Avatar Lighting followup: Steve Linden - CLOSE! But not everything...

This is in regard to the followup to this thread responded jointly by Torley and Steve Linden:


I'm -- really of the belief here that while I understand what went on with the 'fixing of shadows on avatar faces'; I still think that the new light falloff is WAY too gradual... and that has to be addressed too..

It is -far- too easy for any attachment to go fullbright now. Whereas the 'vertex program avatar mesh' may be brought *UP* to match, I think this will just exacerbate some of the problems we're seeing.

The mismatch is one issue; the fact that everything is just way too bright is another...

I hope this dialogue can be kept open a little bit longer as there is some concern here -- even with Avatar Vertex off; yes, the skin and attachments match better, but the ENTIRE SCENE is -far- too bright (to be true: fullbright), and many people are turning off "nearby hardware lights" alltogether.

So,

1) I agree that Avatar Vertex with Nearby Local (a) does not match with the brightness of Sun+Moon (b) or Nearby Local without Avatar Vertex (c). Essentially what Steve said was that the falloff levels for "b" and "c" were made more gradual, while (a) was forgotten.

2) While (a) was forgotten - I really feel, and I have to say, that I do believe that (b) and (c) were turned up *way too high*. While a fix may make the skin match attachments **in a blinding manner**, and it is indeed good that they will match, I -firmly believe- that while trying to abate the "shadows on the face" problem, the "volume was turned up too high all over".

So we're dealing with two issues here: The falloff was made too shallow, and LL forgot to make Avatar Vertex -match- the "too shallow".

So, you had attachments that are blindingly fullbright in the nearest light (falloff too gradual) and an avatar mesh that is way too dark (this gradual falloff was not applied to the avatar mesh.)

I really do hope that Steve plans to not only make Avatar Vertex match the rest of the lighting schemas, but also *please* turn it "down a notch", as even if the skin does match, the other issue is that everything is getting bleached to fullbright.

I am sure that avatars should *not* be fullbright whenever near the closest light...

So in summary, the falloff in 1.10.1 was made too gradual, *AND* Avatar Vertex Program was not updated to 'follow' this new falloff. (which is too gradual, causing attachments and avatars to be bleached fullbright way too easily.)


I'm hoping that we can come to a falloff level that takes both attachments and "noonday-sun-nose' into account.

Perhaps the Avatar Vertex program can be brought "up" to a middle level, whereas everything else can be brought "down" to a middle level, and we can have a happy medium here.


Thanks for the consideration,

-Michi

I understand your concern, and will look into bumping the OpenGL lighting intensity down a notch for local lights, although there will surely be other complaints if I do so

The probelm is the way OpenGL does lighting falloff. What we actually want is something that is nearly linear (actally i = ((r-d) / r)^.75 where d = distance from the light, r = the light radius, and i = intensity. Negative intensity is treated as 0. What OpenGL gives us is i = 1/k*d, where k is some constant. Currently we use k=3.5/r which gives us i= r / (3.5*d). This gives us a pretty close approximation at half the radius of the light, but leaves us with i=.28 at the edge of the light (instead of 0). With one light it's not very noticable, but since lighting is cumulative, it will be more noticable with several lights. (Note: all these calculations assume falloff = .75. It varies a little with other falloff values but I wanted to keep this simple .

The worst problem is that on some graphics cards, when you are very close to a light (i > 1.0), grey objects will turn white. There is nothing we can do about this until we switch to GLSL.

I will try turning down lights a notch, see how things look, but if I turn them down too much objects in the world will look too dark.

-Steve