An alternative to facelights?

I rarely used facelights in the past because I could always set my day to sunset or sunrise and it looked halfway decent. With Windlight the sunset and sunrise settings wash out all skin detail and make you orange too. Terrible! Setting the environment time slider closer to noon gets rid of the intense orange light but it increases the shadows on your face. Not good! What to do?

I created a sky preset that brings back the ideal lighting of the old sunsets/sunrises. The lighting is much more even and your face looks good when facing in any direction.

Here's the preset:

http://www.zshare.net/download/10647674a0755219/

The file is called 'appleblossoms.xml' and it's basically a text file. To use it, just download and place the file with the the other sky presets in the location (assuming you have windows):

C:\Program Files\SecondLife\app_settings\windlight\skies

Then just load SL and go to world->environment settings->environment editor. Click on advanced sky and choose appleblossoms in the list of sky presets. The sky will automatically change. No need to click save or change or anything. Just close out of all the settings windows.

This is not a permanent change and you can go back to the default easily. I think you can set it permanently using the day cycle editor but that's your choice.

So what do you think? Good/Bad idea? Too difficult?

But it won't make your face look 'nice' to anyone else.

Great tip Bree .
Certainly a usable work around untill "The Company" give us an easier way to transfer WL settings.

But it could make everyone else's face look nice to us. I can see a new tab in our profiles, Environment Settings. So we not only get to teleport to friend's location we should be able to offer our environment settings too.

I am warming a little to the colors in Windlight, even the orange ones, but don't tell LL.

Neither do facelights.

Downloaded it-- this is very nice, thanks! It'll come in very handy for taking pictures.

Thanks Bree it's pretty close to Namssors', yah and so it begins!
Trading settings!

Just to add a little more to a great thread . Anyone that D/L's and uses this cfg can make changes in world that save to this file and then copy/paste to a notecard in world and send to their freinds.

Said freinds C/P to a .txt document (on desktop)and rename/change the extention to .xml and place it in the windlight/skies folder.

Don't forget to make a copy of the old file incase you wish to revert.

On a mostly unrelated note; keeping in mind that at one point all prims could be made to glow, am I the only one that laughs hysterically at making a penis attachment glow? Seriously, it never gets old.

Nice way to share settings Bree. Much better than my screen shot approach . I guess I'll put mine up on my web site in a day or two

http://www.secondskinlabs.com/Downloads/downloads3.html

I guess I totally missed your previous posting about it! And yeah it is a text file so I guess someone can just save it and rename it as an xml. If only we could just share the whole thing in-world.

Beautiful! Very nice.

I've created at least 30 sky presets that avatars look fine in. The real trick is often the placement of the sun itself. This is something I didn't even consider until I had done tons of settings.....then it hit me....duh! I can just move the dam sun until the lighting is more appealing. This is especially handy when doing pics and you want a certain scene with the sun at a certain angle... too bad we can't do that IRL.... be much better sunsets here on the east coast!

I've thought about posting a bunch of my pre-sets for folks to plug-in as well....but I have no idea how to do it. But then I realized the obvious.... the sky presets really only effect the person using them....so who really cares. LOL

But.....if anyone is interested I'd be more than happy to share the ones I've created....or even give a crash course in the settings.....I've done it already for a few folks and usually people are surprised and delighted at how simple it actually is. And ya can't screw it up....ya only save a sky setting if you are happy with what you've done.....otherwise it doesn't matter what you do....you can always go back to default.

False. It was an avatar using a facelight that caused me to find out what skin she was wearing because the face looked so awesome. Wasn't the skin, it was the light.

And - I've been approached by others asking about my skin, and it was the light and the way it made the face look that they were drawn to.

Thanks you Jax

I'm living SL in perma day now, when I use to live in sunset land,
be nice to have a WL norm of all 4? phases of the day as presets to load *cough* where your avie looks as good as if you had a face light, possible?

I understand they sell good creams now as an alternative to face lifts .

Reading these posts makes me want to have a randomize setting as in the shape slider (or as in most software synthesizers). It would be fun to hit random until you find something you like and then tweak it.

Maybe there is one and I haven't found it yet.

I think so. As I am playing with the advanced sky settings I find that the setting called sun/moon color is THE cause of all shadows on the avatar. If you turn that down to .01 for all the sliders underneath you pretty much get a flat shaded avvy. Which is what people wear facelights for. You probably need to adjust the ambient light and maybe some other settings to make the sky and clouds look better if you do it.

The thing to know is that under the Day Cycle Editor you have a bunch of sky presets that it plays throughout the SL day. If you were to make an alternate set of sky presets with 'sun/moon color' turned down you could replace all the presets in the day cycle editor and have a flat shaded avatar all the time. This saved day cycle should work even after a restart (if I recall correctly from the last time I tried it).

Thanks Namssor

"This archived file contains two Windlight presets that work well for viewing skins without harsh highlighting, shadows, and false color values."

http://www.secondskinlabs.com/Downloads/downloads2.html
Click hit Next> Downloads (page 3)
WL_settings_v1.zip (1.46 kb download)

From Bree Giffen "To use it, just download and place the file with the the other sky presets in the location (assuming you have windows):

C:\Program Files\SecondLife\app_settings\windlight\skies

Then just load SL and go to world->environment settings->environment editor. Click on advanced sky and <*edit* in this case> choose Optimal Skin in the list of sky presets. The sky will automatically change. No need to click save or change or anything. Just close out of all the settings windows.

This is not a permanent change and you can go back to the default easily. I think you can set it permanently using the day cycle editor but that's your choice."

Have a look!

I notice on login, Preset has to be chosen again and on some teleports to diff sims.