Vote for Sunlight / Prim shadow issue

Hey folks, you all need to help raise the importance of getting the shadow/sunlight issues fixed in the WindLight viewer. While outdoors is fantastic, indoors leaves something to be desired.

Please login to JIRA, issue 1601, [ http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1601 ] and select "Vote" along the left hand side. The more votes the more likely the Lindens will prioritize it and fix.

Here's the jest of the problem.

Items that should "block" sunlight and/or light sources do not block. Avatars have a warm sunny glow while indoors, lights magically pass through objects to illuminate other objects, objects indoors facing Sun will be lit up, etc.

Check out some various indoor areas and kindly vote for this issue.

Thanks-

KMS

I of course support this, as indoor environments are important too, and this issue is much more pronounced with the new Windlight than it was before. It is of course possible that a better default lighting set-up could at least get us back to how it was before (lighting wise), but some kind of indoor darkening would be nice.

I'm still think that proper shadows and light-blocking are a must on the list of future graphics improbvements for SL. If it's possible to have ripply water with reflections, then it's possible to make shadows.
OK, I'm not a tekkie, I couldn't do it, but surely it would be possible.

Seems like a lot of overhead to me though. While I would love to have shadows enabled, having to constantly do the math to determine what casts a shadow and how it casts it would probably bog the computer down. And the more prims having to cast that shadow, the more calculations that would have to be done.

Not really, this is what the graphics cards are built to do.

I'd have thought that if the system can do the maths for reflections off rippling water, it should be capable of calculating the shape and direction of shadows.

The reflections are comparatively easy. If I understand it right all it does it is takes an object, renders it to a lower-detail image (like avatar impostors do) then applies it to the water before the water shader run. When the water shader runs it then distorts the image.

Same for the refraction effect, which takes an image and distorts it so that it looks like "wobbling" due to the water-surface.

Realistic shadows are vastly more complex =(

This isn't really a WL issue, it's just standard SL behavior. SL doesn't know what "indoors" means. AFAIK, it would be pretty strenuous to have some sort of system that automatically figures out what constitutes "indoors" and otherwise. It's this same reason we don't have particle weather. What's the difference between a simple building platform in the sky and the floor of a home? Surely you wouldn't like someone blocking all your rain/sunlight because they have random stuff 600m up.

I'd be for it, but not if it's going to be more of a strain on servers or graphics cards. And unless you can make it a universal standard that applies to everyone, it'll be very hard to make any use of indoor lighting effects.

Although an obvious perk, it's more difficult to pull-off than you think. Especially if there is a moving light source in the equation. Even if there wasn't, at what time can we agree that the graphics engine should 'snapshot' the moment, and bake the textures into their surroundings. And of course, we aren't talking about self-shadowing (shadows cast on other objects), this technology is a ways away from VR worlds. I suppose you could choose an object (the hull of a structure or house), make it 'static', and tell it to decrease the ambient light within.

It gets tricky. But with our current lighting engine (even WL), general object shadowing isn't in place...other objects don't block the light of other objects. Even a crude version of this would be hard to pull off.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but in my experience, this is SL next-gen we're talking about. Right now we can accurately light a scene by the direction of the sun or area lights, and the objects themselves will illuminate and shadow crudely, but as far as the objects themselves shadowing or shading other objects...not yet.

RL, Software Engineer. They're on the right track with WL, but pulling of dynamic lighting would be the golden egg.



Hence the push for votes. If the users demand, the lindens will listen. The sldev meetings scrub JIRA for "most popular".

SL really needs to bring the graphics out of the 90s and WL is a huge step in the right direction. Although not directly related, Sony HOME will be released within 6 months (give or take 2 years, knowing Sony) and the bar will be raised. People will expect virtual words of that quality. Arguements about "not a living world" are irrevelant to an end-user who cares nothing about "building" and is more into the social aspect.

In the end, there's no reason people with the video horsepower can not enjoy dynamic lighting. If there's a 600m building blocking my land, by all means it should block the direct sunlight. There's nothing keeping me from installing a street lamp that shines through the outer window of a room.

Here's to hoping.

For now, I think the answer to this problem is to use 'Full Bright' textures indoors with the shadow and lighting baked into them.

But yeah, would be great to have real-time shadows and lighting.

Also!:

The lighting doesn't have to be truly dynamic. The shadows can be rendered into the textures on the relevant surfaces and then forgotten about. There is no reason why the shadows have to be rendered every single frame.

The bad thing about this approach would be that each surface on every prim would require its own texture. This of course would be invisible to the user. But it would mean your video card is gonna need an awful lot of ram.

But our graphics cards are already burdened by the load, and this would add significantly to the load.

I think it would be a better idea to tone down the "outside" look of Windlight to a reasonable balance between indoors and outdoors (which is what we had before).

Of course, if it's a feature that we can turn on and off in preferences, then that would be the best solution -- as long as turning it off would also balance the contrast to make it less outdoorsy.

neverwinter nights did dynamic lighting back in 2003...

Does neverwinter nights compare in complexity to SL? Does it have user-generated content with an in-game object editor?

Neverwinter Night doesn't allow novice anywhere in the world to build their wooden home and share it online realtime downloading to all other users who happen to walk across that land ;p

RL 3d modeler in SL probably already able to do the same level of graphic if they baked lighting effect onto the textures. Advanced builder would probably able to pull off the same thing if SL have mechanism of 'static' objects. Graphic in most of those games are already heavily optimised by the modelers and programmers, unlike in SL ;p

real time dynamic shadows simply aren't going to happen in SL for a long long time. Game engine tech is getting much better, but the games that are currently doing real time shadows have very tightly controlled polygon counts, view distances, and other optimizations that make sure the GPU has the headroom to do the real time shadows. Those things aren't possible in SL. If we ever see this in SL it's not going to be for many years. Asking for it now is pretty pointless.

LL might want to consider "updating" their technology page in that case:

http://lindenlab.com/press/technology

Yep. They should. Then again I could be wrong. I find thier blurb pretty dubious.

Nice find.

Yeah, needs updating.

Although Second Life did once have dynamic shadows. But they were just faint blob shadows that weren't really missed when removed.

Shadows are a really difficult thing to compute on the fly. Most 3d games precalculate shadows for objects at compile time, so most of the work is done by the time you run the game. SL can't do this obviously. There are some optimizations that could make it a little more feasible.

You could use light source/object/object occlusion to avoid calculating shadows for some objects, and you could limit by dimensions which objects cast shadows.

An object with a max dimension of < 0.25 or a min dimension of < 0.1 for instance probably doesn't need to cast shadows.

Physical objects don't need to cast shadows. I know it would be cool if they did, but it would require a lot more updating.

Objects in SL might not be able to have shadows precalculated, but the corner vertices are known for all standard primitive types and permutations there off. Some tortured prims could break it, and sculpties might not cast shadows, but using just that limited set of points would be fine in most cases.

two words: Ambient Occlusion

/13/91/223486/1.html

Not shadows per se but it would look right no matter what the sun position is at the moment.

Hrm. In build v1.10 (I think) when they tried to add vertex shaders, essentially the first "Windlight" style lighting, they had shadows as well on the Windows version. However they were pretty crappy, essentially a blob about the size of the object, projected onto the first object it hit. But it would show through things and all kinds of other weirdness.

It eventually got pulled before v1.10 got released.

Must have been the same time that that page was written.

That effect would really bugger up all my lighting effects.

I'd like some control of light in order to pose models etc.