A facelight, in its most basic form, consists of an invisible prim (object) which is attached to your Second Life avatar, via one of your face's free points — perhaps chin or nose, but not skull because that's often where prim hair goes. This prim has a feature called light (aka local, or point lighting) enabled, so it'll cast light in the general vicinity of your face, upper torso, and if it's brighter, your immediate surroundings. Exact positioning can vary depending on what "look" you're going for.
Back in 2006, I was one of the first to popularize facelights. I thought to myself while playing in various public areas, "Wouldn't it be grand if I lit myself up like a big watermelon and also basked those nearby in my fave colors?" The result ended up predating and closely resembling one of my earlier profile pics.
I came up with all sorts of variations, like a "lightbeam" which was 3 prims: a long, 10m one in the middle linked to a pink and a green one, respectively, on each end.
My excitement was motivated by the release of Second Life 1.9, which changed the lighting model so that it now used your graphics card instead of being a big CPU hog (you old-timers like me — gosh, still kinda strange to refer to myself as such — will remember that). I had the pleasure and opportunity to write the guide and teach many Residents about it. I even made a couple videos, the first being a demo of local lights and the then-new flexiprims… my very first video uploaded to YouTube! (I now have 259.)
and this one @ 2:36 here is one of my first video tutorials:
In hindsight, it's no surprise that moving around and lighting the way forth caught on very quickly. A simple practicality which needed to be fulfilled. I received a large volume of correspondence on the topic, and a lot of fashion enthusiasts dove into the possibilities too. You know when those uber-social, ultra-glamorous avatars catch on… it's got to be a hit! Within a few months — and it's a growth which continues today — facelights became a popular cultural item to have. They're even listed in Ordinal Malaprop's "Cosmology of the Grid", and altho some will say they belong more in the "Hell" section (let me get to why), there's no doubt they're a staple accessory.
Facelights, like PKD's Screamers but without the rending of flesh, have evolved to a very sophisticated level. There are complete, compact systems you can buy which are scripted — so no need to tinker with editing objects, a touch dialog makes it easy — and I've kindly received some of these from the creators, as sort of a joyful followup. This picture to the right, by Gaynor Gritzi, is a good example of a facelight system. You may browse for more facelight systems on SL Exchange and OnRez.
If you get involved in avatar modeling (in the "pose and look pretty" sense), you will, sooner or later, hear about facelights. The introduction of WindLight atmospheric rendering and its physically-accurate modeled lighting have urged further exploration — it's one of my favorite feelings when two or more Second Life features complement each other so nicely. Also have a look at Caliah Lyon's "Optimising WindLight for Avatars 2.0", which has both a facelight and a complementary WindLight setting — now that's resourcefulness!
So why might facelights be a problem? Facelights in themselves, like many tools, aren't inherently troublesome, but careless usage is: a lot of Residents don't know that only the 6 nearest lights to you will show, due to an OpenGL limit (the other 2 are the sun and moon backlighting). This means if you wear 6 lights (excessive but perfectly possible) and approach others wearing the same amount, not all of yours will reliably show. This photo by Stein Shilova shows gray-ish orbs which have yet to load their transparent texture, and become invisible facelights.
Worse still, if there are other lights in the scene (e.g., part of a lamp post or chandelier), you won't see those if they aren't the nearest, diluting your experience. In the future, especially for those who don't want to worry about tech details, it'd simply be more carefree to find a render-cheap way of displaying all viewable lights (dynamic and static) within a scene. Until then, like many other tools, it's good to be aware of what's going on so you can make good choices about your creativity.
One of my new video QUICKTIPS (which I'll be introducing on the Official Second Life Blog next week) happens to be precisely about how to make a basic facelight in a focused and fun way, so if you're curious and would like to learn, have a look:
Furthermore, if this piques your interest to do some model photography, you'll want to see my Guide to High-Quality Photography!
And if you have facelight stories of your own, please do share in the comments!
