builders PLEASE! watch your lighting !! Yellow light is NOT flattering in advanced lighting

[Tazzie Tuque]

This is a plea to all club owners, sim owners who are open to the public.. please please do not use lighting with a yellow tone to it...  There is nothing worse than having a nice black outfit on that looks awesome with textures and materials in normal white light, then to see an ugly yellow cast all over it when you go somewhere that has yellow lighting.  Nothing needs yellow lighting.  Not even a fireplace,  white colour light is all that is needed..  It is also impossible to take good photos if advanced lighting is enabled and materials worn in a yellow light..  especially on dark colours.. it just ruins the whole shot.  AND while I am at it, too much too strong lights are bad as well, on light colours that can cause a horrid glare effect that can actually wipe out textures.  I have held off saying anything about this for almost a year.. but finally I felt I needed to..  I guess some folks just do not realize we all do not want to be washed in yellow, or blotted out by extreme light.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

If something is textured such that it only looks good under plain white light, something is screwy about the materials or their settings. I'm not saying that you haven't encountered seriously bad lighting choices around the grid, we all have, but if one is aiming for "realistic" lighting you know that there is almost no such thing as a natural source of pure white light. Now, yellow in particular is indeed, as you remark, a very common example of these bad choices. A fire or a torch emitting light does not emit a pure <1.0,1.0,0.0> yellow. Nor does this color emulate the color temperature of any common light source. In fact, any light source that is fully saturated (all ones or zeros in the color vector) will always look "unnatural"

But you can't blanket-blame the lighting and assume that the "lighting is wrong" when something doesn't look good. If I constructed a cyberpunk area mostly lit by lights emitting <1.0,0.8196,0.6980> - a desaturated yellow, shading ever so lightly to the orange, for something to look "right" under that light it needs to look like it was lit by sodium streetlights. If it doesn't, since the lighting is accurate then the material is wrong. Now, you may not like how something looks under sodium light  and might choose to photograph it somewhere else - but if it looks like it is being properly lit by the intended light then both the material and the lighting are "correct" - if everything there looks "wrong" for the intended light, the lighting probably IS setup wrong. But if only your item looks wrong while everything else looks correctly lit for the type of lighting being emulated, it's likely the material.

(I used sodium light in my example because (a) it's highly appropriate to a grungy cyberpunk setting and (b) it's close to monochromatic in RL and thus extremely easy to emulate with a RGB emitter and to prove that you have done  so accurately)

[Tazzie Tuque]

4 minutes ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

But if only your item looks wrong while everything else looks correctly lit for the type of lighting being emulated, it's likely the material.

The use of materials, under these circumstances that I described here;  consists of a specular of pure white no colour, and only a setting of 51 with no ambient setting, and the specular map is very dark as well under white iights in normal white light it shows only a little glimmer of shine with no colour added.  But under yellow lights the whole. in this case dress, shines with the yellow light..  So in this case it is NOT the materials.  If the specular in materials is low and is not adding colour itself, it will pick up the ugly yellow light.  Seems there is no way around this.  For instance I was at a club last night, myself and a few other ladies had a black  or dark blue or red dresses on with materials and advanced lighting enabled,  and we all looked like we were wearing a shiny yellow wrapper over our clothes,  there were several strong yellow lights around the room..  Not a pretty sight..  Just needed to bring that to attention.  This happens quite often which sadly really does reduce the places suitable for photography.

[OptimoMaximo]

3 minutes ago, Tazzie Tuque said:

The use of materials, under these circumstances that I described here;  consists of a specular of pure white no colour, and only a setting of 51 with no ambient setting

 

4 minutes ago, Tazzie Tuque said:

So in this case it is NOT the materials. 

Hhhmmm nope, the material IS wrong. Pure white means 100% of the light hitting the surface bounces off of it unabsorbed , which is physically impossible and violates the laws of energy conservation. There are many misconceptions in SL about materials and the management of specularity only through specular map is one of them. The specular map defines the percentage of light that gets reflected off the surface and, for non metals, usually a value around 50% is appropriate. The roll off of such specular highlight is determined by the glossiness map and its value in the texture tab. 

[Tazzie Tuque]

4 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Hhhmmm nope, the material IS wrong. Pure white means 100% of the light hitting the surface bounces off of it unabsorbed , which is physically impossible and violates the laws of energy conservation. There are many misconceptions in SL about materials and the management of specularity only through specular map is one of them. The specular map defines the percentage of light that gets reflected off the surface and, for non metals, usually a value around 50% is appropriate. The roll off of such specular highlight is determined by the glossiness map and its value in the texture tab. 

If you read my post, you would have seen that the specular map in the case I am describing was dark purposely so it would NOT let it shine too much ie. let too much light in...  or get too much reflected...  I have been working with materials since they came out and have used them in many ways, I fully understand how they work.. what I am trying to say here is that under yellow light in particular the best material settings that look great every where else,, look horrid under a yellow light on dark clothing.  So I fully disagree with your statement that the materials are wrong.  Sorry I am not going to continue to debate this..  I just wanted to put a heads up to builders about using yellow light.. that is all.