Second Life and Virtual Worlds
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 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.
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.
Hamlet has a great example in his article: Project Materials Beta Viewer Brings The Spectacular World of Specularity (and More) to Second Life. The video I have here I found in Hamlet’s article. It was made by Damien Fate and runs about 1 minute.
[youtube 7mFgccXdESo]
This will allow creative types to make some wonderful silk looking clothes. I’m thinking silk Cheongsams.
There are rumors that the new Materials System will push objects that use the new materials into the Land Impact Accounting system. Some have found that when playing with Materials the Land Impact can escalate radically on physics cost. When using Alpha Masking the new materials can drive the Land Impact WAY UP. Plus a single prim, even phantom, can cost 500+ Physics LI. The image below shows a flattened sphere that costs 560 LI.
Andrew said some things that suggest items using Materials are planned to use the Land Impact Cost Accounting system. So, I would guess part of the reason we have this Alpha version viewer is to find problems they have missed. The Land Impact one is a big one.