"The introduction of WindLight atmospheric rendering and its physically-accurate modeled lighting have urged further exploration "
Seriously, what we need are better skin shaders on the avatar, that react more properly to light. Glistening eyeballs, skin that allows us to add proper bump (read "normal maps" grin) and specularity maps, etc. It would go a long long way to making the avs look better in Windlight. I know Windlight supports these sorts of shaders, really hope that the shader materials are eventually exposed better to content creators without having to resort to client modding.
As local lights are limited to six sources, the above will go a long long way to making avs look better in photos.
*finds link*
http://tinyurl.com/6lfz8c Nurien's MStar trailer for example of how the avatars, well, could look in Windlight
No need for facelights… good local lights setup in the build can make all the avatars look good!
I have a handful of face lights I have been experimenting with. I have yet to find one that works the way I want it to. And I am tired of my friends ridiculing me when we gather together at night, that I am "lighting up the night."
All I want is something subtle that makes my face look better in candid shots, especially those that other people take of me. I'm tired of looking in pictures like a monster when I have no lights on, or a Hollywood billboard, when I do wear lights, I want something that I can wear as part of my everyday wardrobe. I can save the bright lights for modeling photographs.
Any suggestions? I haven't looked at your tutorial yet. Will that help with what I am seeking?
Princess Ivory
The main problem of all this is Windlight, you can say whatever you want, that is realist, etc. But lot of the people don't want realism, want beauty and this is one of the reasons why people used facelights in the old client, cos the avatar looked just beauty 24 hours in any place with any light. Maybe you don't notice cos your skin is very poor in details, in fact in all this videos i never could see ur face well, maybe for the lights… I propose you grab a good detailed skin (if you want I can pass you one) and try to make a good nude photo that shows the details of the skins, this means not a plain skin as windlight does. Cos another problem of Windlight is that if you love the texture art of the skins the 50% of details are lost in windlight.
Ok you can say I can do presets, etc, like you say look Caliah Lyon's "Optimising WindLight for Avatars 2.0". And I did but there are problems still, I did lot of presets, I tried very complex lights and I managed to make presets that looks like the old viwer but some problems I found, 1st that always u have a fixed lighting, this means if I want my avatar look good always, I need always be in a sunnyday, 2nd depending of the buildings, envioriment, etc. U need coinstantly tweak the lights to make your avatar look good, so there isnt any preset that u can always use in any place with any light.
But besides all this let's talk about the big and important problems of windlight and facelights, one of the resons that people used facelights before is that no matter wich light had the others persons, the others persons saw ur avatar like u wanted, like u saw. Ok think about this cos is VERY IMPORTANT, there are lot of people that expends large amounts of money to customize their avatars, now it's like pointless, cos u can expend lot of money in your avatar but the other people depending their presets can see you ugly as hell, so with windlight the control over your avatar is completly lost. And you can say this is superficial, stupid, etc, but this is reality, in RL people buy expensive cloth to feel beauty and the beauty starts for the recognition of other people.
Another common problem with facelights… is that still lot of people cos their pc cant support windlight or cos just dont like windlight use the old viewer lights with the old facelights, what happens? If u use windlight, after expend hours of tweaking lights and got one u like when someone with the old facelight is in the same place as you, you see your avatar buried and all others, is like have a sun in a room, you see all bad and probably white. The same happens when you go a building that has lights or when u are near glows. So th emain problem is that the new light dont merge with the old. This is the most common problem I found, wherever i go always someone has a an old facelight and I can't see SL as I should, so in the end I opted to use the old lights with an old facelight, this way at least I can see SL well wherever I go, and lot of people is following this way.
So what I wanna say with all this? That all this tutorials you are making are a bit useless, are usefull for your personal use, but useless as social use like SL is. In the begining I felt mad, cos I thought was the only person that liked more the old looking of avatars, but I suppose was cos was the new thing, as days passes I see how more people is coming back to the old lights as soon they notice that their avatars look bad and they notice that can turn off windlight light in the graphics menu. Lot of my friends alredy returned to the old lights, I suppose cos people starts to be tired to go some place and see all the lights buried cos osmeone uses olf facelights or buildings has lights or the defoult preset of the sim is bad.
