lighting on avatars is ugly

wow its ugly. A step in the right direction but now we all look scary.

The lighting I've played with so far looks fantastic! Can you post a snapshot so we can see?

how it falls on the face is what i mean. its like when you put a flash light on your face to look spooky. thats how it looks under at noon except upside down

the lighting is fantastic


hush now..

Change the intensity.

It does take a lot of work to control the shadows, just as with real lights in RL. I worked for hours on a stage tonight to get it just right... ended up having lights above, below the stage and in the stage itself at different intensities.

Lots of trial and error.. but the results are well worth it!

Under Preferences -> Graphics Detail, do you have Avatar Vertex Program checked?

I have to agree. Maybe it's just my much beloved Munchflower skin, but I look like a damn racoon with the new lighting - and I have a medium skin tone.

The best thing to do is make sure we never advance from what we had in SL 1.0. That is the best thing to do.

My friend looked old, dirty, and abused with them.

all skins look messed up in some lighting conditions - personally "noon" i hate on all mine.

but that was the same before and after the update

http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=72229&sort=PictureID+desc&Name=Richie+Waves


I think they look cute as a button.. but then if your avatar was pugfugly in the first place then its gonna look worse in the lighting!

I think this has a lot to do with the intensity and angle of the light. A very intense light tends to create a lot of harsh contrasty shadows, and a low angle will create an unnatural effect. I think the same thing happens in RL too. Try reducing the intensity of your lighting, and place it in more natural positions... I think you will like what you see.

exactly. It's more realistic now. This does mean that at some times of 'day' you may be seen in an 'unflattering light', literally.

But the old system was very, very, very broken.

When (if) the shaders come back, the contrast won't be as stark, either. Early versions of 1.9.1 / 1.10 dealt with this better. But details have to be worked out on more lights + shaders.

I think the major problem is that the skin used to make a huge difference in how the avatar looked when light sources were on it. Now with the improved lighting the shadows make the actual look of the face depend on the shape of the face, I think everyone needs to go play with the face sliders for a bit with a strong shadow on them

i look terrible on my goth skins with it =( but my normal skins... damn watch out ladies. there's a new hottie in town. =P

the lighting im talking about is just the sun. Sure its more like RL but the avatars are not like RL.. I mean if our AVs were walking around RL we would look like freaks. Also in RL, sunlight is bounced off walls and the floor so that when we walk around we dont have deep shadows on our face. so SL is very unrealistic to me

Hmmmm ... I am not seeing much of a difference during the day with just the sunlight Wolfgang. Now, I did see a difference in an early preview, where I think they had more shader stuff working. Is anybody else having a problem?

ya, at noon I look goofy, can't get the mouth shape right. But originally my cheeks looked pretty bad too, and with some slider sliding that was taken care of.

My avatar looks fine.

Thing is I built my avatar with sliders only and am using no custom skin.

I do agree that the new, more realistic lighting will often react with painted shadows and highlights in a less than flattering way. Skins artificially create shadows with darker hues giving hints about where the light comes from. When you have the light source coming from the opposite direction, the shadows will look weird.

Also if your light source is centered below the face expect the flashlight-under-chin spooky look to happen.

Light in the real world is like that, particularly when dealing with taking photos. Flourescent light is worst; daylight seems to be the best.

Turning off "Avatar Vertex Program" doesn't really help. Even without the vertex program on, my avatar still looks different -- and it's not a change for the better, in my opinion. Yes, noon always looked bad, but now (IMO) it looks worse.

No, it's just your avatar. I'm sorry.

damn you guys are never satisfied OF COURSE its different from reality, the reality light laws are muuch more complex, SL has to render 10/20 images per second, a calculation of realistic lights in 3dsmax can take from 5to 30 minutes for a single one