I Can Turn Off Your Stupid Facelight!

Most don't even know how they themselves look!!

The "recommended settings" usually turns off local lighting. No local lighting = no facelights. I guarantee you that all those people you see with bazillion-watt facelights, griefer-types excluded, have absolutely no idea how they look.

If you turn off peoples' tacky taste, how do you know who has tacky taste?

(For those worried about different viewers "now" seeing different things, compare your view to another computer's at a different fps, or on a different isp, things like particles, lighting, textures loading, animations, even where you appear to be, sculpties, object rotations are all TOTALLY different on others' viewers.

For the longest time I didn't see any poofers at all, I'd just have gray squares obscuring the view until they faded away, which was pretty ridiculous actually. I've made an art piece for Burning Life with an effect that people with lower FPS's will unfortunately totally miss, it just won't exist for them!

I always thought this was the reason people wearing facelights as bright as the direct sun, which totally wash out their faces of all shading, detail and color did that, namely, their computer renders it differently?)

I will enjoy this ability however, I remember being at a dance where one person's face light flickered and flashed as she spun, starting to give me a headache--I had to turn off all lights to ease the pain , I was so glad when she TP'd away sadly.

the nice thing is...


now we do not HAVE to deal with it, we can just turn off the facelights

(which cannot be done if it is to remain an environement the user can control)

Well put. I agree. What draws me to SL in the first place is the fact that I have control over my environment (and wasn't that LL's intention all along) I don't really worry all that much about how others see me.....though I do indeed use the dimmest face light possible. I had no idea just how totally obnoxious they could be until I was at Mexico2 the other day and was doing a shoot in a beautiful foggy evening setting I had created......suddenly out of nowhere there's this blinding light on my screen LOL
I panned out (at first thinking something had gone horribly wrong with my windlight lol) and there was this woman 10 meters or so away who was lit up like she'd just touched a high voltage wire. I have never seen body/face lights that intense before.....and now I can totally see why it would drive others nuts LOL

I just laughed and made a joke about it suddnely getting so bright while I was trying to take night shots.....and she wandered off.....no big deal....

Well, yes...I care about how I look to me. I also care about how I look to others. But how's a girl to KNOW? Cripes, you could be looking at me in wireframe...and what's the good of spending all that money on skin and clothes THEN?

Oh! Happy thought. Qie's CamCaster gadget. Right now, I think it only shows you the other person's viewpoint...but I wonder if it could be scripted to get their viewer settings too?

I told you so...

/327/99/269269/11.html#post2066362

... and it's probably only a slightly longer wait before we get the ability to trade Windlight settings as actual assets, not as clumsy note cards.

But unless there becomes a fairly "standard" setting its just going to be a chaotic mess.

I wondered about that, too. When your see somebody with a facelight so bright that their face is nothing but a white circle with eyes in it, you kinda wonder what they were thinking. I suppose maybe they've significantly altered their Windlight settings, which makes the light not as bright to them? Because with some people it's just ridiculous.

I bet a whole lot of this problem would be avoided if folks who used facelights would set the light radius only high enough to light up their face, with an appropriate falloff setting. If your facelights are hovering 1m in front of you, why on earth do they need to have a light radius of 10m? That makes absolutely no sense.

Ya, that's pretty true. I only really worry about how I look, and given the skin I use plays very nicely with Windlight. I might let someone know if they have an attachment that isn't fitting them well, or if they accidently left on attachment or clothing layers, but otherwise I don't much worry about it. I will also let folks know if their face lights are washing them out, but mainly so they know.

I tend to worry myself more about what a avatar does than what they look like, really.

i think people in SL who complain about bad windlight lighting don't look at RL lighting enough >_<

in RL lighting isn't perfect every second of the day. in RL sometimes your 'face' doesn't look perfect outside 'cause the sun is positioned in a way that's casting strange shadows on your face. Or the lamp over at your mother-in-laws house is casting a sickly colour light that's making your otherwise fantastic shirt look, not so fantastic.

Lighting is weird sometimes in the real world. Dunno why people can't deal with 'odd times a day casting weird shadows' in SL ... the same they do in RL..

i guess it's because in SL you can actually see your face. In real life.. you don't get a third-person's view of your face, so you probably don't know how awful lighting is hitting your face sometimes in RL.

i find windlight lighting way more realistic than previous viewer versions. Face lights are silly, to me. And i'm really glad i can turn them off.

As an aside.... i also don't get why people need to put a 10 meter radius on their "face light". why not a 1 meter radius? it's not like your face light is 10 meters away.. why does it need to light people up across the room? :-\ i mean if people really need to use one... why does it have to be such a high intensity and high radius?

is it just that people are too lazy to learn how to tweak the light-settings options?

I have a lower end graphics card and I don't even get the Advanced sky option unless I go in and change my graphics preferences to Custom. And, sure, I can do that, then tweak the sliders so I'm still getting detail on the things that are important to me without giving my computer a hissy, but what about someone whose computer is barely up to the task of running SL? What are their options, aside from the often not feasible 'upgrade'?

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that people who hate facelights will no longer have to look at them, but I do get tired of the inherent disdain which seems to go along with, "Why don't you just do xyz with Windlight?" As if we're silly because we can't or won't take that route.

