The default lighting is terrible

Hey everyone try this. Make a prim cube. Make it hollow. Color it solid white. Set daylight settings to mid-day. What do you see? All 4 sides are gray. Now try sunrise and sunset. 3 sides gray and 1 side red. Try going into environment settings and change the day to 9am. A little better. 3 sides gray and 1 side white.

What does this mean? If you use the default sky lighting your house is 100% to 75% in shadows unless you have a pyramid. Your avatar is being lit the same way.

There are fixes for this by going into the advanced sky but should we have to do this?

Windlight makes pretty skies and water, but the lighting is totally crap and unrealistic.

is this why everything looks pink at sunrise or sunset??

Yes

I also think it has messed up my seams due to artifacting.

Sure we can fix these lighting and artifact things on our client side, but what is everyone else seeing? I hope they tweak Windlight to make the default a tolerable universal norm.

I don't have any idea what people are talking about with this. Default isn't perfect on my screen....but it is no way that bad. It's has got to be graphics card issues because I always read these complaints about WL and I never see these lighting issues. I do, however, know how to navigate and edit the environment and I have an entire day/night cycle saved so my default is always my saved cycle. It's a bit cumbersome at first, to learn how to set it up.....but it's logic...it's a computer program....so once you get the basic logic....it's really very simple.

I agree that there needs to be a more user friendly standard default so those without WL savy don't have to be bothered.....but, on the whole....SL is all about creating your own world and having the environment editer is just one more cool advancement to that end. I'm pretty good at teaching the basics if anyone wants to grab me in-world. I'd be happy to help ya out.....I've helped quite a few folks already who were just totally stoked when they realized they could fix their lighting woes and make SL look 100 times better.

The WindLight lighting is very realistic. Sounds to me like what you're really bothered about is the fixed sun settings. You'd probably be more content if they didn't position the sun along SL's building axis. Forcing sunset or sunrise positions the sun directly at either end of the X axis.

Although the sun at midday seems to be in the wrong position in the sky. It's as though the sun is always rotating around the X axis. and that planet SL isn't tilted on its axis like our beloved Earth.

But yeah, better fixed sun settings will fix your issue.

The midday setting in default is really dark, I expect it was cranked down a little too much in response to complaints that it was too bright previously. Trying to build something with dark textures in middday at default levels is very challenging, I ended up adjust some of the lighting settings so I could at least see what I was working on. There has to be a happier medium between scorching bright and cloud-cover dim.

when I first joined about 6 months ago, the graphics were decent for a 3D cartoon game. The representation of Scenery was excellent and the lighting was better than good. 2 Months ago they destroyed all the good features of the overall scenery in favor of Better looking Sky and Water. To a lifeless person who just sits around in front of a screen and admires themself as their AV sits on a poseball, the new look is better .

For those who are building stuff, or operating Vehicles or are in the Virtual Land Business this new look has completely Butchered all the fun and value of scenery.

I used to be able to zoom around in my plane and see the scenery and building outlines 2 sims away, now all I see is Water and more Water and clouds.

My firrst few pieces of Land I purchased were super expensive, because back then they had a view which had a value. The new look made my cheap mountain primspace look like it is its own Island surrounded by water ..just like the expensive Ocean Front property. ( which are now all basically worthless becuse all land basically looks the same.

Discuss!

This is why, every time I log in with one of the Windlight versions, I log out within an hour or two and go back to my really old 1.18.5.3 version.

This is why the first thing I do on logging in is set sun to "midday" and I leave it there.

Riddle me this Riddler.. how do I get that to work?.. I tried reinstalling it and am too dumb to make it work..

The only way to run the 1.18.5.3 version is by putting the Nicholaz viewer over it -- his BE-w version.

However, you can also download and install the 1.19.0.1 version - I think that is the correct number. It is still officially supported by LL and is non-windlight. Note - to get this to work if you already have the 1.19.1.x version installed - you *might* need to install to a separate directory or maybe even uninstall the newer version. I'm not sure on that because I have always installed from lowest number upwards.

Me too

I actually still force my setting to midday most of the time even with the 1.18.5.3 version - I like full lighting to see things for normal operation. I do sometimes set my world to another setting if I want a certain type of picture or a certain mood - like dancing under the midnight setting.

And that's the problem. When displaying items for sale, there's no way of making it so that everyone can see the things properly, and many textures do look an awful lot different in different lights. Before windlight, it wasn't a problem; after windlight it's incredibly crap.

Yay! This weeks Windlight thread!

I bloody love Windlight. I make use of a ton of preset lighting effects depending on the situation or location, and the world gets to look as I choose. Perfect.

I do this too, the other settings (except midnight) are just to bright to me. Does anyone else get bothered by the glare on everything in the sunrise and sunset setting? It just seems REALLY bright to me - very "sunspotty" for lack of a better phrase.


I guess what I need to do is make custom settings but I'm lazy.

Turn off the windlight settings on the current viewer:

http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/sl/index.php/Windlight_Settings

Discovered this week that the textures-on-avatar viewer that I have doesn't know about Windlight, which means that even with checking my textures there during item creation... I still end up re-uploading three different variations of an image file to get the look I originally wanted.

I suppose I'll adjust to it eventually, but... bit frustrating at the time... ^^

With a computer that's capable of showing full WindLight features, the lighting effects are pretty good. Some times of day are better than others, of course.
Also, there's a big library of advanced pre-sets to choose from or you can put together your own sky settings and save them.

The only thing that spoils the graphics is the lack of shadows. Shading, yes, but no cast shadows. But I feel in my bones and my mesh that one day we'll have nice shadows.

yep its terrible.

what else is new?

There is lag in Second Life.

I 2nd that!