Materials – Page 2 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life: Will We Bake Our Mesh Body Avatars?

2017/04/182017/04/16 by Nalates Urriah

The idea of baking mesh avatars has been a subject coming up in the Content Creators UG over the last couple of weeks. The idea is to change how mesh avatars work. If you don’t understand how a Classic body layers work now, this may be confusing. I’ll try to sort it.

Starting back a couple of years, the Lindens added Server Side Appearance baking (SSA). The Classic avatar is made of three separate parts; head, upper body, and lower body. The parts allow layering of textures placed on the Classic body. Sort of like sticking decals one a top another.

Second Life: Specular Maps Tutorial

2016/07/03 by Nalates Urriah

New Work Notes has posted a rare tutorial: Metaverse ProTips: Building With Second Life Specular Maps. Well… I think rare for NWN.

This is a good tutorial on how specular maps are used in SL.

Blender Materials Source

2016/04/07 by Nalates Urriah

I see a new site offering inexpensive materials for use in Blender. Of course there is the question of whether those materials can be used in Second Life. It looks like they can and cannot… I’ll explain.

A Blender Material is very different than the materials we use in Second Life™. In SL we use different textures for the diffuse, specular, and normal layers along with a few settings. In Blender a material is a collection of textures and settings that work ONLY inside Blender. There are way more settings in Blender than in SL. The two material formats are incompatible. So, the material as sold is unusable in SL.

Second Life News Week 13

2016/03/29 by Nalates Urriah

Servers

No updates to the main or RC channels of Second Life™ this week.

Second Life: Reflective Surfaces

2016/03/25 by Nalates Urriah

Hamlet came across a video by Beev Beev that shows how to make reflective surfaces in Second Life™.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqhZDd_33Q

Pretty neat.

Hamlet has more details here: How to Simulate Environmental Reflections in Second Life.

Second Life’s End of InvisiPrims?

2016/03/22 by Nalates Urriah

With the release if the Maintenance Viewer (4.0.2.312269) in week #11, invisiprims pretty much died their final death. Support ended for these critters in 2011. The code that renders them invisible has been in viewers up to this release. But, with this release something changed.

Dry Dock via Invisiprim - Noted by: Callum Meriman — Dry Dock via Invisiprim – Noted by: Callum Meriman

Inviziprims were prims with a special texture that caused things behind the texture to become transparent. Rendering-wise this was nightmare and problematic. The Lindens took advantage of a happenstance of the render pipeline to get them to work. I understand Crazy Mole once built a dry dock using invisiprims (the picture). Many boat builders used them to make the water inside their boats disappear.