Material water - number of light reflections

[BibiNoire]

Hi, I have a problem with adding light sources objects to my object with material textures enabled. I want to create water with many lights reflecting in it. When I add more than 5 (somethimes 6) objects with light one reflection (of previously added objects with light) automatically turns off. Is this something what I can fix with viewr settings? 

[Drongle McMahon]

Unless Advanced Lighting is turned on, you are limited to six simultaneous local lights. This is because they consume a lot of rendering resource from the gpu (effectively, each source adds a whole new set of all the triangles in the scene to be draw from the light's point of view). So even if you want to enable ALM, you should probably try to avoid using too many.

ETA - Mistake there - it's only the shadow-casting lights that add that many extra effective triangles!!!

[BibiNoire]

Thank you very much for answer Drongle.

I understand it is very demanding also It seems I have no choice because this limit works with ALM enabled too, apparently.

[Drongle McMahon]

Does it? I retested with current LL viewer before answering, and had 12 lights on at the same time. What viewer are you using? They were 12 ordinary local lights. I'm pretty sure you can have more projected lights too.

[Dora Gustafson]

In the Advanced Lighting Model there really is no practical limit to the number of light sources and light reflections

There is a limit though to the number of shadows. Only the two or three nearest light sources to an object will make the object cast shadow. As I recall it may vary with the power your computer

The picture above is taken on my system which is nothing extraordinary:

Second Life 3.7.7 (289461) Apr 22 2014 13:01:33 (Second Life Release)

CPU: Intel® Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (3392.3 MHz)
Memory: 8174 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-bit  (Build 9600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 660/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.3489
OpenGL Version: 4.4.0

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

[Drongle McMahon]

Oh yes. I was forgetting that it's only the shadow casters that add all those extra triangles to the rendering queue. I corrected my post. Thaks for reminding me.

[BibiNoire]

Now seems It was animated texture what makes limit turns on.  Transparency turns limit on.

[Drongle McMahon]

Are you sure it's not transparency limiting reflections? No effect of animation for me, but ....

ETA. Seems to be total number of lights reflected from all alpha surfaces, not per surface.

[BibiNoire]

You' re right! Transparency indeed. More options for me, thank you again.