Windlight made my Avatar Ugly. (Includes other short rants)

I don't have access to Flickr from work, so I have no idea what those images look like. Assuming they're good, that doesn't mitigate the fact that the standard presets are incredibly unflattering to avatars. You can put all the work you want into personalizing your own viewing experience, but there's a high probability of still looking like garbage to other people. For any kind of consistency to exist, the base settings (sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight) need to be improved so that our avatars look at least halfway decent without all that tweaking.

Building personal presets should be optional, not required to get any sort of enjoyment out of the platform.

I agree with BP Linden that face lights are really no longer neccessary to eliminate the harsh poly-shading on the avatar under Windlight. Virtually 95% can be removed with the proper Windlight settings.

I also agree with Ann's assesment that avatar realism takes piority over realistic looking environmental background features, and that the default Windlight settings (and many of the others) SUCK for avatars. The truth is...you can have your cake and eat it too. It takes some tweaking, and there are a few compromises (there is definately room for improvement), but the results are pretty darn good for avatar, sky, and water combined once they have been set up well for all conditions.

What we need NOW is a way to globally share the most popular settings, have them remembered through logins, and have hot key combinations we can press to set them without having to drill through sub menus and multiple dialogue boxes.

As for improvements to the avatar mesh - Yeah, it would break almost all content produced thus far for avatars, but what if a new avatar mesh was introduced in addition to the old one? I'm not sure if that's possible, but it would certianly solve the breakage issues as well as stimulate the SL economy.

The point is... yes, you might customise your settings, so you look good on your screen... but not everybody will know how to do it, or will be adjusting the settings the same way, so you might look terrible on THEIR screen.

But of course, we wouldn't know if that was happening. So maybe ignorance is bliss.

It would help if users could share the popular settings globally, but how would you do that? Not everybody reads the blog, not everybody reads the wiki, not everybody reads the knowledge base, only PIOF members can access the forum, and then there are all the non-English-speaking users from other countries... so the best way would be for LL to just change the default settings.

I can easily see it hurting the economy too.

If I heard even a faint whisper that they might possibly consider an avie mesh change that would make current content unusable with the new mesh I'd stop buying clothes since it would essentially be a waste of money.

It would likely take several weeks, if not months, before current content designers are familiar enough with the new mesh to either be able to deliver quality items for it, or have enough inventory (no point in buying a new mesh outfit if there's no decent new mesh skin for example).

If old content can be remapped onto the new mesh, then it's probably not so bad, but if it's a breaking change I don't think you can state that it'll be an economic boom.

This is my major issue. I'm all for people being able to personalize their own experience, but the defaults should actually be usable and they're not. In fact, they're uniformly hideous. Why should it be necessary to tweak and reset and tweak some more if all we really want to do is hang out with friends, explore a bit, and maybe do a little shopping?

And while my priorities do tend to lean towards being more concerned with how Ann looks to me, I still don't want to have to worry about looking like Swamp Thing on other people's viewers unless I'm wearing a Swamp Thing av.

The same goes for monitor calibration, and the myriad of other open source clients that can be downloaded now. People can also disable the lighting effects in the client, so face lights are not a globally synchronized gaurantee either.

I don't think it would be too hard for LL to create a new file type that transfers environmental settings the same way we pass note cards and other content to one another. (Hmmm , a new niche market?)

That would be a good start for LL!

I am a little less enthused by the tweaking windlight to make avs look "good" than some people.

I guess my standard for "good" is pretty high.

Still ..

The defaults should be set up to concentrate on avatars appearance, thats the first thing everyone in SL messes with.

Maybe the technical people know -

Would it be too difficult to simply add 2 new Avatar meshes and keep the old ones?

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Side note: I am never going to be able to take seriously any quotes by Lindens as unprofessionally named a Pastrami and BigPapi

I might actually like Windlight if it we had some decent defaults. I can see how it would be fun to build presets when I wanted a certain look for my picture taking, but I don't want to be forced into it, ESPECIALLY knowing that what I'd done had no effect on what other people were seeing.

