Lighting skins and clothes in 3D

Hi,

I have been using BodyPaint 3D to create some skins and clothes and trying to figure out what the best lighting scene to use.

3 point lighting doesn't light the back of the avatar very good. I have tried things like front, back, left and right and 4 corners but each has their issues.

Anyone can share what they have tried and liked?

Dome lighting works best for me. Basically what you do is place a low resolution sphere around the avatar model, then position a spotlight at each vertex of the sphere (delete the sphere afterwards) so that you have 12-18 lights all pointing in to the center. It's an easy way to simulate global illumination, renders quickly, and it gives you a great deal of flexibility.

Now THATS a good idea.

I hate to piggyback off your post, but it's so close in topic. Are there any reccomendations for lighting avatar clothing AND prim attachments so that the prims and the clothing don't end up being different values when they're the same texture?

Unfortunately, that's not really an issue that can be solved outside of SL itself. You could conceivably, through trial and error, get a prim's texture to match an adjacent patch of avatar skin or clothing under a specific lighting condition. But as soon as a little time goes by and the sun changes position, it won't match anymore.

The problem is in the way SL internally processes light, or more specifically, how it reflects light off of various surfaces. Avatars are preset to be much brighter (reflect more light) than anything else. Presumably this was was done for two reasons. First, so they would stand out and be easy to spot in the flat looking world that was the original SL (especially at night), and second, to hide some of the flaws in the avatar mesh.

From what I've read, the Windlight team had been working to improve this, to make light behave more accurately and consistently with respect to avatars, but unfortunately, they seem to be backing out of that effort. Too many people are complaining that their old skins and body shapes don't look "right" under Windlight. The truth is they DO look right (or at least closer to right) under Windlight; it's just that they looked so wrong in such a particular way before, that's what people are used to, and it's what we've all been designing for for years now.

Hopefully, the Windlight guys will choose to ignore the complaints, and just put their foot down by deciding progress must progress. The complainers need to learn to embrace change. We can't have our world just stand still because a few people might be too inflexible to adapt. Worlds change, evolution happens, that's just reality.

For more information on the avatar lighting issue, see this LL blog post: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/12/21/the-new-windlight-viewer-pondering-aesthetics-76116/

Can't say I agree with you on the windlight issue, Chosen. In the current viewer, a good skin with careful shading can make an avatar looks much more anatomically complex and attractive. The amount of shadowing that windlight puts on avatars makes it impossible to fool the eye. The shadows simply represent the very simple geometry of the avatar mesh and conflicts with any effort the skin maker has put in to faking better anatomical detail. It isn't flattering, and it makes nearly all existing skins look pretty awful.

"The truth is they DO look right (or at least closer to right) under Windlight; it's just that they looked so wrong in such a particular way before, that's what people are used to..."

OMG thank you

Whole can of worms, but I just had to say at least that.

Chip, I agree with you that it does bork existing skins. But that's pretty much my point. Existing skins were designed to take advantage of the improper lighting that was in use before. By now, talented people (yourself included, of course) have had enough practice designing textures specifically to look good under those old lighting conditions, that they can make some truly spectacular looking skins. In that sense, it's a shame that the introduction of better lighting destroys the illusions that were so carefully made.

However, as I said, progress must progress. If the lighting model changes, then skin makers need to learn how to make skins that work under the new conditions. It can be done; it will just need to be done differently.

I'm not saying they've got Windlight quite right yet. Unfortunately, because the avatar mesh is so bad (especially in the lower face), you can't light it accurately or it will look terrible. However, you can do a heck of a lot better than how it was before.

Maybe a good solution (with added benefits) would be for avatars to have a brightness slider. Some setting somewhere along the continuum should emulate the current lighting setup we're used to. Somewhere toward the other end should be full accuracy. But extremes should also be possible. How about being able to turn brightness down to zero, and have your avatar be a silhouette? Or turn it all the way up, and have the av look like a glowing energy being? And everything in between. I think that would be a great way to go.


What I'm really hoping is that the new lighting's exposure of the flaws will spark SL into action on finally getting a better avatar model into SL. The one we've got has not been changed in 4 years, which is ridiculous. The Poser 2 type model that it was sourced from is now 4 or 5 generations old. Frankly, avatars look terrible by today's standards for realtime humanoid models, even with the best possible skins on them. Imagine what SL would look like if more modernized versions were added. (Notice I said "added". The old ones should not be removed. We should have options.)



Not sure I did anything thanks-worthy, but you're welcome, just the same.

We'll see about the can of worms, I guess.

Now that I agree with completely. Any feature that doesn't consider the many thousands of hours of development time invested into legacy content isn't an especially well designed our well thought out implementation. A great deal of SL's value as a platform comes from the wealth of existing content and that should always be a consideration. If through employing new shading techniques skin makers could make skins in Windlight look as good or better than under the old viewer, that would be progress. While I love how Windlight makes environments look, where avatars are concerned it's a step backwards since it removes a great deal of flexibility, even if it's technically more accurate.

Windlight puts me in a pickle with skinmaking. The only way I can think of the get decent results is to bump the contrast on the skin way up so that the shading still shows, but then it will look very harsh in the current viewer. And its a moving target, because who knows what the final release version of the Windlight defaults will look like? And I still don't know if it will ever be possible to compensate for the awful avatar mesh, exposed in all its chunky blocky glory by the shining glow of Windlight.

Though if it means LL will finally put new avatar meshes on the top of their priority list, it will be worth it. THAT is something I'd be willing to redo all of my textures for.

Just a tablespoon sized oar in this river of opinion: I have lived with a photographer for too long not to know of the grief that a sunny day causes when photographing people. Too much contrast. Too washed out by the brightness of skin. The plain fact is that the Windlight people have given us a constantly terribly bright day. Following the guidance of my photographer husband, I messed about with the Windlight settings and created for myself a cloudy day, which he has told me is the best condition for getting a good picture of a human, particularly her face. Further, I remember all the cloudy days in San Francisco when I experienced the sensation that people were hyper-sharp, hyper-clear, hyper-delineated and most of all, hyper-real. Gamma is important to getting a good cloudy day effect. A sunny summer day, from about 9 in the morning until 6 in the afternoon is just too bright and contrasty to get really nice photographs, at least with my skills. Make yourself a cloudy day. Give the numbers to your friends. When we can gift/sell each other with these lighting conditions, then give it to your friends. I'll post mine, if there's interest. I had to take screen shots to get them at the time, because Windlight wasn't including the GUI even when asked to do so.

Thanks for the feed back.

Seems like I am getting the best results using global illumination kind of lighting. For BodyPaint I got a plug in that creates a sphere and puts a light at every vertex. Been trying to figure out what the right level pf brightness to use but when ever I upload into SL it always seems to come out darker than in my 3D program. Does seem like anything that creates a hard lighting effect creates too strong of a shadow so I can see how the cloud concept plays in.

So after reading about Windlight stuff here I loaded up a solid white texture and put it on my head, upper and lower textures of the skin and looked to see what lighting SL is doing. I attached the pictures. It looks like SL is adding shadowing to the avatar based on the direction of the sun.

So not sure where that leaves me. Would be ironic that i spent several months learning 3D software so i could bakes textures with nice subtle shadows and highlights. Seems I need lighting effects to work the bump maps in and to get specular hightlights, etc. but on the other side seems i don't want shadows because the will compete with SL's shadowing.