Not too bright full bright

Ok, so I'm not intentionally making this a second life blog... But apparently SL is giving me lots of stuff to rant about.

"Full bright" is a checkbox that can be enabled on an object's texture in second life. What is does is tell the viewer rendering the object to assume that all sides are completely lit up from all directions regardless of actual lighting conditions.

Quite a lot of creators in in SL however seem to think that what the checkbox does is "make all colours look more pretty and not so murky." This misconception seems especially common among hair makers.


The reason for this attitude is that since textures in second life is always treated as the way objects are supposed to look before any shading is applied, textures can only be made darker or lose contrast due to only some colours being added. This is why applying a "tint" of white to a texture does nothing - it says that the texture should not be darkened anywhere. Applying a blue tint adds blue and not red or green and thus shifts colour. To simulate the same effect in Photoshop, create a layer on top of your texture, fill it with a "tint colour" and set that layer's blend mode (from the layers panel - the dropdown says "normal" unless changed) to "multiply". Anyway, it all means that colours will look the most like the creator intended when no shading occurs. This includes shadows and coloured light.

So why is "full bright"such a bad idea?

First of all, your object will shine. Have you seen people whose hair glows in the night? That's because all prims in their hair is set to be full bright. You look at the crowd in the dimly lit nightclub, and some people stand out like light beacons because their hairs' designers didn't like it when the colour became less vibrant. So instead it ruins the sense of immersion for the rest of us.

Secondly, it creates mismatches. Avatars can never be set to be full bright. So if a designer decided that the prim sleeves on a coat didn't look cool in the red-isch light they happened to be near when designing and made it full bright... then when the owner of such a  coat is anywhere with less light or near coloured light sources, the sleeves will have a different colour than the rest of their coat.

Now, I can see why designers do this. It s the result of some very odd choices in how SL renders things and mostly due to how light behaves in second life. Real light is what creates colour – without it, everything would be black. Real light bounces off of things – in fact, the reason you can see something is because light (in the frequencies of the colour it seems to be) is reflected on it's surface. When real light has been reflected off of one thing and reaches another some additional frequencies are absorbed by the second object and the rest is reflected on and might reach your eyes. This potentially infinite reflectivity is what enables you to see objects, their reflections and get colour tints.

Second life light... doesn't exist at all. Or rather, extends from every surface to your camera. The colour of this "light" is the colour of the texture on that surface. The light can be of a lesser degree if the environment light is set to less than maximum. Light sources compensates for this by making every surface within it's fall-off loose less light depending on it's intensity. But nothing can be lit brighter than it's original texture suggests. And light never bounce at all. Not only does that mean that there is no such thing as reflections on prims (water is a special case), but it also means that light can not move around by way of brightly coloured surfaces that in reality would have absorbed little light. In reality a lamp would lit a room with white walls better than a room with black walls. In SL, the effect would be the same in either case, except that the white room would be grey unless the lamp is very strong. Or the walls are set to full bright".

The light rendering is bad in SL... But please, don't use that as an excuse to create bad things. Compensate by making textures slightly brighter than they should be instead.