~Muse~ jewelry designer, model and fashionista Caliah Lyon posted about optimizing Windlight to keep those harsh shadows off your avatar’s face. The article takes a lot of guess work out of the settings, giving you step-by-step instructions about what settings to tweak and how far to tweak them.
If Windlight has been frustrating you no matter how many facelights you’ve attached, take some time to read Caliah’s post. It’s well worth the five minutes to tweak the otherwise gorgeous visuals in Windlight.
Caliah’s method works good. For even quicker lighting really close to the ‘old SL lighting’ just set cloud coverage to 100% and then under Advanced Sky, set the Ambient Intensity (I) to 1.00. You don’t have to mess with haze settings this way. Problem with either is the sky won’t look as cool as it should. Also, everyone else still sees default look or whatever settings they have chosen. Still Windlight seems really cool. It’s a photographer’s dream come true!!!
Or you could just stop staring at yourself and take a look around now and then.
The point is not to stare at yourself but rather for the whole of the fashion industry not to call WindLight a failure…..
I want to look the best I can on the runway and for that reason am not ready to use Windlight in a fashion show. Not to mention rez takes twice as long, crashes seem more frequent with the autodetected settings, my hair looks green etc
The more advanced the lighting/rendering system gets, the more obvious the need for updates to the avatar’s geometry is.
I would gladly trade my entire clothing inventory for better avatars. It’s way past due.
“The more advanced the lighting/rendering system gets, the more obvious the need for updates to the avatar’s geometry is.”
SL avatars aren’t exactly bad in that regard — over 7k tris is respectable amount for single character mesh even nowadays and there’s just few problematic areas in it that could use some moving around.
The problem is in most part caused by hopelessly clueless default setups of the lighting system, both old and the new one — shine a light straight top down on a RL human in nearly dark room, and they’ll look just as bad even if though “AV mesh” of theirs is infinitely superior. Sadly, this issue would need someone with experience from the field to sort out; someone LL is quite clearly lacking.
Seeking beauty of all kinds in a digital environment is nothing you should have to apologise or be sorry for, nor should appreciating that be, so long as you can remember an av is merely a digital representation of, but separate and different from, yourself. The fashion industry does exist to please our sense of aesthetics after all (and those of people close to us); it follows that some would prefer seeing their avatars in better lighting