Windlight skin issues

Well this days I have heard a lot about windlight, so I decided to try. I was suprised, the skys are gorgous, the water is amazing and there are so many customization of grpahics, I am sure people will love it, the landscapes are just amazing.

But then came the troubles, I was recently working on a skin, so i said I will try how it sees with this landscapes and i was very disapointed, to not say angry, all the work in the skin seems was in vain, the new lights makes loose lot of details and the new lights makes a ugly shadows, I sais well i will put a light attchment, when u put a light atachment in the normal SL the skin always look perfect, as u wanted, but when i puted the results was more catastrofic than without light, now the light atachments burns the skin colours.

So here I put the images of the test I did with all types of lights, with and without light atachments and the normal SL and the windlight. Also I tried a popular skin, a vogue skin that lot of people has, to see if was me that my skin sucks, but the results was nearly the same.

So I ask, how to deal with this, I hope wont be the standard of the SL, cos this means more problems and less control for the designers, would be like the web, that u should do a product that works with all products? I mean do a webapge that sees nice in explorer, firefox, opera, etc?

But how to do it with the skins?

Here are th images, waiting for opinions (yes i am a bit pissed):

http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/2986/skintestcc1.jpg

http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/6502/skintest2rg6.jpg

I would use the regular viewer or the Candidate viewer for making skins. Windlight seems to focus on the Linden background textures such as sky, land, and water details; avatars look dark and most textures look over saturated to me. In my opinion, avatars look horrible in Windlight even when I enable Local Lighting and put on facelights.

uh yeah, what's up with the powerfull yellow light from the sun in windlight making every texture, especially skins look horrible lol... before you had to stand in front of the sun to look at your best, now you have to hide from it

To get rid of the "burn": go into the Environment Editor and select the time of day when your skin looks its worst. Click Advance Sky and increase the haze densitity until your skin looks better.

There's not enough ambient light. In the middle of the day you're avatar looks as if they're are lit by a single bulb in a dark room. It's especially incongruent when you are standing in the middle of an area where everything else is brightly lit by the sun.

mmm well, my question is what will do the skin designers now? The avatar changes all the time, u can config the lights in lot of forms, is impossible for designers make a skin and offer to people that will look like the pictures, I imagine people going to shops and trying skins, everyone with diferent light sets and they will say, WTH, this doesnt seem like the picture.

What would happen with the art of making skins (not to name the pale skins that are the ones look worst in windlight)? Now I tested some hours with windlight and in some cases i looked like a newby with a very detailed skin.

This has been true even before Windlight. This is why skin demos are supplied by nearly 100% of skin vendors. If you like to run certain settings in SL , on your video card, and on a particular monitor, they are almost certain to be different from the next persons settings. There are just too many variables. To expect a skin demo to look exactly like what is depicted in a picture is expecting too much. To expect that the skin vendor represent the skin as it can look (given certain settings) is a reasonable expectation. I view post processing skin textures (with the exception of background removal) as deceptive advertising, and something that should be avoided.

All that said, I have to agree that Windlight makes the situation worse by clipping details (too high contrast) and skewing colors on skins. It kind of reminds me of a cheesy horror film like "Masque of the Red Death".

Edit: Since becoming more familiar with the advanced settings in WL, I have come to accept it as an improvement now that I am able to control the contrast and color shifting on an avatar.

It would be a good idea to add your comments on jira:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3125

Maybe you could have a look at the intensity setting of your facelight, it seems to be contributing to the burn you are seeing. My facelight is giving me a much softer glow, and I'm just not seeing that awful burn that you have going on there. But then my facelight also doesn't cancel out all shadows on my face in normal SL lighting as yours does. It makes sense that if the ambient lighting in the world changes, then the player built lights like facelights might need to as well. I can send you mine, and see if it makes a difference, if you like?

Skin makers can't possibly account for every single shadow that the engine casts onto the faces of avatars, all we can do is make sure that the skin shadowing is fairly neutral and looks good in non-extreme ambient light.

Here's a couple of quick shots I took in the windlight default settings, the first with no facelight, and the second with the facelight. This was at sunset, with the light behind me.

No facelight


With Facelight

i think it makes the scenery gorgeous. The sky worthy of laying down on a hill just watching the clouds go by.... Water....breathtaking.

Avvies?? Playdough. i look like I am made out of playdough.

I create shapes, so maybe it is partly a bias on wanting to look good in the game, but when you buy a skin (or many skins in my case lol) you want to GET the quality the creators are putting into their skin.

My skin has built in highlights, a wonderful reflective illusion not unlike the glow you get after.....the treadmill In Windlight - i have tried with a few different face lights, without face lights, creating my own new face lights to try to compensate and take away the erie white playdough mushlight on my skin...but to no avail.

I simply....cannot use it. Call me vain, but the sky, landscape etc - if I go sailing or plan to sit home and watch the stars, i WILL use it - I downloaded it. But the majority of the time, I am people watching or shopping or creating and it just MUTES it for me.

If there was a way to disable the lighting effect on avatars SKIN it would be fabulous. I want the shadows but not that terrible glow.

Sunrise however is just astounding in Windlight. As long as people arent in it

In all fairness, isn't Windlight still in like "beta" testing or whatever they call it? I thought the purpose of the facelight was due to the bad lightin in regular SL. I just took mine off and was satisfied. If I didn't like the way the av was lit I changed the daytime settings but I did that before anyway.

