How to get a perfect view from your Second Life home

Are you tired of looking at your neighbour's unsightly build or some other object on the landscape that is making the view from your own home less than perfect? Here's a great tip on how to get rid of them to get your perfect view...

I wish I had know this tip years ago! I only came across it on the Second Life forums this year and am so glad I did. However, it only works in the Firestorm viewer, not the Second Life viewer. If you haven't got Firestorm it's easy to download and install and has a lot of great features (including sky and environment settings) that the Second Life viewer doesn't have, so it's well worth getting, in my opinion.

Okay, so here's the tip: In the viewer you can derender any object you don't wish to see (people too! Very useful for shopping events...). As an example I'll derender this rock:

Right click and from the pie menu that appears select More>More>Derender. Under the Derender options you will see 'Temporary' and 'Blacklist'

Temporary: the object will remain derendered for your current log in session. When you next log in it will appear again.
Blacklist: The object will remain derendered every time you are logged in (unless you remove it from the blacklist).

That's pretty cool! So in this example I chose 'Blacklist' so as to show you how to remove it from the blacklist. You can see in the picture below that the object has 'disappeared':

To see which objects you have blacklisted go to menu World >Asset Blacklist

The Asset window will open listing all the objects by name, region, date and permanency (and you can sort these categories by clicking the title). If you had selected the Blacklist option there will be a tick under 'Permanent'. If you selected Temporary there will be no tick.

From here you can remove the blacklisting by selecting the item and clicking the 'Remove Selected' button at the bottom of the window.

The object name and information will be removed from the Asset Blacklist will now be visible inworld again. Voila!

I found this really useful for my houseboat area. When you get a Linden home, or if you are in a more crowded mainland area,  it's quite possible that the view might not be exactly what you want, and there may never be a home with that perfect view, so this helps to getting toward that goal. 

I wanted a better view from the top deck of my houseboat, and didn't really like overlooking a neighbouring one. So I selected the whole houseboat and everything in it (click one item for example the houseboat and then click and drag a bounding box around the houseboat to select everything in it), and derendered the lot. I now have my perfect view all the time!

You can see the full thread about this topic over at the Second Life Forums.