Face the Light

Time for another installment in Dylan’s popular series of Tips and Tricks. This time, let’s talk about something that can make your avatar look better when done right, but will make it look like Bela Lugosi in a 1930s horror flick when done wrong. The sinister thing is that you might not see the effect it has for others, depending on which Second Life viewer version you use. Let’s talk about facelights.

Note: As of April 2, 2008, the regular Second Life viewer is based on the Windlight engine. Some problems I mention here that have to do with the differences between Windlight and the older graphics engine will soon be a thing of the past. Still, if you’ve only now switched to Windlight and are wondering why your facelight suddenly looks so awful, you’ll find some clues here.

A facelight is a light-giving object you wear somewhere on your avatar to brighten up your face. The idea is first of all to make your face visible at all in dark surroundings, but also to make it look better by getting rid of stark shadows and smoothing over some of the less attractive parts of the polygon mesh that makes up the shape of your face. So far, so good.

The first thing to keep in mind when using a facelight is that it will work only for observers who have local lights enabled in their SL viewer. To check whether they are enabled for you if you are using the regular SL viewer, go to your preferences (ctrl-P), click on the Graphics Detail tab and look up whether the “Nearby local lights” option is active. If you are using the current Release Candidate viewer (which already contains the new Windlight graphics engine), go to the Graphics tab, check the “Custom” box to make the advanced options appear and find the “Nearby local lights” option at the bottom. If that option is inactive, you will see neither your own nor anyone else’s facelight, nor any other local lighting that may be present in your location. If your equipment can handle it, always keep that option active; it makes a huge difference for the better in the way Second Life looks.

You might ask why that option is called “Nearby local lights”. The reason is that the way local lighting is set up in SL, you can see only the light from the six light sources nearest to you. It’s simply a matter of saving computing power. Six light sources, that’s all; everything else will be ignored by your viewer.

This brings me to my first rule for using facelights: Don’t use them all the time. Use them only when you are in a badly lit environment. Good builders take great care to incorporate local lighting into their builds so that additional personal facelights will not be needed. And not just not needed, they may even destroy the effect the builders want to achieve with their lighting setup, so you deprive yourself and others of the enjoyment of seeing things the way the creators intended.

The second rule is: Always examine the effect of your facelight in different daytime settings in both the regular and the Windlight (RC) viewers. If your computer can’t run Windlight, get feedback and maybe pictures from friends. This is important because what the facelight does to your face in Windlight may be vastly different from what you see in the regular viewer. Local lighting works very different in these versions. While in the regular viewer the light is very diffuse, in Windlight the direction the light is coming from is clearly seen. The facelight of the lady in the following picture is located in her choker. She was using the regular viewer, so she wasn’t aware of how weird that looked in the more realistic lighting environment of Windlight at all.

Note how her nose and her lower jaw and the underside of her hair are lit from straight below. Pure Lugosi.

Another problem that is much more noticable in Windlight than in the regular viewer is that many people are running around with facelights that are much too bright for their skin tone and/or that light up a much too large area. Sometimes I think I’m looking straight into the center of a nuclear explosion when someone with a facelight like that rezzes in. Even after the initial blinding shock has passed, their faces are hardly visible because the intense light is washing out all colours and contours. One more reason to always check in both viewer versions.

So what do you do if it turns out that your facelight makes you look like Dracula? Don’t panic. A facelight is no rocket science. You can make yourself a good one within a couple of minutes. Here’s how:

1. Go to your home or some other place where you are allowed to build and create an object. The shape and size of the object doesn’t really matter, so if you know nothing about building at all just right-click on the ground, select “Create” from the pie menu, and then left-click on the ground. A plywood box will appear, and you will see the Edit window on your screen, with the “General” tab open. If you know how, you can choose a ball instead of a box and make the object smaller.

2. Give the object a name. Just put “Facelight” where it says “Object”.

3. Then go to the “Features” tab. Click the Light option and fill in the values:

My advice: Leave the colour unchanged. Anything other than white light might do funny things to your skin tone. The intensity is a value you might want to play with a little. 1.000 is the maximum value and looks good for darker skins. If your skin is very light, you might want to try a lower value. Radius is set to 10.000 by default, which is much too high for a facelight. 0.800 to 1.200 is plenty enough. Set Falloff down to 0.000.

4. Make your facelight (the object, not the light) invisible. You do that by going to the “Texture” tab, clicking the texture image and then replacing the plywood texture with a fully transparent texture. If you don’t have one, pick up a freebie textures box somewhere or ask your friends. Someone will have one for you. If all else fails, give me a shout in-world, I’ll give you one. Note: Setting the “Transparency” spinner on the “Texture” tab to 100 won’t work, the spinner only goes up to 90. Your object won’t be completely invisible. You need the invisible texture.

5. Close the edit window and take the object into your inventory.

6. Find the object in your inventory, right-click on it and select “Attach to”. Select an unused spot in your face, the chin for example.

7. The next step is probably easiest if you do it standing on a posestand. You’ll find one in any clothes store in SL. Press Ctrl-Alt-T to make all invisible objects visible. You will see your facelight as a red, half-transparent shape right in your face where you attached it. Right-click it and select “Edit” from the pie menu. Now you will see the edit window again, and also 3 axes going through the middle of your object – red, green and blue. Each axis has two cone-shaped handles. Move your mouse cursor over one of the handles on the red axis (which will point away from your face) until the handle gets larger and lights up. You can then grab the handle with the left mouse button and drag it carefully away from your face. The object will follow the handle. Drag until the object’s center is floating about 30 or 40 cm in front of your face. Close the edit window and press Ctrl-Alt-T again to make the red beacons disappear.

8. That’s it! Now if you want to detach the facelight, right-click it in your inventory and select “Detach”. If you need it, right-click and “Wear”.

9. And if all this is too much hassle, just visit The Shelter, go to my info stand to the left of the freebie corner and pick up your free ready-made, full-perm facelight from there. That one’s even got a built-in script that lets you switch it on and off with chat commands .

One final hint: When you’re dancing with someone, even if your facelight is set up properly for yourself, chances are it will be too close to the face of your dance partner and make them look ugly. There are ways to solve that, for example by adjusting the light intensity down to 0.500 if both of you are wearing facelights, but in most cases it’s probably easiest to just leave facelights off while dancing with a partner.