Can You See the Light?

One of my favorite builds in the UWA flagship Challenge was the design I made in January of this year. Besides the winning design the part I enjoyed the most was the use of lights and lighting/shadow effects throughout the build. From outside lighting of the build to shadows and sunbeams streaming through the upper floor windows,

The use of lights and lighting/shadow effects can take a build to an other level of complexity. Using the settings in the build/edit box in SL allows for many different effects. As with all things less is more with lighting effects.

There is nothing worse than a build that is over exposed with lights or even worse GLOW set to a maximum brightness effect. It looks like crap plain and simple to any one who has a good graphics card and their shaders turned on. GLOW IS NOT GOOD set to max bright, please all glow whores read this and understand we do talk about how bad your art and builds looked with the over kill of glow on them!

In the edit/build menu the "features" tab allows you to set the effects for light on prims, You can control the intensity, radius and fall off along with the color you want the prim to be. This will allow you to have a multitude of light effects from color to distance and brightness a light can be seen in world. The "texture" tab also allows you to make a prim full bright and finally the glow setting can be found here.

One of the best ways to get a good feel of how lights are working in a build is to walk through it and see how they look as you pass by them. I have always been an advocate of walking the build and getting a feel for how it flows over just camming it.

So take your time and make sure it feels and looks right and remember less is more when using lights in your build.

Good Building

Nyx