Turn that light off!

This article was published in Fusion Magazine, November 2013. Click for the magazine!

Greetings everybody! My name is Auryn Beorn and this is my first article for Fusion. I will try to approach some topics that could be considered too techy for the betterment of your enjoyment in your SL experience. My philosophy is quite simple: the world of SL is a big place with so many different people and tastes; hence, learning the tools that allow us to minimize exposure to what we do not like, will be always beneficial for us. It's my wish that these tips will help you enjoy your SL.

I'm opening the field with facelights. Like them or not, they'll be present whenever we teleport to an event, club... Normally, the avatar wearing them, is not aware of what everybody else sees. Likely they haven't learned about windlight, and they don't see themselves right without the facelight.

This girl could light a city on her own.
Attacking the avatar that wears the facelight will solve nothing. What we can do is to deactivate them in our viewer. Easy and clean.

How do we do this?

We will have to open up our preferences (Me/Avatar: Preferences or CTRL P), and go to the Graphics tab. Make sure you have access to the advanced options (Advanced button). In there, we can find an option named Local Lights under Shaders: untick it.

This has one drawback: No local lights will be rendered. Local lights refer to light points that aren't the SL Sun/Moon. That is, all the other lights coming from objects.

But we have more choices.

We can start by derendering only the attached lights. We find this under the menu Develop: Rendering: Render Attached Lights. Un-ticking this option, the result is that only the lights attached to avatars will not be rendered. All the other lights will be rendered. (If you see no Develop menu, activate it under Advanced: Show Develop Menu. If you see no Advanced menu, CTRL ALT D for it. Almost, if not all current viewers, have these options.)

If you don't want to derender the attached lights, you have also the option, under some viewers, of derendering the avatar of your choice. Temporarily or permanently, but when an avatar is derendered, the attached lights go away with them.

Yay! Lights are gone!
Whichever your choice, don't forget to turn the lights back on when you need them!

Simply activate what you deactivated in the first place, and that's it: the lights are back when and where you have full control over them.

Enjoy your SL.