Does WindLight fix nasty noon-time face shadows?

At sunrise I look all perty, but at noon-time? Ugh! Any chance WindLight fixes this?

nope, found it to be even worse so waiting till they get the bugs out of it abit more

Worse?!!!

Why would they do such an evil thing?

It's in its early stages, yet, I reckon. Why don't you try the First Look viewer yourself? The sky/light/etc. are all things you can adjust.

If you do try the Windlight First Look viewer, be sure to fly up real high and look around at the shape of the water conveyed by the pattern formed by the repetiton of the distorted water texture . It's mighty funky looking. Bad funky, not good funky. Borked.

Oh, anyone that enjoys how their avatar looks now might want to start taking pictures now while it's still possible to. Same for the sky. Nostalgia can be pleasant.

To the point of the thread, my skin is too shadowed in the First Look viewer, under default settings, and has too much highlight. You can make all sorts of adjustments to how you look to yourself, but the look that really matters most for some folks with regard to av appearance is how the av looks to others. I have a feeling that our avatar appearance will be end up being much less consistent on other's screens than with the current display system. So you might look properly made up on your screen but look like you have a five o'clock shadow to others.

They messed up the water too?

Next thing you're gonna tell me is that the sun's gone supernova... oh wait, that already happened.

Sigh, I find Windlight makes me look terrible at anytime of day in default. You can fiddle to make it better though. But like life, you have no control on how others are seeing you on their screens.

So true. It's just so frustrating to spend time putting together a decent appearance, and still end up looking like an aged Neanderthal.

SuezanneC is right about taking pictures. With every upgrade I'm convinced this is the one that will lock me and my underpowered machine out of SL. Maybe even more than av pictures, I should be cruising around taking pictures of the sights while they're all still visible!

I've found the sunlight in the First Look viewer to be too harsh-- I keep having to make adjustments to make it softer. It still makes rather stark shadows most of the time. The thing that bothers me most about it is that forcing sunrise no longer gives that nice soft flattering glow that's so good for pictures; it looks dark and blue. Probably a more realistic dawn, but no good for photos.

That's really disappointing. I've got the whole hardware lighting photography studio setup for my supermodel alt, but for me I prefer taking pictures in the great outdoors. I toyed around a bit with av-attached personal lights, and it sounds like I'll have to use those on a more regular basis if I want decent photos.

I actually thought the whole beautiful sky thing was great, but it's not worth it if it's done at the expense of avatar appearance. Besides, what's the point of a spectacular view when for most people it's blocked by giant spinning porn ads?

Hi Ava, I always have my world settings set to sunset.
..so you'll always look perty to me.

Yeah, hopefully they'll tweak that a bit more before releasing it.

I, as well as alot of content creators in SL, rely on using lighting to take good photos of our products....what option will we have if it makes it worse no matter where the sun is?! Guess we will all have to have ugly ads like all the others who don't know how to use the sun

To me local lighting always makes my avatar have horribly dark shadows so I don't use it often for ads. ;/

There are several issues for Windlight on Jira (jira.secondlife.com) which address things like this-- see the numbers in my signature. If everybody who's concerned about this votes, hopefully it'll get fixed faster!

I will go check it out and vote if I think it'll be problematic, thanks for posting them in your sig.

Markubis, you're so sweet!

Like you I usually force sunrise or sunset, because I just think the whole world looks nicer that way. I do find one problem with it, though, for avatar photos... I have to be facing directly into the sun to get the proper effect. A session usually goes like this:

- turn to face the sun
- move the camera to the right angle facing my av
- see that I'm just a little off, putting dark shadows on one side of my face
- turn again to face the sun
- and so on and so on...

Sadly it usually takes me a good five minutes of trying to get exactly the angle I want. That's why I originally experimented with personal hardware lighting, but I never could get the quality and angles of the lights just right.

Thanks for the JIRA numbers, Ilianexsi. I'm still not savvy enough with JIRA to successfully find relevant issues.

I am particularly troubled by VWR-924. In addition to ruining the sunrise/sunset light, it also disables local hardware lighting? So basically decent lighting for SL photography will be totally unavailable.

Hopefully that one will get fixed.

I noticed that too about my av look bad in noon sun.

Elinah

Heh, it took me a while to figure it out-- I just went to the address, logged in and did a search for 'windlight.' That brings up all the related issues.

Now why didn't I think of that?!

Sorry, I am seriously lame sometimes!

Of course Osprey is right... I'm just so afraid of new SL clients, as each one breaks my SL experience a little more. Still, I must be brave, so I ventured forth into FirstLook...

To my delight, it is in fact possible to achieve beautiful lighting for avatar photography, at least on my computer. And with tweaking the settings, I could easily achieve a lot of lighting variations that were previously difficult.

Some things do NOT work like they did before, like "Force Sun". I found that it changed the quality of light (color and intensity), but had no effect on direction of light. It sometimes changed the sky color and sun position, but not instantly. Oh, and now "noon" is the pretty sunrise-type setting.

The downside: lag-o-RAMA!!! My underpowered computer is much slower under this viewer. My graphics card doesn't render the clouds or haze and the old fog does not render at all so nothing hides the nasty stuff at the end of my draw distance. This also applies to underwater, which now looks just the same as above. I see so many horizon rendering artifacts that all sense of environmental realism is gone.

So I'm glad to see that I will still be able to take nice photographs, although with different settings than I used previously. I'm bummed that default setting will still bring about the caveman look at certain times of day. And I'm thoroughly disappointed AND totally not surprised that, for regular activities, this will completely destroy the "realness" SL experience for me.

Must. Upgrade. Computer!

Oh, and I checked the water. Seriously weird! (Edit: Strike that... turns out the regular client shows the same weirdness for me once I turn off the fog and clouds. Fog hides a lot of unattractive glitches, and I am really gonna miss it!)

Is the moon still there?

Good question. I tried lots of settings, but I never did see it.

Might just be my computer, though. For some reason all adjustments I make, whether "force sun" or in the "edit sky" window, change the light instantly but not the sky or sun itself. Like waiting to load textures on objects, changes to the sun (position or appearance) and sky (color, whether stars show) take about 30-60 seconds to actually load.

But I waited for a full nightime sky to appear, and even then I never saw the moon. Perhaps its no longer force-able the way the sun is, and only appears on its regular schedule? (Which would actually mean you could have a full moon and full sun right next to each other!)

I saw someone mention somewhere that you couldn't fly through the clouds like you can now. I can't see the clouds at all in WindLight, but I think it's true. When I was adjusting the sun and waiting for changes to actually load, they loaded in patches... showing that the sky is clearly just images on the inside of a cube. In certain light settings, I can even clearly see the edges of it. Just another thing that takes away from the "realness" of the experience.

I got my framerate up by disabling local lighting and running in an 800x600 window.

Oh, I forgot - a while back I tried mouse-moves-sun to no effect - I hope that doesn't go away for good (I'll have to try again - maybe it was me as I tried it prior to what I posted above).

Just checked JIRA, and Torley has reported the moon is in fact missing. If it's important to you, you might want to vote on it.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1074