My major gripe is the eyes. They look metallic and take on strange colors when near local lighting. I'm hoping they address this.

Any solution that involves messing with parameters to make your avatar look good on your own screen fails to account for how it will look to everyone else. Face lights are similarly of limited utility. To other people, their viewers render only the lights that are closest to *their* avatars. Other people may not be seing your face light.

Another thing when someone mentioned sunrise and sunset. I dont think the lighting is outlandish. If the source light being cast, in this case the sun, is a yellow-er or orangish tint then that will affect the color of the object the light it is being cast on.

I would like to see them somehow incorporate natural shadows, but I have a feeling that is quite beyond the capability they have or tht we would have in lcal rendering capability

I have noticed in regards to the environment however that snow is really bleached out.

Torley et.al.:

People are not in SL to admire the scenery. They are here to interact with other avies.
Part of the charm of SL is that everyone who wants to can look great, not only to themselves but to everyone, with very little effort. That is why so many spend so much time and money making their avies look good. I hate to say such obvious things out loud, but it seems to me that the awesomeness of Windlight skies are making you forget them.

If Windlight stays as it is, or requires new graphics cards and twiddling with a bunch of default settings to make your avie look decent again, or everyone has to buy dark skins to get rid of the harsh bonelike shadows that I see now ... you will have hurt SL substantially.

I don't care how much LL paid for this technology. I don't care if the dynamic range promotes realism ... if it makes avies look worse in default ambient lighting, as it does now, you will hurt SL.

Ahem Nika Talaj, even besides the ppls watching, interaction,
personally I don't enjoy the horrid new skin & texture appearances,
huge contrasts that don't co-mingle and it runs fine on my computer,
I've run it to the hilt for hrs a few times, eh! don't appreciate it.
WL should be a pref, like particals, a more or less or none slider,
like Voice, not a hogass part of SL client lol

Second thoughts:

Tanned skin looks ok
Sunrise and sunset are beautiful to me but a little TOO strong in effect - tone it down to 80% of what it is and its nice.

Sun at noon is just TOO bright. That is the main problem. Too white and too bright.

I had no problem with performance whatsoever but I have a fair amount of ram and a top videocard so that might explain that.

Wildlight really is beautiful - and has its merits. But to ignore the washed out effect on the people playing (their avvies) is a mistake. The skins business can afford to be expensive because people WANT to look that good that they will pay for it. A free viewer better not degrade the appearance or it will not be used.

When I am working on shapes, or playing with skins or clothes or anything where COLOUR is important to me, or detail....I don't use it. When I am bored and want pretty scenery I love turning it on. Just don't turn the mirror back on me =D

When I tried it, the sun at noon was so strong that my facelight had absolutely no effect. You couold barely tell it was even on. My Avie only really looked good at sunrise or sunset if looking away from the sun. As a skinmaker, that's just unacceptable to me, so I am back to the old viewer until they fix windlight on skins.

I shudder at how awful my Avie looks to other people though.

Thanks for the JIRA link, Funk. I'm going to go vote on this now.

yes I agree the shadows are way too dark BUT in the advanced environment settings you can create some beautiful results
Problem lies with noobs hitting SL for the 1st time. It doesnt do SL's avatar beauty any justice unless you know where and how to mess with the light and ambience and then you have that issue of looking totally different to other ppl.

All a bit weird Seems like LL have sacrificed the scenery for the avatar which when you take into consideration the $ that goes through SL for avatar appearence isnt a great business idea in my humble opinion.

The sunsets are fun for awhile... but in the end Second Life is all about looking good.

I really, really hope they change the default enviromental settings by the time WindLight goes live. But I don't have much hope in it as the same tweaks that fixes the avatars also kills most of the pretty sunsets.

Hehe, I really stopped thinking about that too much when I looked over at my husband's screen one evening and saw myself as an amorphous grey blob shaped rather like Ruth! Since then I figure, if I look good to me, and other characters look ok to me as well, then I probably look ok to them.

I already posted this message in another thread, but I think this may help people who came across this topic also.

The main reason why the avatars look so shabby is the much too high contrast, compared to the standard viewer. The overall avatar geometry - which isn't too flattering - becomes prominent over the skin and hair tends to look like a bunch of garden hose.

So I took each daytime setting and increased the ambient intensity while lowering the sun's intensity.

I made my settings available for download here:
http://www.file-upload.net/download-494513/Shellis_Windlight_settings.zip.html
Unpack the zip file and copy the contents into the "SecondLifeWindLight\app_settings\windlight" folder.

Please make a backup copy of the file SecondLifeWindLight\app_settings\windlight\days\De fault.xml before you do this. This contains the default sky settings for each time of day.

Enjoy!

It is funny I think how vain we are even with our SL selfs... I am too.. I paid good money for a beautiful skin... She is perfect to me.. She looks like me too which I never thought I'd find without scanning a photo of myself.. NEWay... I think in windlight I can say with all honesty I look like a crack whore...

Just an FYI, I posted a proposal for a general revamp of the avatar mesh in preparation for Windlight, to include several issues that we've all seen in the past.

See:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3432