Tips or Advice/Tutorial

Hey everyone,

I am sorry if this as been asked before, I've been looking for a while now and I have no luck finding something that covers this...

I've been searching on how to make -->http://i35.tinypic.com/ztisd3.png

The windows that is and the actuall lighting on the floor, if anyone could help me, I would greatly appreciate it .


Thanks very much,

Mickie

The lighting on the floor is simply a texture that is either part of the flooring or else it is a shadow alpha on a second prim covering the floor with the windowlight blocked out as a transparent area.

If you're thinking of doing something similar, I would suggest using the first technique of shadowing the texture. Alpha textures on flooring and rugs clash badly with many types of prim footwear. Of necessity, prim footwear is often made with an alpha textured part or invisiprim to hide the avatar's protruding feet.

The OpenGL graphics engine used by SL and many other examples of 3D gaming software has problems when two or more alpha textures are arranged in close proximity. You can see the unhappy results all over SL where objects such as trees and plants appear to flip in and out of view, fighting for the attention of your camera.

In the case of alpha textured flooring, the floor texture will be cancelled by a silhouette of the invisiprim shielding the footwear of an avatar standing on it.

I agree. Ephraim is right about avoiding alpha textures on floors. They play havok with shoes. Simply draw the new lighting effect into your floor texture. Don't try to make a texture for the entire floor, though. Since it wouldn't be a tiled texture, you'd lose a lot of detail in stretching it to cover the entire area, even if you used a 1024 x 1024 image (the maximum uploadable to SL). Instead, make a new texture that covers only that smaller part of the floor where you want the light from the windows to show and apply it to a separate prim in that part of the floor. Unfortunately, that means making a multi-prim floor instead of a nice single-prim one, but you'll have your light pattern that way.