Too much light

Hi

I am using windlight, and have jsut recently updated my graphic card so i can use the atmospheric shaders.

while i really love seeing the clouds and light on my water, everything else seems a bit bright...
my fiances piercings used to be nice and shiny, now they look like dull metal.
my sand looks all washed out
some of my textures look like they are jsut white, the pattern seems to have vanished.

i dont know a lot about lighting, so could someone please tell me is there a way to set it so i can still have the lovely clouds and sun shining on my water, but not have everything else washed out?
(please explain in pure blonde english or i wont understand it)

ty

We would be allowed to complain about some of those effects you are describing with light -

But the techies have told us we are wrong.

Even though its pretty obvious to many of us that it happens-

We are wrong and us continuing to bring it up means we want to forever be stuck in 2003 graphics land.

Essentially, what Colette said.

The Windlight client has a lot of sliders to adjust the way things look, and if you want to know a set of presets that will make things look better, please post this same question in the First Look forum, where a lot of Windlight folks hang out.

I am very saddened by this. The First Look folks may be able to tell you a set of presets to use so that avatars and textures will look better to you. However, other people will still see you as you appear using default settings. A while ago we succeeded in bullying the development team into changing the default settings so avatars looked better, but recently they reverted back so that avatars are ugly except in the early morning.
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Ever notice that the Lindens and the Technical elite all tend to have either newbie looking human avatars or fantastic robot/dragon/furry/alien Avs?

And yet they supposedly have a better frame of reference for knowing how the new lighting affects human skin tone and the human female Av mesh.

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Its basically like the male fashion designers in New York- they have to hire fashion models so their clothes will look right.

Becuase no woman with hips can get them on.

Omg Colette, your posting is SO perfectly right!

It's hard for me to write what I want, because English is not my native language. But yes, I have posted some text and pictures that clearly show that contrast (washout) in Windlight is way too much and kills all bright textures. But all LL and some residents say, in other words, is: you are old fashioned, get used to the new age.

I honestly must say that I have given up. I thought it was only me whining about things that are not really there. But the truth is: Windlight IS messing up all bright textures and I dread the day that Windlight will become mandatory. Because from that day, I will have to remake many of my textures to show any detail.

And hey, don't say that it only happens with badly made textures. I think my textures are amongst the best in sl, really. But ALL bright textures are washed out, no matter if they are bad or well done.

I am all for progress, but please turn down the contrast a bit. That shouldn't be so hard?

You did great with your English in this post.

I'd hope the experience of a texture designer would cause some people who don't believe it to pause and think.

Thank you for your information.

Try adjusting the sky settings in Windlight:

http://secondsoigne.wordpress.com/2007/11/25/optimising-windlight-for-avatars/

Adjusting/Tweaking the sky settings might work for you as far as brightness settings goes. That is a pretty good explanation of some of the same problems others have been seeing in Windlight. (So far I haven't had to adjust much and Avies looked better from the start.)

As for object details go into Preferences > Graphics. Then check the box that says "Custom". From there all the sliders will activate as you increase or select the options. If the shiny objects are looking dull then you will want to see which selection of the reflection settings works best. Sometimes I'll use "All Static Objects" other times I'll set the reflection to "All Avatars and Objects". Which with that said I also usually use a high object detail setting.

Also I say this keeping in mind that the levels of shiny do look different between the two viewers. Low in the normal SL viewer might need to be med or high in Windlight or vice-versa. I know that a few objects I created needed to be set to low or med from high, while smaller ones I needed to increase the level of shiny. There were one or two that looked better after applying an almost white texture with a little detail. But that is my experience and probably not the same as others. You'll have to play with the levels on different sized objects to get a feel for what works best. You can read up on the shiny issue here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Windlight#What_to_test.3F

Of course keeping in mind that some travel into laggy areas, this is what I normally use for settings in places that I know are low lag. When I go roaming or into a high lag area, I turn the graphics settings down for better performance. When I 'turn down' the settings, the sky I never have to adjust but object settings I do bring them down to mid or low. (Depending upon where I am going at that time.)

What you want and will work best on your PC will have to be tweaked by playing with the settings. Keep an eye out in the First Look wiki for WL for other tweaks and possible bugs.

Good luck!

I honestly really can't say, I've hand any inkling to say to an avatar, "you look ugly in Windlight", maybe because I'm just male, but I tend to think I look reasonably closely at female AV's, their skins and eyes regularly and they still look great in Windlight.
I didn't like the fact I would skulk in the shadows of an evernight dark roleplay city either then hearing people could see me and shoot at me sticking out like a sore thumb 100m away because they were using noon settings all the time.

also did you know some people have never calibrated their computer monitor, thousands of SL players are probably looking at SL through some thing like dirty glasses!

Sara, I was also experiencing that overbright, washed out effect. I simply went to Preferences>Graphics and opened the Custom option and changed the Nearby Local Lights to Sun & Moon Only. That simple change made it so much better.

Better? Are you kidding me? Sure, people who are wearing crappy, overly bright and awkwardly placed facelights look better with local lights off. And when you're in an environment built by people who didn't know what they were doing, it might be even best to switch your monitor off altogether. But a well-textured, well-lighted environment viewed with local lights enabled looks MUCH better than anything you can see with sun and moon only.

