Simple Question about the use of the Advanced Lighting Model

[Henri Beauchamp]

Taking the pavement is not really relevant (it is quite possible that the No ALM image was taken a little too soon, possibly before all textures were loaded at 100%, since I took it first, while I had to wait for all textures to reload after switching to ALM, and did use the texture console to make sure).

Here are more obvious examples: on the left, without ALM, on the right with ALM on:

 

Edited May 6, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Prokofy Neva]

10 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

To be honest, I have to try very hard to see any difference at all in these images, but I guess a photographer could (and I freely admit to utter incompetence with a camera, RL or SL).

Incidentally, there's another thread where an SL photographer is in dire need of some advice that I think only a viewer dev would be qualified to give.

But back to this topic, I had to click on the images to see them at full scale, so I pulled them into gimp and grabbed a section from each that hopefully will show full size in a single image here:

What I see in the upper selection is less sharp vegetation, and in the lower selection totally smeared-out front surfaces of the stones. Maybe the stones have a normalmap that's invisible to the non-ALM lower selection.

Thing is, I want to see those normalmap effects and all the Materials details, especially as they emerge differently under different cam angles and lighting conditions. The lighting in these images seems pretty flat with the sun angle almost directly overhead, which mutes Materials effects pretty drastically.

I mean, people can see SL however they want, and if they don't want to see my projected lighting and Materials effects, that's fine, but that way they'll miss a whole bunch of dynamics in favor of some static diffusemap texture detail.

I don't know why people spend so much time disagreeing with you about what you can see before your eyes. For whatever reason, whatever combination of set-up or graphics card, ALM makes things more blurry.

Here are three pictures. 1) Regular photo without ALM after 5 minutes, still waiting for the rock to rez in 2) Add ALM, it adds shadows but much of the elements are blurry; look at the top of the tree; waiting doesn't help -- notice how the leaves and branches in fact lose their definition; 3) Add "depth of field" and it is something like that "toy village" type of filter, where blurry and seeming "depth" combine to make a really ugly picture. Hence, unclick it all. In fact, without these induced shadows, the picture looks brighter and cleaner.

 

Edited May 7, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Akane Nacht]

always off. I use it sometimes for taking pictures or if someone made something that really needs to be seen with advanced lighting (ie they tell me to switch it on).

It just makes it too laggy to move, and tbh I don't see a whole lot of difference visually.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

On 5/4/2022 at 4:08 PM, Jules Catlyn said:

How many of you use the Advanced Lighting Model in your viewer?

My estimate is between half to two thirds of all people in SL have ALM on all the time.

On my older iMac (Nvidia GTX 760), ALM on is a drag, reduced the fps 10-fold, compared to ALM off. On my newer PC (Nvidia GTX 1080Ti), there's no noticeable difference between ALM off or on.

This divide can be big problem for me, as a creator. Whenever I want to use projector lights in a build. With ALM, it looks fine. Without, it can look like an atomic explosion.

[Qie Niangao]

7 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I don't know why people spend so much time disagreeing with you about what you can see before your eyes. For whatever reason, whatever combination of set-up or graphics card, ALM makes things more blurry.

Here are three pictures. 1) Regular photo without ALM after 5 minutes, still waiting for the rock to rez in 2) Add ALM, it adds shadows but much of the elements are blurry; look at the top of the tree; waiting doesn't help -- notice how the leaves and branches in fact lose their definition; 3) Add "depth of field" and it is something like that "toy village" type of filter, where blurry and seeming "depth" combine to make a really ugly picture. Hence, unclick it all. In fact, without these induced shadows, the picture looks brighter and cleaner.

Again, looking at the pictures individually, I have to try really hard to see any difference at all, but zooming in on a detail and comparing side-by-side, there's definitely a difference:

That's ALM on the left, and I agree it's not as crisp as the non-ALM image on the right.

Incidentally, the ALM version here also has shadows enabled—which I use all the time, too, but it's not required for basic ALM—and it will have some performance impact; whether that's noticeable is very dependent on graphics card.

Depth of field isn't an effect I much appreciate in digital imagery, so I almost never use it myself.

Anyway, yeah, I can see the difference now. But there's also a big difference the other way, and at some point I'll make a little screen recording to contrast ALM and non-ALM dynamics while looking around a build with Materials effects (and at some lighting angle other than high noon).

