Do you trust your eyes?

[ChinRey]

Take a look at this picture:

It's a corner of a to floor store I'm working on with the second floor still missing so you can compare the walls downstairs and upstairs. Do you notice how much darker the lower half of the wall is?

It isn't. The top and bottom half of the wall have exactly the same texture and the illusion shatters when I break the continuity:

I'm sure we've all seen lots of similar optical illusion but I never thought I'd accidentally create one myself.

More important, there's something we need to be aware of as SL content creators that is so easy to forget: We do not see with our eyes, we see with our brains! The eyes only capture some very basic info and it's up to the brain to try to make sense of it. It's all about context; what looks good in Blender or Maya may not look good in SL and the same item may even look completely different in different scenes in SL.

Edited January 25, 2021 by ChinRey

[arton Rotaru]

On first glance to me it looked like a much larger room. I thought the lower wall was horizontally extended from the wood planks.

The difference in brightness is even weirder.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

A good texture memory saving technique too.

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

6 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Do you notice how much darker the lower half of the wall is?

Um...no?

[ChinRey]

19 minutes ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Um...no?

Aww. Try this then. This is from wikipedia's article about optical illusions, showing the same effect:

The squares marked A and B are exactly the same color and shade. We can prove it by connecting them:

 

 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

To clarify: you're saying region B looks darker to you than region A? Because it doesn't to me.

If anything, the bottom looks slightly lighter, but that's not an illusion -- my LCD monitor changes brightness when viewed from different vertical angles.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/25/2021 at 3:07 PM, ChinRey said:

Take a look at this picture:

It's a corner of a to floor store I'm working on with the second floor still missing so you can compare the walls downstairs and upstairs. Do you notice how much darker the lower half of the wall is?

It isn't. The top and bottom half of the wall have exactly the same texture and the illusion shatters when I break the continuity:

I'm sure we've all seen lots of similar optical illusion but I never thought I'd accidentally create one myself.

More important, there's something we need to be aware of as SL content creators that is so easy to forget: We do not see with our eyes, we see with our brains! The eyes only capture some very basic info and it's up to the brain to try to make sense of it. It's all about context; what looks good in Blender or Maya may not look good in SL and the same item may even look completely different in different scenes in SL.

When I see things like this when trying to match wallpaper it drives me crazy. And I think if I take a snapshot, the camera can't lie, I might suffer from optical illusions but it won't. But often the camera captures the exact same differentiation in colours and shadows on identical texture at identical tiling, which I suppose comes from the lighting of SL itself or something. 

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

That's a good point about the camera not lying, but equally, it can't support the human visual experience, so if an optical illusion works I'd go for it in preference to using camera pictures to mix and match shades. It's us that are going to live with and appreciate the result, cameras are just ephemera-generators.