Realistic lighting

Is Secondlife ever going to have realistic lighting? Or will we always have the crappy bleed through everything kind of lighting? And if you need an example, force the time of day to midnight, then build yaself a tunnel, you can see right through it . Or is realistic light, a bad concept, because local lights fail so badly?

How is it that Linden Lab can develop Windlight, but not even realistic lighting? -.-

Nothing in Second Life is static, therefore shadows cannot be pre-processed like in games.

If it's possible to have multi-coloured dynamic reflections on water, as in WindLIght, which are dependent on the position of the viewer(s), then surely it would be possible to have monotone daylight shadows that are only dependent on the source of sunlight.

Interesting. Perhaps LL could apply the same coding used in Windlight to make SL lighting more real?

Those are a lot simpler than they look. It's a case of taking objects above the water and rendering them to a low-detail texture same as with refraction (the underwater "wobbles" of your legs when you're standing in water), it then just puts this "under" the water shader which distorts and adds lighting to the image.
The extra rendering for this is a bit of a frame-rate hit (if you enable it), but it ultimately isn't as complex as realistic shading.

We already have basic light and dark shading on objects, determined by their angle to the sun. The job is part-done already - light-blocking and shadows are all we need. Of course, later we could have more sophisticated shading effects and reflected light - but I'd settle for light blocking and shadow for now.

This has been brought up in various places, cast your vote!

Navigate to: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1601

Login to Jira using your SL name and password.

On the left hand side, about mid-page, select "Vote" to voice your opinion.

Thanks,

KMS

I posted this on another thread a few weeks back...still holds true:

Ya...real time shadow casting? That' ain't gonna happen for a few years...at least not in the Second Life client. Other 'metaverses' may create an engine to handle this magnitude of streaming data...and have it optimized...but not SL.

Here's an alternate idea, with a few holes in it: they could make it so only certain structures, which have been labeled 'structural', cast shadows. When creating a prim, you select an option in the 'object' section of it's preferences: 'detail' or 'structural.' When placed, and 'locked', the engine knows it's a structural prim, and calculates the shadow placement, and bakes it into the surrounding. Detail prims won't cast these shadows.

Now...bare with me. Here are some holes in this idea. Real time shadows should be calculated by the suns position. This means the shadows must move to be believable. This would require baking a dozen different shadow positions.

Another thing is color and multiple light sources. What about a street lamp? This is clearly a light source, and if the sun casts shadows by day, this lamp should cast shadows at night...here many problems are presented...multiple light sources (which could be locked to the 6 nearest to you like it is now) are a major hardware strain, especially if there are shadows linked to them.

And if we are talking about 'real time' shadows...we must then delve into AV shadows...casting and receiving shadows from any number of light sources. That's another huge difficulty...both in programing, and optimization.

Also, self shadowing is necessary for realism. If a structural prim shadow cast a shadow over another prim, this prim must receive this shadow, or else it would seem to have 'full bright' on. Think about it...

Lastly, real time shadow casting is a huge hardware strain. If abused (which it will be due to our free-form world creation), it would take the newest hardware to run all these 'real time' calculations.

All of these things are only a FEW of the complications 'real time' shadow casting creates--there are many more on top of this...

OK, I'll shut up now...you guess get the drift.

A way to possibly go about the concept of advanced lighting is to make it possible for sim admins to run a special render client that takes the sim offline for a few minutes (or hours knowing LL time) and renders a full-sim light/shadow map and bakes it, then brings it online again with sexy shadows and such. I know this will never happen but its fun to dream that such advanced and cool things will ever come to SL.

that, and an avatar model that doesen't make your butt triangular when you bend over.

we can all wish for nice things.

it would be good to see say a completely sealed stone room didnt have sunlight on an inside wall - always gets me that

and the light featur on objects is an all round glow that can affect through walls and floors

be good if the direction of light was editable even a small bit similar to prim manipulation

make life a lot easier and nice to see