Lights and distance?

Is there any way to adjust your settings?
Or anyway to modify the lights?

To make lights (I mean prims that give of a light source) actually work from any distance apart from up very close?

I made a very simple light, eg just a prim with 1 face being white, full bright, a little glow and make is a light source and it works fine for just 1 prim

Yet, put it on the wall of your house and move away a little and the light sourse (the area it lights up) dissapears.

You can still see the white prim with a little glow, but it's no longer acting as a light.

I understand there is some limitation re the number of light sources you can have at once (perhaps someone can refresh my memoru on that one)

But is there a way to make a light look like it's working as a light, and lighting up the surrounding walls/floor/room when you move away a little?


Ooops, just noticed this may not be the right forum for this topic.

SL can only display 8 light sources, two of which are taken up by the sun and moon. So you're left with 6 to play with.

These leftover 6 can be over-powered by any worn light sources (eeek- facelight!).

Your lights radius might need to be bumped up if the values are only low. To activate this lil tweak- select your prim and edit, then go to Tools and check "Show Light Radius for Selection". It will show you how far the light gets cast from the prim.

Try those for a start, hopefully someone else might chime in as well.


Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't hurt to ask, doesn't hurt to answer.

Thanks for the excellent answer. I will try your suggestions later and report back

It's a bit mean only giving us that many light sources and including the sun/moon as well.

I guess some others know the tech reasons behind that, also facelights too counting for them also. Just seems VERY mean to me.

Perhaps you might be able to answer 1 thing on this same subject.
Do lights that are NOT facing you, but are behind prims count?

I mean, say you have a wall (prim) and on the side facing you are 4 lights, and on the other side of the wall are another 4 lights.

I assume (possibly wrongly) that you will still see these 4 facing you fine, as long as the others are hidden by the prim wall?

Lights have no direction, i.e. their effect is always spherical, and they are not kept out by prims (unless you have a REALLY good computer and are able to run that fancy 3rd party viewer that supports real shadows).

Oh yeah, I understand prims don't BLOCK light. I just wonderd if lights that did not have other prims in the way were given more priority in the SL viewer then those that were hidden from direct view.

This question comes up periodically in both this forum and Building Tips. Try doing a search of the archives on those forums for the word "light." Or, as a shortcut, look at this thread .... /8/03/259102/1.html

As far as I can tell, the presence of other prims between you and a light source has no bearing on whether or not that light source counts as one of the six that you see actively working. For example, if you come up to the outside of a home, and on the other side of the wall there is a fire in a fireplace that uses one light source, then that light will activate, so you can see its light inside the room, through the windows.

Distance from you to the light, and how great the lighting radius is for the light, are the determining factors.

The eight light limit is imposed by the OpenGL rendering system that SL uses. Until SL evolves to a better rendering engine, we won't surpass that limit.

And the limit is there in OpenGL to make it possible to do rendering at a reasonably fast pace. Having to calculate the effects of multiple light sources places a huge drain on grapihcs processing power in a real-time 3D environment. That's why the prototype SL client that has "real shadows" won't work for most of us. It required the capabilities of one of the fastest, most expensive graphics cards on the market. Most of us don't have computers that can cope with the requirements of real-time shadows in an environment like SL.

Minor point of clarification, just for technical accuracy.

You're right that there are two lights that are always on, but they're not the sun AND the moon. The sun and moon are never on at the same time, so the sun/moon is just one light, not two. The other always-on light is the ambient light, which simulates how sunlight/moonlight reflects off the ground and diffuses through the sky to illuminate the world.

The main difference between the two is that sunlight/moonlight is entirely directional, and ambient light is non-directional. Without the ambient light, everything in SL would look as if it were lit by spotlights, like on a stage, not very realistic. Without the sunlight/moonlight, there wouldn't be any sense of global uniformity to the lighting scheme. Anything facing upward and/or facing the camera would be bright, and anything facing downward or away from the camera would be dim. Again, not very realistic. Both are definitely needed.

If you go into your environment editor, you'll see there are individual intensity sliders for the sunlight/moonlight and the ambient light. If you're interested, try turning each one all the way down and all the way up to see what they both do.

I love you, Chosen. Seriously dude... you're like fruit concentrate. You never dillute the info.
Of course I knew that! *smacks head on desk* I just didn't know I knew that- gah!

Thank you for correcting me!