And I am sorry but I will encourage to the newbies and all the people use the old lights since this problems are resolved. While I puted a very bright light in me with glow and I go to most populated places to see if people enjoys this new experience as Linden Lab is saying.
I think is starting like a kind of lighting war between people that care about avatars and people that not.
Desidelia: that reasoning is sort of like insisting that all your software in 2008 runs on your old 486 with 64 mb of RAM.
Eventually SL had to update its graphics engine, or be outdated and join the rest of the virtual worlds scrapheap that didnt quite make it and didnt keep up as graphics tech moved on. I've been in most of them, and I'll be in the next ones too
Windlight suffers mostly from not being finished. Finish Windlight pretty please!
Thanks for the info about the followcam! I immediately my logged-on character (who is also my daughter, have no idea what she will do on Mother's Day) to go over and grab it for me.
s/immediately my/immediately sent my/
I don't have problems with WL, but some friends of mine have, dont ask me why, I don't know, they have better pcs than me, I suppose is cos windlight dont work with all the drivers, they just cant activate it.
Btw what I am saying is there are problems with lights in this new client, I play another games and I don't have this problems with lights, I see the lights good, the characters of the game dont look bad, looks detailed, looks beauty and dont have to tweak anything, in this new SL no.
This new client lacks of design, u can't deny me, and i mean real design not graphics, cos design is not just visual.
Another point is… If u have a product that is good why change it? I think has been a bad idea force all the users use windlight, would have been better like an option or a new game, why not SL II? Look the game starcraft, 10 years and still lot of people plays it and blizzard didnt launch a new game with better graphics, now they wil llauch Starcraft II, but as a new game not forcing the other users use it. But I will put you an example of design, is a problem I had years ago, a magazine contacted to me to remodel their magazine with a more new look, well I did, I made a new cool layout, more modern, more beauty, but I wasnt sure, lot of the readers were old people of 50-70 years old that was reading the magazine during 10 years, so i though, this new layout will fit? they will accept it? Lot of times people is scared of changes, I contacted my economy teacher to ask him opinion and he told me, are u mad?? U dont want loose clients, u alredy have clients, you are just looking new ones, so told me launch a new product, a new magazine and look the aceptance, with time people will jump to this new one and forget the old, they need time to adapt and accept. I did this and worked, and this is what does most of the companies, look the mmorpgs that are in the market, maybe they improve a bit the graphics with expansions but with the same engine, but they dont change radically the engine, if they change it they launch a new game and with time people jumps to this new game.
The new client seems a new game bad implemented, in my opinion wins good new things but looses another good things, it like a return to the old internet, when we had explroer and netscape and u needed one to see somethings and the other to see other things, something that drove crazy all the designers, then for this reasons was created standards.
Really I think that all the skin designers are very unhappy, imagine all the hours they expend creating amazing skins, maybe months and all for nothing cos in 2 seconds you can mess all the work just puting a facelight or changing the lights. They dont have control over their products, and really in most of the cases I dont see a difference between a RAC skin i bought for 4000L than a Eloh skin i got for free.
Well well i am making posts too long, better I stop, cos I can say more than hundered problems of this new client relationed with design.
Attaching image of someone wearing possible 18 face lights.
http://flickr.com/photos/day-oh/2460386842/
Just discovered today that windlight has ruined some of my objects - it used to be that a light in a prim illuminated the prim and now this no longer happens - and some of my creations have become very dull indeed.
Not happy.
It's a shame that the article only focuses on how wearing facelights can reduce your experience of the surroundings.
I'm a club owner and have spent a great deal of time placing point lights to enhance the look and feel of the build (including a point-light strobe). Someone attending the club wearing a framework of six facelights (or several people wearing one each) not only stops them from experiencing the environmental lighting, but removes them almost completely for everyone in the club.
As a builder I have to say that facelights; prim clothing that contains lights; and now prim hair that contains lights, come under the 'hell' category that Torley mentioned. They border on a form of griefing.
Thanx each and all for sharing!
