What are my Lighting Options?

The most (virtually) funny thing happened to me yesterday when I was editing my shop.... the dang sun set. I actually found that this was an impediment when I needed to zoom out to look at the whole frame. It got me thinking that, in general, I need some lights.

I purchased some light on/off script pack, but cannot get that to work and have been surprised that I haven't found any Lighting stores out there.

Is there any way for me to, say, create a few floodlights? Can anyone point me in the most relatively scriptless direction for that

Thanks in advance for your help,

make one large prim... I find a cylinder or disk... 10x10x0.01 or something

make the texture blank

set it to be a light, and phantom

move it very close to the ceiling, roughly in the middle of the room

then in texture, set transparency to 95%

and that will light a reasonable sized shop for you...

in daylight, you won't even notice it...

You can always force daylight too. Enable your DEBUG menu buy pressing, alt + ctrl + shift + d, then press alt + n. This will make it daytime on your client, everyone else will still show night.

Siobhan suggested an easy way to make a light, but lights at night, of any sort, can sometimes be inadequate when building.

There are lamp stores around, some cool lights out there actually. Search and explore.

Thanks to both of you! I'm going to use both of those very helpful suggestions.

I've gone ahead and made enough "light" objects to be a source of illumination. However, I'm more interested in a light "affect" like a spotlight or what-not. I've not found any stores dealing with this and can't seem to FIND any with the built in tool.

Any other leads?

If you want a spotlight effect, the best you can do is to place a "light" object at the center of the target. SL doesn't support directional lights yet, and I don't expect it to for a year or two -- the hardware just isn't there yet.

If I can bloody remeber to login tonight I have a spotlight I created, its no good for light but works great as an effect. It's also scripted (by me! ) to follow somone who you name. Its only my second working script so you might want to loose that part and get somone who knows what they are doing to do it

Note this all requires "Local Lighting" to be turned on.

Prim light differs from RL light in many ways:

1. There aren't any shadows. The light goes right through everything. This means that you can't make a spotlight by blocking it with shutters (SL sunlight, on the other hand, does cast kind of vague shadows).

2. The source of the light is a point at the center of the source prim. Bigger prims give more light. You can set the _color_ of the light on the texture tab, but the _texture_ affects only the appearance of the source prim, not the light (this means you can use a 100% alpha texture on the prim itself to make it invisible and it will still give just as much light).

3. This was the hard part, for me. The light only lands on the vertices of the objects it illuminates. From there it bleeds down the adjacent edges and finally out onto the surface. These vertices and edges are not the obvious ones, but the vertices and edges of the triangles that everything in SL is made out of (a square surface has two triangles; cut it just the tiniest bit and it has four; cut and hollow it and there are lots).

4. There is an inverse relationship between distance and intensity of illumination, but I think it is linear and not quadratic.

5. Sunlight is just as bright as prim light, so they add together in surprising ways during the day. You will often see a kind of quilt effects showing exactly where the seams are in compound objects (if you have local lighting on). Colored prim light colors things during the day, but it looks more like paint than light.

On the other hand, prim light does illuminate only facing surfaces.

So, with a small light and a large surface to be illuminated, you will see nothing unless the center of the source is in front of the surface and close enough to one of the vertices. Placing the light in the right spot, you can see the triangles that everything is made of: kind of the SL equivalent of X-ray crystallography!

Some of this is just the way OpenGL works. Some of it may be a quirk of my quirky ATI/Radeon graphics card.

Good luck getting it to do what you want. Any intuitions you bring from RL are likely to get in your way!

--Almarea

I also made an AV tracking spotlight a while back. It tracks anybody within range, and decides who to track if multiple AV's are near it. IM me if you want a copy, Goodwrench.

Fake it.

Shadows are easy to fake. For objects or whatever. Spotlights, flood lights, area lights, linear lights, point lights etc. Send me an Im in world or drop by and visit me in Chartreuse I would be happy to show you or anyone else for that matter how. Shadows make all the difference.

Of course there are limitations on "lights" now since you cant actually make anything additive you have to do other things that are more difficult, but all in all its not rocket science.

Furthermore none of this requires local lighting or shadows to be enabled.