Category Archives: Materials

Second Life News 2014-23 #2

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This week’s (23) server rolls returned the packages that briefly ran last week, until Wednesday evening’s re-roll that wiped them out. Yesterday (this week’s Wednesday) those were re-deployed with the only change being the security fix was added.

The Trace 2014

The Trace 2014

Le Tigre now has the Group Ban project package. With a Group Ban Project Viewer you can try out the feature. It is not 100% and won’t be until the update is rolled to the entire grid. This means for now you can group ban people. But, there are ways around the ban and those only close once the roll is grid wide.  Continue reading →

Scripting Second Life Materials Testing

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We have a new aspect of Materials arriving, the ability to script materials as we script textures (diffuse map).

Simon Linden has posted in the Server Beta UG agenda about the coming Materials Scripting feature to allow script control of the new Materials. Quoting:

  • LSL support for materials is in testing
    • Certain Aditi regions (DRTSIM-253 channel, presently) have LSL support for materials
      • Regions “roller-test102” and “roller-test103” are on this channel
      • This is still a work-in-progress – testing is still underway
    • Materials can be added to object faces with llSetPrimitiveParams() functions
      • [PRIM_SPECULAR, integer face, string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians, vector color, integer glossy, integer environment]
      • [PRIM_NORMAL, integer face, string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians]
      • [PRIM_ALPHA_MODE, integer face, integer alpha_mode, integer alpha_cutoff]
        • Valid alpha_mode options are PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_NONE, PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_BLEND, PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_MASK, PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_EMISSIVE
    • Materials can be read with the various llGetPrimitiveParams() functions
      • [PRIM_SPECULAR, integer face] returns [string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians, vector color, integer glossy, integer environment]
      • [PRIM_NORMAL, integer face] returns [string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians]
      • [PRIM_ALPHA_MODE, integer face] returns [integer alpha_mode, integer alpha_cutoff]
  • Behavior for both getting and setting materials parameters should basically correspond to behavior with PRIM_TEXTURE
  • The color vectors use 0.0-1.0 as the range, as with llSetColor()
  • The integer parameters for PRIM_SPECULAR correspond to the same values that you see in the build tool
  • Components of a material can be ‘reset’ as follows:
    • PRIM_NORMAL and PRIM_SPECULAR settings are set to ‘default’ values by setting the texture to NULL_KEY
    • PRIM_ALPHA_MODE settings are set to ‘default’ values by setting the alpha_mode to PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_BLEND
      • mask_cutoff is actually reset to 0 unless the alpha mode is PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_MASK
    • When PRIM_NORMAL, PRIM_SPECULAR, and PRIM_ALPHA_MODE settings are all set to ‘default’ values, the material is deleted from that prim face, and LI may be updated accordingly
  • Known issues
    • There is a viewer rendering issue, where the face will not be rendered and you’ll see log spam (BUG-6187),
      • If the viewer has ALM enabled
      • and a prim face has a material on it
      • and PRIM_ALPHA_MODE is PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_BLEND (this is the default after a material is added)
      • and the diffuse texture does not have an alpha channel (e.g. plywood)
    • The version currently on Aditi lacks proper throttling, so there could be performance issues if scripts behave badly

You can test this new code in ADITI regions; “roller-test102” and “roller-test103”. These are mainland regions (meaning they are running the code currently on the main grid) in the ADITI grid.

Continue reading →

Second Life Normal Maps & UV

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There is an interesting discussion in the SL Forum about a problem some people have had making Normal Maps for Second Life™. Jake Koronikov opened the thread. Jake had a problem with the normal maps creating a visible seam in the model.

FlickrNormal

Normal Maps from Flickr Search

For instance, the seam between the front and back sides of the avatar leg. Of you were making a manikin and using a normal map on it that seem would become visible as a step on the surface rather than the smooth surface it is supposed to be.  You can see his images of the problem in the thread: Tangent spaced Normal Map seam visible in UV border area. (2017 – The images are gone.) Continue reading →

Blender Baking in Cycles

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You may not have noticed that Blender has more than one render engine. It includes:

  • Blender Render
  • Blender Game
  • Cycles

By default Blender uses the Blender Render, which is often referred to as Blender Internal. Cycles is the newer render engine. It uses NODES for many of its rendering features. While nodes are quite different from what many of us are used to, nodes mode texturing does get the process out where one can see what is happening with the render process. A person can also insert modifications into the processing stream at any point.

I like using nodes for texturing. I haven’t used them much because there was no way, at least that I knew, to bake Cycles rendered textures for use in Second Life™. Now we can.  Continue reading →

Bits and Pieces of Second Life 2014-6

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Materials – Prim Perfect has an article up on the surprise they experienced  when moving to a new viewer that was Materials capable. In their words: “The difference is stunning.”

If you aren’t running with the Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled, you are missing out.

Exploring Banana Island - 2014

Exploring Banana Island – 2014

In the Firestorm viewers only the BETA version has Materials capability, for now. If you are a Firestorm user you may want to check out the Beta. If you are leery of Beta versions, you may want to try the main release SL Viewer.  Continue reading →

Real & Second Life Tidbits 2014-2a

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Baking

There is a quick little tutorial on how to bake a specular highlight into a texture on YouTube. I like it because it uses the Blender Nodes.

SL Fashion Blog

This is a blog with great images taken from Second Life. It is, as the name suggests, about fashion. But, the images are gorgeous. See: SL Fashion.

Check Lada L-roy’s review policy. Nice philosophy.  Continue reading →

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Materials Use in Second Life

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Oz Linden tells he came across some numbers on Materials use in Second Life.  Quoting:

Over half of regions and around 10% of avatars now have at least one thing with Materials properties. I’m not sure how that [avatar] number was derived… I’m guessing worn, but I don’t really know.