Now that I think about it, it seems kind of backwards to enable ALM for pictures and turn it off otherwise, when a big difference is really the dynamic information ALM adds while moving through and around a scene with Materials surfaces. Some of that information is evident in static 2D images of the scene, true, but to me it's really the dynamic effects of ALM that affect the whole experience of being in SL.

[Candide LeMay]

Isn't the main difference in crispness the antialiasing setting (which only applies to ALM as far as I can tell)?

In Firestorm with ALM on and antialiasing set to 'disabled' things seem just as sharp as with ALM off. If I set antialiasing to 2x 4x etc then things get more blurry.

[Jenna Huntsman]

18 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

To be honest, I have to try very hard to see any difference at all in these images, but I guess a photographer could (and I freely admit to utter incompetence with a camera, RL or SL).

As someone with a lot of experience in the field, SL (w/ default settings) period is a bad thing to compare against a real camera as the lens of the SL camera is optically perfect - unless you enable DoF (I have actually began to make a list of DoF presets which correlate to real lenses, see here https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Jenna_Huntsman/CameraLensPresets).

The example that Henri gave is a good example of what the perceived issue is, although I think there may me more at play there - maybe the shadow map is being rendered at too low resolution? I can't say that I've ever seen this myself, even testing now, so maybe it's also YMMV.

It's also worth noting that the human eye is much more sensitive to contrast than it is colour and luminance, so enabling ALM will inevitably cause some "blur", not because there is actually blur being applied, but because the contrast is lower. A great example of this is seen in Qie's post with the house, as looking at the image, I don't see any drop sharpness but there is a substantial drop in contrast (thus, making the image look 'blurry', as the eye is having a harder time distinguishing between objects).

[Blush Bravin]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Now that I think about it, it seems kind of backwards to enable ALM for pictures and turn it off otherwise, when a big difference is really the dynamic information ALM adds while moving through and around a scene with Materials surfaces. Some of that information is evident in static 2D images of the scene, true, but to me it's really the dynamic effects of ALM that affect the whole experience of being in SL.

This!

[Henri Beauchamp]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Anyway, yeah, I can see the difference now

At last... 😜

 

Quote

. But there's also a big difference the other way, and at some point I'll make a little screen recording to contrast ALM and non-ALM dynamics while looking around a build with Materials effects (and at some lighting angle other than high noon).

Now that I think about it, it seems kind of backwards to enable ALM for pictures and turn it off otherwise, when a big difference is really the dynamic information ALM adds while moving through and around a scene with Materials surfaces. Some of that information is evident in static 2D images of the scene, true, but to me it's really the dynamic effects of ALM that affect the whole experience of being in SL.

I really cannot care less about the ”dynamic” (and indeed, materials are almost always unnoticeable unless you change the angle of view dynamically, making them just another burden for the viewer, with way more textures to load and VRAM/RAM used, for ”static” or slowly changing point of views), when the ALM mode makes things look so blurry and bland (the loss in contrast and the much less vibrant colors seen in ALM mode make things look especially ugly in many scenes)...

Sorry, but as long as LL will not solve these problems, ALM will stay OFF for me !

[Jennifer Boyle]

Always on.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Just to illustrate how profoundly different the world can look for people with ALM on or off. In the example below, I'm showing a bumper car arena. The floors of such arenas IRL are typically metallic, to conduct the DC electricity to power the cars. I tried to emulate that by projecting a battery of colored spotlights onto it. With ALM on, the light is reflected both in a diffuse way (by the dust and oxidized top layer of the metal) and in a mirror-like way (by the unoxidized metallic component of the surface). I really wanted to show this effect, but at the same time, a large group will see the arena horribly overexposed. So I added an option to turn the projector lights on and off. It's up to the arena owner to decide if they want to show off the pretty colored lights or not.

 

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Just to illustrate how profoundly different the world can look for people with ALM on or off.

These tanks of prim "water" and "molten goop" are in a build I visit often, both viewed both with and without ALM. (This is the first time I've ever recorded video from SL, so please excuse my caveman cam control.)

