Rant: Colored Light and Prim Attachments

<mutter, growl, snap> Why, oh why, do prim attachments so strongly take on the colors of the light around them? Something brown really shouldn't ever look like the sun, no matter how yellow the light above it is. It's just not realistic. And WHY in SL do club owners and other builders feel the need to make every crazy-colored object in their builds Light objects? All it does is increase the number of black-haired residents to a ridiculous rate because it's the only color that lets you use prim hair without it Glowing all day long.

<mutter, mutter, razzle frazzle, pull out hair>

...

<mutter>

...

Okay, I'm done.

I kinda wish prims and avatars would light more alike than they do now, since my av's face is a combination of avatar and prims, and it looks kinda funky under strong light, when the prim parts are lit completely different... *takes a breath* ... from the av parts.

From my experience, if the texture of a prim is white or another light color, certain SL lighting will cause it to lighten to that shade regardless of any darker overlay color that may have been applied. However, if the texture color was brown or black, or even flesh tone, SL lighting will only lighten to that particular color.

For example, if you want your hair to stay brown, use a brown texture. Using the default gray texture tinted brown will allow the hair to lighten to the gray color.

Lukas is dead on here...if you are having light bleed problems with prims that have no texture, but only use color. Just make a few monocolored textures and use that instead. It will make a huge difference.

You could try turning off local lighting as well?

Might as well cut off your nose to spite your face. You fix one problem by loosing out on a lot of detail and immersion that local lighting brings.

I'm not trying to be snide here, honestly. I wish LL would fix local lighting more... They need, for example, to impliment a maximum distance or something, so that one moron can't ruin an entire sim from their 512 plot of land. But Local Lighting as is works well, and you loose out on a lot of if you turn it off.

Not to mention, of course, that even if I turn off local lighting on my own computer, I still look like my head is about to go supernova to anyone else I see.

And while colored textures is an interesting work-around, that I will certainly try to use in my own creations, it doesn't exactly help with purchased attachments...

I have local lighting turned off, but I still have objects set as "light" objects because they brighten up considerably. Makes giant serpents better.

Really? On all 3 of my pc's it looks truly bloody awful. I turn it off because it ruins the look of the whole game. Av's look cartoony and over contrasted, and objects just look blurry with nasty.

Even on my uber expensive 256mb Geforce Ultra.

actually another issue would be how much lighitng lags the client.

Its probably the single biggest cause of slow framerates in SL.

As to the specific way lighting affects avatars, and attachments (havin abit of experience here it is possible to correct for it.) the problem is when you use 'color' in the texture dialog to color an object... that color you select is applied 'before' the light is calculated.. and a strong enough light can over burn it to white 1.0, or burn some colors but not others (aka burning blue to max, while not burning green so instead of aqua hair, its suddenly medium green)

the way you get around it is to use an actual color *TEXTURE* rather than color in the dialog. the texture color applies *after* the lighting and will not 'burn' like the dialog color will. aka a texture that is 50% grey.. will NEVER be brighter than 50% gray, under *ANY* light. whereas an actual object thats white textured but then is dialog picked to 50% gray, will be solid white under strong light.


but yes overall lights in SL need work, badly... or people need to redo the way they think about them... every light casts a ray to every object around it in SL. with lots of lights, and lots of people around them, this gets very *VERY* slow... the best way around it currently is to turn local lighing off (in busy areas this can take framerates from 3-5 fps to 20 or more)... but it shouldn't *HAVE* to come to that. Rather than have 25 different small lights in a room, have *ONE* larger central light that will illuminate everything. it will look better, and cause *ALOT* less lag for people in your build (*AND* your neighbors.... remember 25 lights on your property will lag everyone who has it within their draw distance, not jus you)