails" in folder view, where the last frame in the loop looks fairly similar to the first frame in the loop.
24. Copy those images to a new folder called "import".
25. Go back to flash.
26. Create a rectangle the size of your stage and fill it with red.
27. Convert that to a "graphic symbol" and call it "myLogoGraphic".
28. select the graphic symbol and make it into a "movieClip". Call it "myLogoClip".
29. Double click on your movieClip, then again on your graphic symbol so you are on the graphic symbol's timeline.
30. Go File-->import. Browse to the first file in your folder and select it for import.
31. Flash will tell you the image "appears to be the first of a sequence of images". Select OK or Yes or whatever.
32. Flash will import each image and create key frames to make a sequence for the loop.
33. Go file-->publish. Make sure your publish settings are at least flash player 9/actionscript1/2. Actionscript doesnt matter here, but has to be flash player 9 or above.
34. check it out, your loop. Now you can see what it looks like. If you find the filesize is too large, here are some steps to aleviate that.
35. Leave flash and open fireworks again. Select file-->batch process. Follow the steps to export and save all the files in your "import" folder with lower JPEG quality settings. In my case, I am applying a blur to the image sequence, so I could get away with a very low quality setting, and thus cut the filesize down significantly.
36. Batch all the files to the import folder (overwrite them) so they are lower quality jpegs.
37. Go back to flash and go to the library. Select all the images in your jpeg sequence, and choose "update".
38. Publish your movie. It should look crappy but the filesize should be a lot smaller.
39. Go back to flash. Now, jump back to the stage out of your "graphic symbol" and you can apply live effects to your flash movie clip. WIth the flash movie clip selected, look down at the properties inspector, you should see a "filters" tab.
40. Select filters, and apply a blur effect. Yes, this blurs the logo, but thats ok. we'll add a sharp logo later.
41. Apply other filters as you like, such as brightness or contrast, tinting, colors, texture effects etc. Each one will make the animation run a little slower on some machines, so be prudent depending on your intended audience.
42. On your main stage in flash, add another layer, and import your logo PNG file to that layer. Try to get the letters to line up with the ones in the animation. Depending on the various ocular distortions introduced by SL's viewer, you might have to rejig it a bit.
43. Check the logo overlay image in your flash library. Make sure the output setting is "lossless/png" so it looks nice and sharp.
44. Publish your movie and add it to your website!
Thanks for reading,
