Second Life and Virtual Worlds
With the coming of Materials, being able to use normal and specular maps, how one builds is more important. Knowing or not good building practices is going to determine the experience in Second Life™. Poorly built items, whether clothes or objects, have a detrimental effect on our frame rates. The SL Wiki has a page … Read more
This Friday the Lab announced the Materials Beta Viewer is out 3.6.0-276764. Yay!!! See the announcement here: Materials Beta Viewer Launches.
The post explains a bit about what Materials is about and gives a quick tutorial on how to set the viewer so you can see materials. Now if they had just said something about where you could see some things using the materials… Well, try Hippo Hollow.
The title is not very PC. But, I think it will work. GIMP is the free open source image editor many Second Life residents use. With the coming of the Materials System to Second Life™, users of GIMP are going to want to be making normal maps. So, here is a bit more about what normal maps are and how to make them.
First, in English the word gimp also means a lame person. GIMP is DEFINITELY NOT a lame image editor. Its name was to denote it being free. While the name is not particularly flattering for the program it derives from: GNU Image Manipulation Program where GNU or GNU GPL stands for: GNU = GNU’s Not Unix and GPL = General Public License. These later acronyms are about how the software is licensed for sale or redistribution.
Today I see version 3.5.2 (275381) Project Materials Viewer is out. I’ve just downloaded it. I won’t get to play with it until tomorrow. Download
Friday a new version of the Materials Project Viewer was released: 3.5.1 (274847). I am away from home this weekend, so I won’t get to play with it until Monday. I have a link titled SL Materials Post QA that leads to the Alternate Viewers page where you can download a copy.
Geenz Spad was at the Content and Mesh meeting today. We got a bit more information on the Materials System that is rolling out.
We’ve had one update to the the Materials Project Viewer and Geenz is expecting to get another out this week. Some say the viewer is stable and they are using it for their main viewer. We’ve been warned that may not be a good idea. That is because of how the viewer handles, or doesn’t, the textures on existing objects and it may not be consistent, meaning the viewer could mess up existing items.
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 … Read more
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.
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.