Nalates has a good tutorial for and background on the Advanced Lighting Model, which Linden Lab recently added to Second Life to give users more and better options for illuminating a scene. Trouble is, she says, is many people still don't take advantage of it in their SL locations: "We can’t get any information on how many people are using ALM. We’ve been asking for a couple of years now. So, creatives and merchants have some hesitancy about building for ALM. Understandable. But, I ran with ALM enabled on my old machine and still got 10 to 30 FPS in most cases. Shadows killed me, not ALM." So she makes the in-depth case for adding ALM here. Whatever you do, don't do lighting like this:
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Face lighting is the kiss of death to sim builders. You get one of these avatars walking around your build like cars with headlights turned up full destroying any atmosphere for any player withing 20m. The ultimate vanity "Hey forget the build, Look at me"
Posted by: JohnC | Saturday, October 08, 2016 at 03:06 AM
Well. regarding facelighting, most people don't know how to edit a facelight to use ALM ( projected lighting) and also use subtle lighting controlling intensity, distance, falloff etc. Thus it gives it a bad name. It can be very useful for some pics as it can be misused as well. Getting the pitchforks out on facelights only reveals the writers ignorance.
Posted by: Connie Arida | Monday, October 10, 2016 at 04:35 AM
According to Google Advanced Lighting was introduced into the SL viewer (and shortly after in Firestorm and other 3rd party viewers) over three years ago -- so it is NOT "recently added".
I am not going to comment on the projected lighting facelight idea except to note that a LOT of folks do not use the region settings and a lot do not use ALM.
I actually test my shop areas inworld (and sometimes in events and venue when I remember) at midnight with and without ALM to see what things look like. It isn't great, but you can certainly find things, Hopefully people learn how to change their light settings fairly early after entry into world :D.
I do wear a facelight all the time (often turned off) and mine has settings which include dim. I even made a personal "dim" version -- lowering the settings below the original DIM version. It is an integral part of fashion photography. I doubt too many bloggers and photographers go without one if they journey outside their studio.
So I am in there with Connie on this topic.
Mine facelight of choice is the CG Facelight 4.1 which must be floating around still somewhere -- yep, free on the Marketplace AND it is full perm once opened so you can change the script to make an even dimmer version like I did.
Posted by: Chic Aeon | Monday, October 10, 2016 at 09:32 AM
"Getting the pitchforks out on facelights only reveals the writers ignorance" I guess you have never been outside SL or you would know that only in SL is something so ridiculous as a face light used or needed. It is because of the dreadful lighting engine, even the so called advanced form, that people feel they need to add to it by sticking lights to their avatar. And if you had ever spent ages lighting a sim of any quality you would know that any extra lighting at all is going to ruin it, no matter how subtle it might be. But I long ago realized the pointlessness of pointing these things out in a world where to the majority of users sims are seen as back drops for fashion shoots and clothes designers blogs.
Posted by: JohnC | Tuesday, October 11, 2016 at 09:28 AM
The big difference that Advanced Lighting made to facelights is that the classic lighting only handled a limited number of light sources, and added them together differently. And some of the old facelights have way more facelights than that limit. Go to ALM and the results are horrible.
Facelights can be subtle, echoing the lighting set-ups photographers used, to just make a face look better. Most are crude.
Posted by: WolfBaginski | Tuesday, November 28, 2017 at 01:27 PM