Architect Says Second Life's Dynamic Shadows Greatly Enhance Building in SL

Architect Keystone Bouchard (co-founder of the award-winning Wikitecture platform) has been building in SL with dynamic shadows enabled lately, and says they greatly enhance the process: "When you rez and stretch a prim with shadows enabled, it has a much deeper visual impact – more like working with physical materials that have a greater weight, or sense of presence than they do without shadows. For me, it definitely has an impact on the realtime design experience – through a deeper sense of depth and space than non-shadowed prims convey." Question is, how much will shadows change the architecture of Second Life? Image: The Arch Network.

Comments

[Opensource Obscure]

Question is, when will shadows become supported in the main viewer?

They're currently an "experimental functionality only that will not be officially supported" (follow the link and look for Deferred Rendering at the bottom of the page).

What I'd be really interested to learn from Linden Lab is - what percentage of Second Life users are currently using graphic cards good enough to enable Deferred Rendering (that is shadows)?

They should be able to extrapolate this information from their logs.

Related shameless plug, here's a video I made about how to enable shadows - and even more interestingly, Projected Textures - in the current Second Life Viewer 2.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

I don't claim to be a great SL photographer, but I would say that the house in a photo I took (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mel_yeuxdoux/4445345156/) would be vastly less real-looking without shadows.

[Sepp Schimmer]

I have to agree with Melissa, shadows add so much to both the experience and the result of in-world photographing. And now it comes better and more easily than before, not at all the same need of post-processing! I only wish they had added more than just the shadows.

Considering how huge photographing is in SL (just look at the Flickr and other creative SL communities, not to mention the market for poses and other photo related stuff) I wish Linden had embraced photographing as a killer app for SL much more. SL is wonderful for photography already; motive hunt, creating sets, teaming up with others, modeling, exhibiting, sharing - all of that. But it could have been so much better yet.

Alright, windlight was a great step, but it is by no means adequate for more advanced photographing. Haze in windlight is great, but what about out of for example focus blur?

I would love to see an in-world, viewer integrated "SL-R" :) camera, on with with the equivalence to shutter speed and aperture controls, zoom and lenses.