(I should probably do something about all that alpha-flicker, huh? 😛 )

[Rowan Amore]

Put that fancy floor in a club with 40-60 people and I'd rather reduce lag and not see the shiny pretty.  Exploring regions without many people?  Sure, I'll have it all cranked up.

[Qie Niangao]

2 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Put that fancy floor in a club with 40-60 people and I'd rather reduce lag and not see the shiny pretty.  Exploring regions without many people?  Sure, I'll have it all cranked up.

Okay, but it costs the same to render that floor (or anything else in the scene) whether there's one or 60 avatars also in the scene. There the entire scaling issue is the rendering of avatars; hence, personally I use aggressive impostering, with or without ALM.  It's true that a single avatar's jewelry can pose quite a rendering burden, and ALM on avatars can add to that burden, but honestly I've never seen an avatar over (at most) 100K complexity that isn't improved by the jellydoll treatment.

[Rachel1206]

On 5/4/2022 at 4:08 PM, Jules Catlyn said:

How many of you use the Advanced Lighting Model in your viewer? https://gyazo.com/e4b335dc7a3737f32d50480479804c63

Always - so lucky I can run everything in 2K Ultra graphics and all maxed out except for normally busy night clubs with 40+ ppl . To me SL lighting and shadows important and part of my joy experiencing SL.

 

Edited May 7, 2022 by Rachel1206
Spelling

[Lyssa Greymoon]

3 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Put that fancy floor in a club with 40-60 people and I'd rather reduce lag and not see the shiny pretty.  Exploring regions without many people?  Sure, I'll have it all cranked up.

Try the performance viewer. It is amazing for that kind of thing.

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Try the performance viewer. It is amazing for that kind of thing.

As soon as Firestorm has one, I will.

[Joseline Tiratzo]

ALM really helps with photos. It is useful to create light and shadow which adds depth. If there are materials ALM adds texture and reflectivity. Not PNG/JPG texture but surface texture. There's more to a photo than displaying all colors or showing every single detail. In the photo below, I'm using three large projector lights with the rest of the room in shadow because ambient light and sunlight are turned off. ALM makes this method of lighting available. I also agree it's not very useful for many activities and locations in SL. I turn my settings down when going places. People who design small spaces should try to design with ALM in mind and add a sign to let others know.

[Lindal Kidd]

Qie's video shows very, um, graphically...why I prefer to use the ALM.

[Salt Peppermint]

always on. I also feel that many think they need high or ultra settings to have ALM on... you don't. You can absolutely stay on mid graphic settings and enabled AML for a much nicer experience without stressing your computer. 

Also shadows and AML are 2 different things. Shadows usually are much harder on the computer and will drop your FPS significantly . enabling AML but keeping shadows off usually will not make a great impact on your FPS but give a much nicer experience. 

of course it will also depend on the items you look at. not every creator uses materials in their items , so in some cases there will be a huge difference in some not so.

personally I love to enhance some of my clothes with optional holo shine materials, that can not be seen without AML for example. 

[Orwar]

1 hour ago, Salt Peppermint said:

of course it will also depend on the items you look at. not every creator uses materials in their items , so in some cases there will be a huge difference in some not so.

   No materials still beats people doing this .. 

[missyrideout]

4 hours ago, Salt Peppermint said:

I also feel that many think they need high or ultra settings to have ALM on... you don't.

Exactly! I always start by moving the graphics preset slider way low. Mostly because it was the one way to get an even number like 100,000 for my the complexity threshold. If I move the complexity slider by itself its always something like 114,016 or whatever and I just ... don't like it. I like nice round numbers! Then I tick off advanced lighting and a couple other things and that's my base quality setting.

[Salt Peppermint]

On 5/9/2022 at 7:50 PM, Orwar said:

   No materials still beats people doing this .. 

there are a few cases where this will actually work quite nicely. obviously not on big surfaces. but yes, not everyone who uses materials also actually knows how to properly use them. 

but we all started somewhere, and many came a long way, making SL beautiful. 

[Marianne Little]

Bright colors is a feature for some, and for others, like me, it is too much color.

I often edit a picture by adding a layer, set it to black and white, and then almost transparent, to tone down the colors.

But I would never argue that I do it right and that those who prefer much color think wrong about it. It is a personal choice, what looks good to me may give the other reaction: "Wtf was she thinking, that is just a washed out blur. She must be doing something wrong."