Category Archives: Materials

Best Building Practices in Second Life

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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.

Penny Patton Efficient Building

Penny Patton Efficient Building

The SL Wiki has a page about Good Building Practices. There is lots of good information there. But, a significant number of creators ignore the guidelines or don’t know about them. Or… it may be they don’t understand them.

Penny Patton has a new article up titled: Building a Better Second Life – Tips for squeezing both better performance and more detail out of SL through efficiently made content. This article is something that every person building in Second Life should read and learn.

Penny covers using textures and scripts. She gives examples of what efficiently built things look like. Her M&C fantasy build (some sections are NSFW) is an example of efficient building practices. Penny does get to her ubiquitous near mantra ‘build to scale.’

I believe her points are keys to a better SL.

Second Life Materials Goes Beta

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This Friday the Lab announced the Materials Beta Viewer is out 3.6.0-276764. Yay!!! See the announcement here: Materials Beta Viewer Launches.

Jacket by Geenz Spad

Jacket by Geenz Spad

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.

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GIMP Normals for Second Life

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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.

GIMP Normal Maps

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.

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SL Materials System Update 2013-16

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Geenz Spad was at the Content and Mesh meeting today. We got a bit more information on the Materials System that is rolling out.

Materials Example - Geenz Spad Image

Materials Example – Geenz Spad Image

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.

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SL Material’s Transparency

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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

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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.

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