Walls with Lighting effects

I see a lot of wall sets that have lighting effects and am curious if that makes a building look more realistic in your eyes or more goofy?

Most people do not fix their sun in a certain spot pemanently, and the in world lighting makes them look unrealistic most of the time.

what are your thoughts?

To me they are too unrealistic to use them. I only use them on request.

It is weird anyways, in a dungeon for instance, beneath a castle, you stil see the effects of the daylight cycle.

Do you mean baked shadows, or do you mean full-bright or glow?

If you mean baked shadows and lighting, then I love them when they're used in an enclosed space, such as a skybox like the Lodo Loft:



In more open spaces, where you have more visual clues as to where the sun is, I think they work best when used more sparingly (such as mostly-enclosed rooms).

I am talking about any lighting effects that are part of the texture, not glow or brightness.

I've seen baked lighting be pretty effective to indicate interior light sources, but I hate it as an attempt to show shadows cast from sunlight. I guess separate shadow prims could be scripted (like a sundial) to show the shadow at different rotations and repeats, to coincide with the actual sun position, but I don't think I've ever seen that (except on sundials).

But it will all look especially stupid after the viewer has its own built-in shadows. They're already in the 1.23 Release Candidate (in a very preliminary state, so disabled by default), and they look *vastly* better than any shadow prims. In fact, you'll really want to be rid of the shadow prims under trees and furniture, etc., when trying to take photos with cast shadows enabled in the viewer.

(Hence, do not purchase any more no-mod plants, builds, nor furniture that include shadow prims.)

I occasionally use bumpmaps. But it REALLY depends on the build whether they should be used or not, they have a tendency to "overreact" to lighting changes.

when you say "use bumpmaps" how do you use them? Is this the same as the built in ones in the texture tab?

OK, I'd call that "baked lighting" or "baked shadows".

It can look very good when done well. Satch Flan has made some amazing builds with baked lighting and shadows. I don't think I'd deliberately buy a boxed building or building parts with baked lighting, unless that was going to be the ONLY thing in the build, because mixing up objects with baked lighting and objects without rarely works well.

That's the ones. And there should definitely be more of them. More useful ones, that is. There's not much good you can do with petridishes in my opinion. Even in sci-fi builds I tend to clear them before I've even finished building

I don't think that's going to be a concern to more than a few percent of the user base for at least a year, at least as long as they're using the current scheme.

I like baked lighting.

Of course you all realize that this discussion becomes pointless when shadows and per pixel lighting come to the official viewer. There's no guarantee that the shadows in the current RC will make it into the next viewer, but I figure it's just a matter of time.

One wonders how many avatars will be able to come along.

To answer the op's question, I never cared for prim shadowing and prim lighting, or lighting drawn onto a texture. Tho, I'll admit the effect can be dramatic.

All that being said, I'm about to commit sacrilege by modifying them out of AM Radio's farmhouse.

Depends on the effects maybe?




Club Omega -

by Urfin Vacano (profile quote: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tochesmastra/225/98/2387

Some of the pro work in SL


BTW: VonGklugelstein I saw u on the presentation last days

That's cheating. Any build automatically looks better if you put a "Felis" in it.

That gives one hell of a peformance hit on graphics cards. I just installed a brand new 9600GT and even that started to protest a little bit after an hour or so with full shadows and lighting on Kirsten's S-17 viewer. My guess is that many people won't have shadows and lighting enabled. Hell, some can't even enable Windlight, and not everyone can afford to upgrade their computers in order to see all of the shiny.

Having said that, this year's Christmas treat from me to me will be a new, top-of-the-line gaming rig

Wow, you have too much cash in your pocket Could you make a picture inside the club Omega using Kirsten's shadows and hightest settings pls? Would be cool ...

I have a credit card with deep pockets, you mean

I'll see if I can get round to that for you. Might take a couple of days, since I'm busy with a build right now.

Now everybody knows it! Now they are going to make the camping and traffic bots look like Felis -

Heh, I couldn't enable shiny until I'd been in SL for a year.

very fancy.. lol

and yes Hi there, I remember you as well, I was even at my best behaviour... the 132000 ARC over my head was funnyyyyyyy! I was running spellcheck on my name and ran a typo generator that guarantees 10% typos per sentence..

Indeed I never seen an avatar rendering cost of 132.000

Must be the reason why that guy lost his voice during his speech about how to prevent lag

Which makes me happy I never used them.

The thought of redoing all buildings and send everyone a replacement copy... omg the idea alone makes me shiver.

Yes indeed. I have that very same skybox and it's gorgeous.