@hypatia: I vote in favor of "glistening eyeballs"! I hope for at least some of the advances you noted too; you should've heard some of our WindLight graphic gurus remark about the anachronistic attributes of our current avatars. It's intriguing to me when one area gets improvement, then makes it so obvious how other stuff is behind… pressuring it to keep pace or better.
Will check out dat trailer too.
@Princess: Lighting up the night sounds like a good thing.
And IMHO, Caliah's (and other's) resources are a boon to getting more "natural" avatar looks in the present, yes.
@Desidelia: As I've said many times before, WindLight allows for a lot of unrealism. And there are an increasing amount of skins on the market that are being advertised as "WindLight-optimized", but perhaps it's more accurate to say they are actually less cartoonish (not that it's always a bad thing) in some aspects and don't require exaggeration of dynamic range to strike against the older, comparative "flat" lighting model.
A lot of what you mention will be moot, come Windlight server-side's estate settings — more details @ http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Windlight
@Kara: Oh sweet!
@Day: BigPapi Linden's gonna chomp on them (running joke).
@Sable: I like scripted club lights a lot, I haven't seen more of them but really appreciate the ambient they can cast. In the future, I hope they can be tempo-matched with beats — I used to go to a lot of raves where this happened, and that synchrony added immensely to my experiences.
@Torley It can get kind of hilarious sometimes. Both of us hang out at the same place all the time (the Transgender Lounge, slurl as my homepage above if anyone wants it) and have similar looks (not a lot of pink cats roaming around). Yet quite often people that have been there awhile are taken off guard when someone mentions we are the same person.
Hehe Torley actually "WindLight-optimized" is false advertisement, and well i suppose is the only good thing for bad designers, cos they can fake the ads very easy, now lot of ads shows amazing clothes and skins that u almost will never see in ur avatar.
And is windlight that makes cartoon avatars cos does like an effect of blur in the skin.
But well don't think I am just bitching, I am trying lot of presets and light systems to find something good. I challenge u to make a lighting tutorial that works in all places without loosing avatar details.
I have found some but the old facelights always are a problem, maybe another solution is change the old viwer lights or make the avatars full contrast in the old viewer, this way people wont use facelights and both users will enjoy SL, the ones that uses WL and the ones that not.
Nothing like some avatar with 6 klieg lights walking around in a sim with a 60 meter diameter light effect (yes i measured it. it really does cast light in a 60 meter diameter circle) and when they walk up next to anything the textures are totally washed out. Not to mention all the flickering from the effect of only 6 local lights allowed in range. All you have to do is set to midnight and zoom way out and you'll see the ones with the over amped facelights.
I do agree the lighting with windlight has negative aspects to go with the positive aspects. Windlight is great for taking still images. local lights also help still images to get rid of Windlight shadowing. If your making a movie then hope a walking klieg light array doesn't stagger into your view unless your making a comedy about people oblivious to how much they damage the sl experiences of others. Windlight is not real useful in social settings inside buildings–where most social activities take place from what I have seen.
Whats really interesting is how creative people must be to overcome the effect of viewer environmental effects that were designed to be that way.
At least we can still set sun to mid day or midnight.
I'm working on a new build that leverages Windlight reflections. I'm undecided about use of local lighting to increase visibility during darkness so people will not have to set sun to mid day. guess i'll just have to build the lights in and hope people using obsolete viewers don't come around with klieg light arrays messing up everything for others.
[…] Torley An illuminating tale of the history behind Second Life's facelights Quote from the site - A facelight, in its most basic form, consists of an invisible prim (object) […]
Facelights and other avatar lighting systems definately have their place, especially in some SL photography. It is obvious why some people would choose to use them.
There are other situations though where an avatar lighting can be totally detrimental to those around them. In situations where a building/artist has carefully crafted light into their work, an avatar wearing lighting not only potentially ruins the work for themselves, but also anyone in their vicinity.
We had a example during a recent performance of 'The Wall'. Weeks of careful lighting design from the lighting rigs could not appreciated by the audience because one 'nearby' person was wearing a 6-prim lighting system.