Each feature in SL is a small step forward (hopefully). SL has plenty of competition just around the corner, and there is no "standard" setting in reality, just better rendering. It doesn't take a genius to deduce that virtual world designers are attempting to make things more realistic through better rendering techniques. Some may argue Second Life is an exception to that rule, but if it truely is (and I don't believe so), then we won't have to worry about facelights, Windlight, low poly avatars, or SL because we'll all move on to better virtual worlds, and I don't think they'll have the virtual equivalent of flashlights to compensate for bad rendering in them.

And I think people who talk about how realistic Windlight lighting is don't look at enough RL lighting. Real lighting casts odd shadows, yes, but it rarely makes you look diseased, like WL can, and it's never in my life turned my face pink or orange...a bit rosy or golden, yes, but certainly not to the extreme WL does with my av.

But, speaking of realism...Second Life is NOT real life. If we want to be flatteringly lit at all times, so what? How is that unreasonable? Builders want their creations as perfectly lit as possible, yes? For some of us, our avatars ARE our primary - and perhaps only - creations. The motivation is the same.

There is that. I think windlight's default lighting is pretty realistic, and that's where I keep it. I seem to remember one big complaint being that in "sunset" mode, peoples' faces and objects looked orange. I was reminded of this the other day when my RL alt was walking by the beach as the sun was setting. I looked around at the people there, and noticed that all their faces were...orange.

.... For fun and prizes. (^_^)y

I had the same response when I was reading those posts. I live in California and we're known for our 'golden' sunsets. Spend a day in San Francisco taking photographs and you'll see a lot of the same light, color, and shadowing you see in SL. Maybe... That's their influence? (^_^)

Heck... My parents remember a time when a blue sky over LA was a rumor. (^_^)y

Like Dakota said.. i've also seen peoples skin go very orange at certain times of day in RL. But perhaps where you live in the world you don't get the same sort of lighting effects that happen during sunrise and sunset (or perhaps you are not often awake at these times of day).

i, like Dakota, find the default windlight settings far more realistic than previous versions of SL. not perfectly realistic, we aren't there yet... but a heck of a lot closer.

In RL... builders aren't always getting the 'perfect' lighting for their structures either. i dunno.

i've NEVER seen an avatar look diseased in windlight lighting. Nor have i ever seen a (well or decently made) shirt look hideous in windlight. Nor have i ever seen a build look awful in windlight. i've seen builds look better at certain times of the day.. my skin looks better at certain times of the day in windlight than it does in others... Sure.. but i've seen more hideous lighting from face lights than any default sun-cycle in windlight.

But.. this might come down to computers. Maybe some people have some really crappy computers that are rendering light in a horrible way that i just don't see on my more high-end machine.

(as an aside, in RL my face looks BEST in the lighting in my bathroom. It's like.. perfect lighting. Every other lighting is subpar. but it is silly to think i should carry my bathroom lighting around with me all day. ~)

Well yeah the face lights are to compensate for the horrible problems in the mesh.

If LL came out with a better Avatar mesh then no one would need them.

not sure why you have issues with windlight (is your system lowball on the sl preferences?)

I recently upgraded my vid card, still not top of the line by any means, but WOW what a difference

I turned on all the windlight settings with the fancy water etc etc and WOW, it did not make my avatar look sick, if anything it made her look better

Hmmm. I ALREADY crash into people and disrupt events.

The ultimate solution: create a selectable prim attribute that controls whether a prim can occlude light. I think it's funny that at night, if the lights are on inside my house, I can stand outside next to the (dark) wall and be completely lit up.

With this feature, people could use facelights all they wanted, because they can surround every side of the facelight prim except the side toward their face with a transparent-textured prim that stops the light from shining anywhere else but on their face. Problem solved!

It would also make flashlights more realistic. Right now, flashlights act like lanterns.

Sorry, no such luck: there's no way for the (standard) viewer to share its settings with a script.

There's so much in flux right now, regarding what gets rendered and how, it's not surprising that there are such diverse user options. This not just a matter of user preference, but of graphics card capabilities. Some *mumble* years ago, the choices would have been 3D or not, so it's better to face these current choices. But a tremendous amount of content is or will soon be obsolete, facelights being just the most glaring (hah!) example of the day.

Consider baked lighting textures. *Huge* amounts of time and effort went into making those, often custom for each surface of a build. Once what's now high-end graphics capabilities saturate the mainstream and everybody can see what the privileged few can now glimpse in the shadow draft viewer, baked lighting will look really stoopid. As will most every high-end skin on the market now.

Indeed, the changes wrought by shadows and pixel lighting will dwarf the effects of WindLight and a much-needed new avatar mesh, combined.

Nowhere. Thanks to open sourcing you can't have a common view, really. I'm using an 18.0 Nicholaz Viewer. No windlight, No voice, and the old comm window. I am quite happy with it's stability and graphics, I wouldn't want to be forced to give it up. I would have been out of SL a long time ago if those alternate viewers weren't out there.

*snickers* In RL, viewing the world isn't the same for every person. If I took off my glasses, the world would be a very color mass of blurs in the distance and up close (like a hand's width) from my face would be all that is sharp. Yeah, so rendering in RL sucks for me far more than it does in SL.

I admit I do prefer to keep the defaults, except when I'm shopping or building. Then I set it to midday and leave it. I'm glad to see this new feature in the debug settings, because it means people who need the face lights can still use them, while I don't have to see it.

And yes, a lot still use facelights because the avatar mess leaves a lot of odd shadows on the face, no matter what time of the day you set it at.

...or the people who walk around with 10 lights attached. The viewer only supports 6 max.