CyFishy's Tips For Noobs #1: How To See What You're Doing
CyFishy's Tips For Noobs #1:
How To See What You're Doing
Your first fumbling steps in Second Life will almost inevitably be with an exquisite view of the back of your avatar's head.
But what if you want to see yourself from the front?
Since Second Life is designed as a visual environment, it really does help to be able to see things. Thus, your experience can be enhanced greatly by mastering the wonders of the camera controls.
"Camera", in this case, refers to the "point of view" that you view the world from on your screen. The camera will follow whatever you have selected as its point of focus. By default, the point of focus is your avatar, so that wherever your avatar goes, the camera shall follow.
The camera can be moved around this point of focus through a couple of different means.
The "training wheels" way to do it is through the Camera Controls option under the View menu. A little controller will appear on your screen that looks something like this:
- The arrows on the left will tilt the camera around the point of focus. The left and right ones will arc the camera around accordingly, the upward arrow will tilt the camera overhead (so you're looking down) and the downward arrow will tilt the camera below (so you're looking up.)
- The plus and minus signs in the middle will zoom the camera in (plus) or out (minus.)
- The arrows on the right will track the camera left, right, up or down, depending on which arrow you click.
If you lose track of where the heck you are, hitting the Escape key will always bring the point of focus back to your avatar.
You can do the same things without the camera controls on your keyboard. (As a matter of fact, if you use these keyboard controls while the camera control is still on your screen, you'll see the corresponding controls highlight as if you're clicking them!)
- Holding down the Alt key while using the arrow keys will arc the camera around on the left and right keys and zoom the camera in and out on the up and down keys. (Up will zoom in, down will zoom out.)
- Holding down the Control and Alt keys will have the same effect with the left and right arrow keys, but the up and down keys will tilt the camera up and down accordingly. (Note to Mac users: use the Control key, not the Command key, since the Command key is already on duty as your substitute left mouse button.)
- Control, Alt and Shift all held together at once (a bit cumbersome, but possible) will set the arrow keys to track left, right, up and down (in the same way the arrows on the right of the camera controls do.)
PS--those of you with rotating wheelie things on your mouses will find that the wheelie will also serve to zoom in and out. I can't tell you much about that, 'cos I'm a MacBook person, but there you are.
So, now you can see your avatar from all possible angles. Pretty neat, huh? But what if you want to focus your camera on something else?
The point of focus can be changed at any time (or even back to yourself) by Alt-clicking on whatever you want to look at. So if you want to look at a sign, you can Alt-click on the sign and angle the camera so you can see it clearly. If you want to observe a statue, you can Alt-click on the statue and look all around it. You can even Alt-click on other avatars in your view, though this can be very disorienting if they get up and walk somewhere else, as the camera will follow right after them. Once again, if your camera gets dragged somewhere and you need to retrieve it, hitting Escape will bring the point of focus back to you.
If you want even finer focus of your camera, you can combine the key combinations mentioned above with clicking and dragging.
- Alt-dragging will move the camera around as you move left and right, and zoom the camera in and out as you move it up and down.
- Control-Alt-dragging will also move the camera around at left and right, and tilt the camera up and down as you move the mouse up and down.
- Shift-Control-Alt dragging will track the camera in whatever direction you move the mouse.
There's also a viewing mode called Mouselook, but that's for another tutorial. In the meantime, go and see what there is to see!
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