{"id":116,"date":"2009-12-01T18:54:29","date_gmt":"2009-12-01T18:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.templarcreations.com\/?p=116"},"modified":"2009-12-01T18:54:29","modified_gmt":"2009-12-01T18:54:29","slug":"not-an-introduction-to-second-life-prim-lights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/?p=116","title":{"rendered":"Not An Introduction to Second Life Prim Lights"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is dedicated to those knowledgeable and helpful folk over on the <\/em>SL\u00a0Universe forums<\/em><\/a>, without whom this post might never have been written.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is not the post I was going to write.<\/p>\n

I was going to give an introduction to using Second Life prim lights. Because I\u00a0needed some illustrative snapshots, I created a simple prim, activated the\u00a0light feature, and started taking pictures.<\/p>\n

At which point I realised that after five years in Second Life there are still\u00a0things that I don’t know, one of them being that lights don’t quite work how\u00a0I expected.<\/p>\n

As an example, here’s a cube which has been turned into a light-source. You can\u00a0see it lighting up the floor, as expected:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Well…maybe not quite as expected. Why does the light have such a peculiarly\u00a0elongated and patterned appearance?<\/p>\n

What’s happening is that the light is revealing some of the underlying\u00a0structure in the Second Life world. Turning on wireframe (this is in the\u00a0Advanced menu, if you want to try it yourself) gives an indication of what is\u00a0going on. I won’t post a picture, because a static picture of the wireframe view is just a confusing mass of lines. If you try it yourself, though, you will notice that the lines and intersections (technically known as\u00a0vertices) match the pattern of the light. When a light shines on a prim, the\u00a0appearance is changed at the nearest vertex.<\/p>\n

Let’s move the cube so that it is ‘between’ vertices:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The light fades. It doesn’t vanish altogether, but it is certainly less visible.<\/p>\n

If the cube is moved again, over the next vertex, the full light returns:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If the light follows the vertices, what happens if the prim that the light is\u00a0shining on is resized? Given what we’ve just seen, it’s perhaps unsurprising\u00a0that resizing the prim will change the appearance of the light:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This has the odd result that resizing the light prim has no effect on the light\u00a0that it casts, whereas resizing the prim that the light falls on does have an\u00a0effect!<\/p>\n

So, when you are trying to set up lights in Second Life, you have more to think\u00a0about than you might have imagined. The position of the lights in relation to\u00a0the prims that they are illuminating, and the size and shape of the prims that\u00a0the light falls on, all have an impact on the final appearance of the lights.<\/p>\n

In the next article in this series I will go back and write the post I\u00a0originally intended, and give more of a basic introduction to lights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is dedicated to those knowledgeable and helpful folk over on the SL\u00a0Universe forums, without whom this post might never have been written. This is not the post I was going to write. I was going to give an introduction to using Second Life prim lights. Because I\u00a0needed some illustrative snapshots, I created a simple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[55,72,85,104],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mv-sl-tutorials","category-tutorials","tag-light","tag-prim","tag-second-life","tag-vertex-light"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templarcreations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}