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
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.
There is a new video on YouTube showing the Mesh Deformer in action. 6 minutes. Notice that Enhanced Avatar Physics are enabled. That apparently surprised some of the people commenting in an SL forum thread.
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 … Read more
Lots of bits and pieces are coming out. CHUI has made it to the main viewer. That is allowing lots of things to move forward. The Materials System now has a Project Viewer (link in left column – currently alpha version per Oz Linden – if used to edit existing content it may break it). We are seeing Third Party Viewers come out with Server Side Appearance (Baking). See Kokua 3.5.1 now with CHUI and SSA. The HTTP package is moving forward and the Interest List updates are everywhere.
Today there will be no rollout to the main channel. None of the Release Candidates made it past testing. So, those packages are getting updates Wednesday and will run for another week.
Blue Steal and Le Tigre will continue to run the package with the new scripting functions for animation overriding. There are some changes to improve how these functions work with other scripted items, such as pose balls.*
Magnum had the update to HTTP Protocols. That package gets some bug fixes and will continue to run on Magnum.
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.
In Late January I posted about the Materials System and gave an example of what the Build Panel might look like. See: Second Life Materials System 2013-4.
An Early Look at Materials
As it turns out this example is pretty accurate. Back in August 2012 I was explaining what Normal and Specular Maps do. See: Second Life Materials System Announced.
