We are midyear already…
Chip Midnight, the maker of the clothing templates that many of us use, has put up some interesting posts about Materials over on SLUniverse. Chip is working with materials. The image here is an avatar he made.
Materials
Materials Information
Everyone seems to be playing with materials. For those interested there are changes and new pages appearing in the SL Wiki.
- Second Life’s Light Model For Materials
- Case Study – Katana Using Normal And Specular Maps
- Case Study – Sequined Bear Using Materials
- Case Study – Example Wood Crate Using Materials
Best Building Practices in Second Life
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 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
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.
GIMP Normals for Second Life
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.
New Materials Viewer Released
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.