That, I know for certain, is an impossiblity. The current UVW layout of the avatar mesh sucks worse than an epileptic tightrope walker. Major changes to the layout would be needed to improve the seams, which are the biggest problem next to one arm and one foot. Come to think of it, you can't walk at all with one arm and one foot!

I personally think the old mesh is so bad it would be worth just scrapping it.

And yes I have a large inventory,

And my whole business is based on the current avatars, so I'd have to redo EVERYTHING.

The longer they wait the more people will be affected and the more things they will own for the old Mesh.


Even if they just added 2 new avatars to use, the old ones would become obsolete quickly. How many people still use non-flexi hair?

Remember, there's currently just ONE mesh for both male and female avatars. Two new gender specific meshes would be nice!

The senior manager of TechSoup, who was a representative at a recent Senate hearing on virtual worlds has an avatar named Glitteractica Cookie

I guess I'm really in the minority here, but I don't think my AVI looks bad in Windlght. I like more shading on the face, to me it seems more natural. After all, we don't all wander around in RL with perfectly smooth faces.

I haven't tweaked my presets much at all, BTW.

Which was ridiculous. But she wasn't representing the company as that.

BigPapi and Pastrami should leave the silly names for when they are off work.

No, but the idea of realistic lighting has been taking to extremes it's not supposed to reach...basically, the light parts are too light and the dark parts too dark. There's nothing 'natural' about the current defaults.

I finally switched to the Windlight viewer yesterday, and noticed the same problem of avatars being a little less attractive.

Part of the problem is that the great new shading and lighting of Windlight does a great job of highlighting the crude avatar geometry, which did not upgrade with the new lighting.

The new "improved" shading seems to overtake some of the help that came with bumpmap use in smoothing out avatar geometry as well.

Since the lighting is different and more varied, your results with things like "beauty lights" will now be more varied.

Also, many skins and textures were skillfully designed with shading in the texture to make up for the lack of shading from lighting. Those are going to be screwed up in the new lighting.

It's clear to me that the Windlight developers think that most users of Second Life come to Second Life just to view the glorious background settings that the Linden Labs people created, and not to interact with people. Thus the high priority on making landscapes look good.

I made the mistake yesterday of buying a new body lighting system that's supposed to be optimized for Windlight. It works much worse than my old face light.

My advice is to live with the uglier avatars in the short term. Hopefully within a month or two, enough hours of content-creator work will have been spent figuring out a way to deal with the new Windlight shading and make avatars look at least as good as they used to, if not better.

Honestly, it's quite amazing that the Second Life residents who create content were able to make avatars look as good as they did, given the crude tools that Second Life gives them to use.

Well. There was nothing "natural" about the old defaults either. There is no point in anyone pretending that the new lighting is "worse" - I actually prefer it all told - the issue is that it breaks existing content which was designed for a previous system. Breaking content is of course the number one "no thank you very much" rule but not one that is exactly... stuck to rigidly by LL.

I'm afraid that I support breaking facelights though. Utter pains in the rear. Perhaps somebody should add a JIRA post for attached lights only affecting the avatar they were attached to.

No, but no one was claiming it was either...the goal of Windlight is to be more realistic, but it fails miserably. And the old lighting DID work better with the avatar mesh.


I'm not pretending...it IS far worse in terms of avatar appearance and that's a big priority for a large percentage of SL Residents.


I'm not sure which content you're referring to, but it does seem to be a problem for not just avatars, but a lot of other textures which looked perfectly nice prior to Windlight's inception.

I'm not really a technical person, but I do know a little about 3D graphics.

More detailed meshes mean more of a strain on system resources. Though Linden Labs doesn't really seem to mind straining system resources for things that make a minor impact for a majority of Second Life users.

