Materials

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.)

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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.

[youtube Ow2cDaivDVo]

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. 

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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. 

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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.

[youtube VGKbLFqYY58]

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. 

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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.