Shinyness

Shiny is a cube map...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_mapping
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_mapped_reflection

Ohhh! Hmm! That could make sens... I wish Lindens would come and read us, and tell us if that is true or not and what could be done, etc. *s*


elka

* has siezure *

I'm not liking this "Shiny II".

Original "Classic" Please...

Well, I definitely prefer the old. My black vehicles look absolutely horrible in 1.7...

- Jon

Torley, I could kiss you if you weren't a spiny hedgehog.

The new shiny is ugly. Please change it back. The new sky is ugly and smoggy looking too.

I throw in my vote for reverting to the old shiny. Give us two options at least, as some posters have suggested, or if you cannot, then just put it back the way it was in 1.6

Yes... more shiny for you, in different combinations! Seeing as how Shiny is so commonly used, this would add a lot more flavor and go a mile of smiles towards, well, TRANSPARENT ALUMINUM!!! Lindens are brill so I'm sure if they can encounter this problem and punch it in the nose head on, they can overcome it too in the due course of time.



I have a soft underbelly!

And I just did some more tests with shiny. "High" shiny has always been comparatively dull but some shades really get a weird "workover", like when I turn a wall of solid red to that, it's like... all... well gossamer and stuff. It lacks luster unless you're dynamically moving the cam around, and then you can start to see the "shinybeam" move across it, but it's still like, SHINY BUT NOT if that makes sense.

Here's some pictures of a chromey Audi. SL shiny should one day be like this!

http://www.mtm-online.de/en/highlights_audi_a8d3_poliert.html

Imagine an av like the T-1000... ANYHOO.

You could have an aditional positive/negative numeric input feild on the texture tab...

You could adjust the shiny to various degrees:
Positive would be (light) white shiny.
Zero would be Off
Negative would be (dark) black shiny.

ect!

Do we have an update on the gross shiny?

I would like to keep both shiny types. I like the old style for some materials and the new for others.

Here's an idea: Have the shiny not affect the colour of the object at all, just the shinyness. I'm sick of having to make metal poles on things white so that high shinyness makes them look grey. It just makes my builds look dumb to people without shiny turned on.

On the technical side, this could probably be done by having the cubemap or whatever they do for shiny using an alpha texture rather than plain black or plain white for the areas with no actual reflection.

How about "tintable" shiny? And maybe user chosen mapping?

I dont know where I'm going with this.

Oh well.

How about we use the OpenGL shader language, and we have streamable shaders? That would be REALLY cool!

Oh, wicked... yeah, like different kinds of metals. I sure see the merit in this. It's like you create a few parameters, and then have SO many combinations to mix it up with.

How about a shiny color, so you could one color for machines with shiny, and another color for machines without shiny. This would help both shiny and non-shiny versions of the same product look good.

I'm not terribly bothered either way - but remember that a lot don't have shiny turned on at all.

But a lot do. I'll start a thread in General asking about that...

Right, sadly, a lot of people turn it off because it *slows* their SL.
Personally, I used to have it turned off when I was a newbie, and someday I tried it and my whole Second Life changed. It's like being blind until that is turned on.
And PLUS, sorry but no, it did *not* make my SL go much more laggy. Always remember the worst thing is Draw Distance, if the rest is set correctly it shouldn't bother that much.

So I think even if a lot have it off, we, shiny lovers, shouldn't have shitty shiny! LOL!

elka

I think Roberta was actually responding to my suggestion of having one color if shiny is on, and another if it's off.

That's what I'm hinting at by "tint-able."

Means you can get the sheen, even without the shimmer... Or maybe that was the other way around.

Ya'll are so cute with your pitchforks and torches ...

We are working on making shiny better. The changes were actually made to the skybox, which also affected shiny objects. In trying to make the sky look better, we made shiny look different, which was unintentional.

We're looking into a comprimise which will look more like the old shiny, only 'better'. Shiny objects will have a more shaded look and will have a gradient from the sky color to black at the bottom. This should solve most of your worries and also allow us to keep the tweaks to the sky.

Hey, don't ridicule my pitchfork--I paid good money for it!

Anyways, that sounds great. Just make the shiny objects's gradients default to whatever looks closest to the old one.

Good to know, though if you're going to force a "darkening" mode onto shiny objects, could you have it avalible as a sort of "compatability mode" (default for pre 1.7 objects) that can be checked and unchecked from the texture dialogue in the Edit window? That I think would be the best comprimise, releiving most of the headaches this would cause for prim jewlerers, metalsmiths, etc but allowing people to take advantage of the fact that it's actually possible to have truer-color shiny objects now.

Later, probably tomorow, I'm going to post a bunch of screenshots...to really understand how shiny objects display in Preview at the moment, you have to look at them during different times of the day.

Unfortunately adding a new shiny mode is no small task, so any suggestions for adding a 2nd shiny won't be looked at for 1.7.0. We are looking into doing something in a future patch, but I don't have a time line or a version number. We're not too keen on promising features in future versions, ya know!

The current shiny (build 27) is how it will most likely stay for the production release of 1.7.0. You can check out how it looks in different light levels by opening the Debug menu (Ctrl Alt D on a PC, Shift Option Command D on a Mac) and then switching to Mouse Moves Sun mode (Debug > World > Mouse moves sun). Switch to mouselook and put the sun where you want it. Then just fire off your snapshots.

I think the best solution for the future would be to have a shiny slider, and/or allow users to select the color of the shiny, so one could set it to be black/dark or one could set it to be whiter/lighter.