I work with the atmospheric shaders off, otherwise unless it's between 11.30am and 1pm "local time" the entire back of my head is in deep shadow and I cannot see what I'm doing.

well there are a lot of tips here.. ty
will have a play with my settigns and see what i can do...

i know that having sun and moon only makes things better for SOME things, but not better for tothers... i liek to see some light

it's getting close to looking right wha tpeoplr keep forgetting or just don't want to gt is sl's graphix was off and we lerned how to draw shade and use tricks tomake up for that now LL has gotten around to fixing that problem we have to learn to amke the stuff all over agian.

so basically yes LL is right this time and you have to relearn how to do it the right way

Hmmm...ok...I'm a (sort of) techie with a very realistic human looking avatar and I use windlight exclusively. One of the things that I noticed hasn't changed with all the updates is the scene gama....you really have to keep in down pretty low to maintain a tolorable lighting. But...that said.... I love wndlight and really only notice a couple presets where avatars look scary.
I was talking to my fiance when he was home (he works over seas) and tho he's not at all into SL, he's into gaming and grapics cards have a LOT to do with how we're all seeing SL.... even windlight. As does operating system.... windlight and SL in general is horribly washed out on his laptop.

Anyway....lots good info in the firstlook forums... windlight is a quite a mouthful for the Lindens to chew on to get it so everyone will be happy with it. But, most games with awesome graphics don't have the flexibility that SL has for folks to manipulate their world. It's a trade off cause most of us can't pay out the a$$ for all the uber high end techno stuff it would take to have the optimum gaming system.

That doesn't even make any sense. Creators DID do things the 'right way' for the lighting and graphics that we currently have in the non-Windlight viewer. If you said a 'different way,' that would be more reasonable. However, if LL really cared what the Residents in general thought, and weren't just trying to please themselves and a certain contingent of the more tech minded, they'd make this change more subtle. It IS causing problems with textures, which means it's causing problems with virtually everything in SL, to a greater degree in some cases than others.

As to those of you who think avatars look as good or better in Windlight...um, what? Lighter skinned avs are bleached out in some light, cast in dark shadows in others, while darker skinned avs become big blobs of featureless black. Not to mention that the flaws in the avatar mesh (concavity in the chest, that nasty uneven seaming around the nose, etc.) are FAR more obvious in Windlight. Fugly.

And, yes, you can fiddle with your settings to improve how things look in your own viewer, but that's going to have absolutely no effect on how your work or your av look on other people's viewers.

You should bring this up at a Windlight office hour, if ya can, else us "tech minded" people (I'm not, and I rather light the WL lighting) will jes keep going the way we've been going.

Mari

no they have accually said this is what the sorta wanted it to look like from the get go and we limited with tech and time now they have gotten around to fixing it

http://flickr.com/photos/rythmnmuse/2277525406/sizes/o/

Ok, just to show I'm not nuts.... took this just now in the WL default as soon as I logged in. I didn't edit it... that's what I see....I do wear a face illumination at all times which helps a lot in any lighting.

Exactly!! And that is the one thing I detest about Windlight. You will never know how good or bad something looks to another person, because of the wide range of options available in WL. None of us will ever see the same SL again, when this hits the grid.

That still doesn't mean content creators have been doing things the 'wrong way'...they've been working with what they were given.

And if LL was aiming for this all along, they should have built up to it more slowly. Not, "OK, here's what you've got. All right, now that you've had that for many years and are used to the way it works, we're going to 'improve' it by making things completely different, invalidating some of your current skills, and jacking up a lot of the in-world content. But, hey, you get pretty skies and water!"

Personally, I could give a rat's ass about the skies and water. Yes, they make some nice scenic views in pictures, but I don't wander around the grid with my camera pointed at either. I look at builds and other avatars, and Windlight is having a negative affect on both.

Any slower and they'd be going backwards - Windlight is nice but its still a good 3-4 years off the pace. Anyone who's had a look at the Crytek engine will tell you that. Even the likes of ArmA and TESblivion which are now coming up on 2 years old have far superior graphics to windlight.

DX10 is here and will likely be the standard in 12-18 months time - thats going to force an upgrade for nearly everyone. So whether or not you care about sky and water the clock is ticking nevertheless - and its industry-wide - not just this wee corner.

All right, more gradually then...baby steps over time instead of one big leap now. And it's not nice at all. Don't get me wrong, I can see the potential, but if LL thinks it's anywhere near ready for RC, let alone alpha, they need to stop sniffing the marker fumes and go get some fresh air.

This is my primary objection as well. And it is an issue which is uniquely bad in SL, which differs from most games in that it has a very healthy economy where people make RL money based on how the objects/accessories they make LOOK. If those things look different to different residents, not only will it be impossible to (for example) make skins with broad appeal, but consumers will cease to care very much. Which means the entire high-end of the content creation market goes away.

Personally, I would vastly prefer it if LL settled on Windlight presets with very little in the way of client controls, and a full set of variations for sim managers. That way, residents will generally all be looking at the same SL, and sim designers will have great artistic freedom to exploit Windlight's potential. Neither of these exist at present.
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How does something that makes what is important to most SL users look potentially worse or at best unchanged equal an advancement?

I think people are a bit confused what people buy the most of in second life.

They buy things to look good.

They buy things to help them play house.

Those are the most crucial areas. No "improvements" should come about without making sure we don't slide backwards in either of those two.

If they wanted to release a new Avatar model that was much more realistic AND that was the reason we needed new skins and clothes- Id be all for it.

But as it is the reason textures on Avatars (and other places) look different is because they are changing the sky and the land. That has been what it was from the beginning. When they first bought out Windlight.

Extreme care should be made to minimize the problems caused to Avatar lighting.