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

What Windlight has done for Second Life residents is re-create the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry will only take his girlfriend to well-lit places for dates, because she looks bad in poor light.

I was still referring to the defaults...you can't just pop over to sunset and go merrily on your way the way you could under the old system. And, personally, I don't turn bright glowing orange when the sun hits the horizon in RL, so I'm not sure why my av should in SL.


I'm not disagreeing with you, I just think the defaults should be usable by those of us who care a bit more about avatar appearance, and fiddling with the environmental editor, optional.


LL is going to do what they want to do, regardless of what we think. They may be creative as hell, but customer service is not their forte.

On a side note, I've talked to several people who have purchased Windlight compatible skins from various places and they couldn't see much difference between those and the other ones.

Some have argued so does Windlight.

Two wrongs, as they say....

Windlight breaks none of my content. Windlight may, under many circumstances (depending upon how it is set) seriously mess with the appearance of the original texture's highlight, color, and shading distribution (the histogram), but the textures have been designed as static fully baked textures to function in a non-procedural rendering environment like SL's. Windlight changes non of those rendering aspects. We do not get subsurface scattering and accurately reflected light off of avatars in Windlight. We didn't before Windlight and we don't now. All we get are essentially brightness and contrast adjustmets based on each polygons angle and position in the SL environment (the UVW). This version of Windlight actually allows people to throttle (eliminate about 95%) those effects though gamma and color adjustments. You set the Gamma at around 1.0 and keep RGB locked while varying the intensity on all settings that directly affect how avatar textures look...

Like This:

So simple. A caveman could do it.

Yeah, that's why this thread exists. We have to drill down into a sub menu and 3 separate dialogues with multiple slider settings just to set our scene up on each login (that's once you have your settings saved).

My bottom line was affected by the new viewer, so I HAD to figure out what settings worked best for avatars. Unfortunately, short of posting them here like this, I can't share those settings with anyone .

Jumps up and down.... I would happily redo every item i have ever made including freebie and retired items if they did this, and then track down every customer i ever had and give them the updated version.

ahahaha too right oh *whew* thanks for that epi reminder

this sounds too complex for the average user. I'm struggling trying to figure out how to do it. I guess when I am logged on will make more sense ..

This sounds even worse .. even after you save it .. you cant just be "set up"?

And what are the chances people looking at you have done half these things?

Yes, wouldn't it be much more convenient for all of us to choose our own defualt settings, and to be able to share them with others (i.e. in an inventory asset).

I have not looked yet, but I know the data probably exists on my hard drive some place, perhaps in a copyable, usable, sharable file format.

The simple transalation of what I said is:

Gamma = 1
R=G=B (white lighting) (see all areas of the middle dialoge that affect R,G,B,I)
Intensity = whatever light intensity makes the avatar look realistic (somthing that doesn't wash it out or bury it in shadow)

Note: There is a Help feature in the Atmospheric Settings for every one of the effects in all of the dialogues that tell you what thier function is.

nice skin by the way, love the eyes!

I think in the short term, the best thing LL can do is make these the default settings for windlight, so this way I know I don't look ugly to most people who don't tweak that stuff:

http://secondsoigne.wordpress.com/2007/11/25/optimising-windlight-for-avatars/

I'm going to submit this on the JIRA as well. I hope it's noticed!

JIRA issue created:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-6425

Please vote on it!

Create your own decent set of presets then, and supply them to JIRA as fix for this issue... so they are provided as defaults instead of current ones you find lacking.

Thanks! It's an unreleased skin (very pale complexion). I can honestly say, Windlight and a little tweaking on my part made my avatar look BETTER!

Right, I'm sure they'd rush right out to to implement that.

LOL yeah exactly ..

Jira is the next best thing to a fax machine that directly feeds into a shredder.

Piffle!

Use your big boy words!

Well, there is only one way to find out. And given they do implement user-provided modifications in the viewer when supplied through JIRA, and that in case of Windlight settings it's just a matter of replacing couple files in sub-directory with new ones they'd receive all ready for use... exactly what makes you think they'd pass on this particular fix? Given it'd mean easy improvement in the area so many people complain about.

Worst case you get nice settings for Nicholaz to put in his version of the viewer. That'd be possible benefit to some, also.

Read above your message, that is what I did.

JIRA is horribly unreliable, but I'm still going to try! Vote!

Yes, it's exactly why i suggested to attach ready to use settings file there

Not liking my own tinkering w/ WL settings,
I tried the ones in your image and wow I didn't even need a face light anymore,
which is kinda weird, 85% of SL is your own view & then hm
"what else everyones' else view might be" *eek*

Not having a clue, but it would be cool if you could export WL settings to other ppls?
Your settings should be a 2nd Default!
Then ppls could either ppls watch or switch to the over medicated scenic views.

Thanks Namssor

oh wait the narci got the better of me, wanted to add in your suggested settings, things aren't too bright or too dark, I was having a problem w/ building in darkness ahem so thanks for that too!