Nalates Urriah

Second Life News 2013-15 #2

by

It seems the updates for the Release Candidate planned to rollout on Blue Steel and Le Tigre did not make it. So, the package planned for Magnum was rolled to all three RC regions.

The Magnum package is the HTTP one with a crash mode fix.

So, if you have been testing the new Animation Override functions, you are out of luck for a week or so. The scripts you have made will continue to work. But, compiling (saving) new scripts to test is going to fail.

 

SL Material’s Transparency

by

If you are playing with materials and trying to do transparency with specular maps, you may have run into problems. The problem came up on Plurk and Geenz, the one coding the project, replied in the comments on Inara Pey’s site.

Laverne Unit – April 10, 2013 at 16:56

After some testing, it seems that you can get specularity with diffuse maps with alpha masking, but not with diffuse maps with alpha blending. I don’t know what the intended behavior is, but that’s how it works at present.

Geenz Spad – April 10, 2013 at 17:36

The intended behavior (eventually) is that alpha blended objects will be able to support both normal mapping and specular mapping. Currently this is a work in progress, and due to its current state, it hasn’t been added to the viewer just yet.

 UPDATE: 4/10 – [16:02] Open Source Meeting – Geenz Spad:

So yeah, be on the lookout for materials on semi-transparent objects, it’s coming, I’ve even been working on it for the past week; don’t mope about it not being there too much.

Specular Maps Tutorial

by

There is information about the Materials System in the SL Wiki and Forum. The part I found interesting is the link to: Brief Considerations About Materials. This is an article by a teacher for a Post-Graduate Course on Game Art.

Materials Tutorial
Materials Tutorial

The emphasis in this article is on Specular Maps. This is something many of us have little knowledge about. But, the specular map is going to be far more complex than the normal map. This is the area where knowledge will be key to making nice object textures or great object textures.

Read more

Mesh Deformer in Action

by

There is a new video on YouTube showing the Mesh Deformer in action. 6 minutes. Notice that Enhanced Avatar Physics are enabled. That apparently surprised some of the people commenting in an SL forum thread.

[youtube TJ0JJXmOBwc]

Check out the Forum thread: MESH DEFORMER PROJECT NEEDS YOUR VOICE. WhiteRabbit0 posted.

While I understand the frustration, there is so much wrong with that post I’m not sure where to start.

Read more