On Second Thought

Now that Windlight has come to the main viewer, I have heard lots of feedback, positive and negative, from friends and fellow bloggers about it. “Lighting is too harsh!” “The skies are so pretty!” “OMG, there’s no icky brown haze/fog at the horizon anymore!” “Too many shadows on my avatar’s face!” It goes on and on. Designers are even starting to turn to revamping face and body lighting systems to look better in Windlight.

What very few ever mention, though, is how customizable WL is on its own. In days past, you had two daytime settings that were available to you so that your av would be charmingly “lit” without making use of face and/or body lights. Sunrise, and sunset. With WL, that is no longer the case! If you want it to, any time of day can be as well-lit or deeply-shadowed as you want it to be!

(Warning: If you expand this post, you will find some nudity on this page. Avatar nudity, and well, you really can’t see anything, because her hair hangs down over her chest… but it is there.)

I rarely run local lighting. Why? Because, to be honest with you I’m not a fan of face lights/body lights. It’s very detrimental to performance, particularly in crowded places, for me. I only turn on local lighting in the instances where it can help me enhance a photograph I’m taking. Even at that, I use little. Now, I am nowhere near the photographer that some Residents I know are! I take simple snapshots to showcase things I’ve created. I take a silly snapshot with my friends now and then. I am not by any means a pro, so a pro will probably be able to articulate the virtues of local lighting for photographs to you in such a manner that you can see how wonderful it is.

I’m not that person. ;)

What I do know is, that when I first started using Windlight - to get used to it, back when it was beta and then release candidate - I had the same issues that many of my friends did. Lighting too harsh on avatars, beautiful skies, but ugly avs! So, I took the time to play with the lighting presets, and eventually found a point that for me, was a happy compromise between the high realism of Windlight lighting and the old viewer’s method. What I like, maybe not everyone will like, but I did want to take a few minutes to show you what you can do with nothing more than WL settings.

Below you will find my personal settings that I use - including “key frames” from my day cycle. They work well for me, that’s all I can say. :)

Windlight: Day Cycle Sunrise - This is my default day cycle sunrise. It’s pretty similar to the sunset (below) but, obviously the sun shines stronger on my (unpictured) back side. :p

Windlight: Day Cycle Sunset - This is my default day cycle sunset. I like it, it’s rosy and warm, but it doesn’t shade avatars (or really anything) very harshly (well, honestly not much at all. Just ambient lighting for colors.)

Windlight: Sunset - Less Rosy Glow - This setting is almost the same as my sunset and sunrise settings, except that the ambient light has been balanced out to remove a lot of the rosy/red cast. This is not a part of my day cycle, but an extra preset that is useful to me now and then.

Windlight - Noon - Well… “noon” in SL™ has never been my favorite time of the day. erm, sorry. Noon always casts less-than-esthetically-pleasing shadows on the face, imo.

Above is an example of something that is possible with WL. I made use of a custom “moonlight” setting for the original snapshot. There definitely was Photoshop involved, I think that’s evident, but Windlight was used to give me the “base” of the lighting that splashes across the front of my avatar.

At any rate, the point of this post is not to showcase the silly things I make in PS, etc, but to show you that so much is possible with WL, if you just take the time to play with it, to get to know it. I promise you, it can be your friend!

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