After they removed it, suddenly the show could be seen as we designed it to seen, to cheers and "ooohhhs" from the audience. The person wasn't doing on purpose but just did not know the consequences of facelights on those around them or on the SL environment.
So while I see some uses for facelights, I think it is a courtesy to remove them under some circumstances.
@Desidelia: "WindLight-optimized" isn't necessarily false ad. It *can* be gimmicky, but isn't always, for the reason I described earlier.
@Ann: How did you measure it? Tools menu > Show Light Radius?
@Debbie: Well-said, and like all good artistry, requires tastes, decisions, judgment. Alas, I missed The Wall, but heard about it (I liked the movie a lot). Sucks to hear that; I do hope that either this relatively obscure limit is addressed eventually, or there's a better way to give priority to certain lights (e.g., the parcel owner or group that the land is set to).
Aha! An old dispute, and this one pitches three camps against each other: personal vanity ("we want to look beautiful, not like cartoons"), skin designers (who put hours of work on those marvellous skins and get Windlight to display them horribly), and builders (who experiment very carefully with lights positioned on scenes — which simply get ignored by 2-3 avatars wearing facelights in the same area).
It's not a peaceful issue. When the new lighting model came out, and even in spite of the limitations on just 6 lights on a scene, builders cleverly used lights to give proper "atmosphere" to the buildings. Before facelights became popular, I remember people like Scope Cleaver or Damien Fate showing me very detailed use of ambient lights. These builds looked gorgeous — as you walked across them, lights would subtly illuminate the scene realistically as you progressed through the several rooms. Some themed buildings even fared better: say, a hidden mountain cave where you're holding a light-enabled lantern, and would see eerie things as you progressed through tunnels with the day of light here and there showing through cracks on rocks, etc.
Then people started to wear facelights, and all the magic of these buildings disappeared. In fact, they became ugly, uninteresting, dull, and some clients even complained! In fact the only thing that happened was that a small group of 2-3 avatars wearing multiple facelights just stole all the lights in the scene. For them — and anyone else visiting those places — the scene became uninteresting, and they complained.
So what did builders do? Since they cannot control who's wearing facelights (or how many are wearing them), the choice is to use the "glow" attribute of prims, and 'bake' textures to look like they're being illuminated. Light and shadows become textures, and not dependent on the lighting model. Sure, it means that scenes don't look "dynamic", but they're just "scenario". You can still do some pretty effects that way, but it's far less realistic than using "real" ambient lights. But it's the only choice left!
It also raises the cost of creating complex environments — 'baking' textures to 'fake' lights and shadows require setting them up in something like Maya or 3DS and projecting lights and shadows, and then do cutting & pasting, bit by bit, into SL. Or, as an alternative, shadows and light elements become extra, useless prims, just to be able to give some slight 'illusion' of ambient illumination. We always had this choice in SL, of course.
It also means that "dark environments" will get less and less attention, since people wearing facelights will cause pools of light to spill over the scene. Yes, of course, there are better facelight designers than others, and it's not so awful in some cases. It still looks strange. Facelights work far better during the day, but people use them all the time.
It's a tricky issue, then. Lights were intended to be used by builders, not by avatars in their vanity. But the latter case has triumphed, because Windlight renders the avatar meshes in such a weird way. Vanity, in SL, tends to triumph always over building — people buy many more clothes than furniture in SL, for instance — so it's quite unlikely that this will change. OpenGL will not change the number of available lights (to, say, a 100!) in the near future due to the raw processing power needed to calculate ambient lighting, so there is just one option left:
Make avatar meshes render beautifully in Windlight
There is one other option. SL already includes the equivalent of a facelight that is activated when we enter 'Appearance' mode. I believe (although I could be wrong) that this is a modification of the texture baking done for the the avatar texture, rather than actually using a point light.
It's within LL's power to make this an option in the preferences menu such that it can always be applied to all AVs within the client's field of view.
That way, if you want to see facelit people in addition to the 'dynamic' lighting effects that builders create, you can. If you would rather not see people this way, then you should have the option of turning the preference off.