Personally, I spend more time in Second Life interacting with people, and not very much time staring at Linden Labs's landscapes. When it comes to making trade-offs between performance and aesthetic, I'd trade a little performance for more avatar aesthetic. I'm not to keen on giving up performance to have glorious landscapes.

The textures and shading are most certainly more of a strain on computer resources than, say, doubling the avatar mesh detail.

It's not something that Linden Labs could do instantly. Making natural looking figures, suspectible to easy morphing, and holding up to animation, isn't easy. But when I used to be more active in the 3D artist community, I knew quite a few people who did such work. It's a matter of hiring a few people to do it and giving them six months or so. Maybe more or less, I don't know whether the simplisticity of Second Life 3D geometry makes a task easier or harder.

On the positive side, new, and more detailed figures could be made with UV maps that are compatible with old skins. Male and female figures could still share the same UV maps (like DAZ does with its Millenium figures, for example).

However, given the difficultly of working with the current avatar UV maps, it might be better to take the opportunity to introduce better UV maps along with better avatars.

Unless extra joints were added, new avatar meshes would be able to use the old animations.

Except for the possibility of making a better UV map for new avatar figures, I can't think of any other reasons that new avatars would create backward compatibility problems.

Improving the lighting and shading of the game just highlights the flaws in the crude avatar meshes. New meshes with a bit more detail could actually make great use of Windlight. The reason that much of the world looks uglier with the upgrade in lighting and shading is because the world's geometry is too crude to take advantage of it.

Geez, so much thought goes into making objects in Second Life look better. How about making the PEOPLE in Second Life look better.

I don't think people need to wait for anything to happen on the content creators end. I personally have checked out most of my content under the new Windlight client and can tweak it to a point where it comes much closer to what I indended it to look like in the first place. I can personally say it's a LOT easier to view skins between SL and Photoshop on my color matched and calibrated dual monitors without having to look at the obvious ugly edges of polygons. Before Windlight I often had to point my avatar away from the sun to eliminate all of the polygonal shading interference.

No, the lighting is not worse in itself - it is better in most circumstances I would say - the lighting makes most skins not designed for it look worse (i.e. the vast majority of them). That is the existing content to which I am referring.

Skins and shaded textures and so on, and the shapes which people used in combination with them, were usually designed to look good under previous systems, which were just as arbitrary in the way they used lighting as Windlight is. However, Windlight has changed the way avatars appear in a way which breaks that. It is quite possible to look reasonable under Windlight but it should not break existing content, as with any other update, which it has to greater or lesser degree.

If true, perhaps we should reserve this "Disable facelights" junk for AFTER skin makers have figured out how to properly compensate for windlight shading.

Otherwise its more like kicking people while they are down.

Well, of course some content creators have already anticipated the Windlight change. And then some content is going to hold up better than other content to the change.

I guess that it's more accurate to say that, when figuring out what content to buy that is "Windlight compatible," I'm going to wait a month or two for other consumers to do the trial-and-error of determining whose content generally looks good under Windlight and whose doesn't.

And I need a month or two anyway to get used to Windlight to figure out what looks good. I spent all yesterday switching back and forth between different body lights systems to figure out what looked best. Sometimes one looked better, sometimes the other looked better. But overall, I made a mistake buying a new "Windlight compatible" lighting system yesterday that wasn't appreciably better than my old lighting system. Based on that mistake, I'm going to play the cautious consumer and let other consumers figure out for me what's going to work well with Windlight and what isn't.

I find this discouraging

Because I have noticed harsher angles/shading in windlight in several slider settings.

If improved skin shading for windlight isn't really going to improve things, thats unfortunate.

Additionally my skin has a seam which is noticably more visible in Windlight than it was before windlight.

Facelights break _other_ people's content by their very nature. I'm afraid I am not terribly sympathetic to this; my first encounter with them was spending ages trying to work out with a customer why a lighting effect just was not working properly. By all means complain that LL has broken something existing, but antisocial guerilla action I will protest.

They don't really work anyway.