Materials are coming to Second Life™. Part of the feature is Normal Maps. So, if you want to take advantage of the new feature you are going to need to learn how to make Normal Maps. There is a new tutorial that teaches one how to use the free GIMP image editor to make them.
Indigo Mertel Plurked the link. If you’re Plurking, friend Indigo. The video is 23 minutes long.
[youtube 8Jdo3ZmtPWk]
vscorpianc made the tutorial. Vscorpianc has 277 videos on YouTube. It is a nice collection of GIMP and Blender tutorials.
She does an excellent job and speaks very well. None of the umm… errr… uuhh… or false starts and redo’s.
There is a little blow back on this rollout, nothing too dramatic.
The server restarting warning changed a bit. If you have the normal human mind, you may not notice the difference. But, it is there. This change is only in the RC channels for now.
New Notification
The threaded object rez project hit a last minute bug and was held back from RC. The problem was if you rezzed a copyable object from your inventory, the object would disappear from your inventory, as though it was no-copy. You can imagine the problems that would cause.
I’ll list some other problems that ‘some’ people are noting. We don’t know yet if these are real problems or if they are part of the Interest List change. The bet is good that if they are real problems they are associated with the Interest List. So, if you are seeing these problems, file JIRA’s and let the Lindens know. If you don’t notice things, those things don’t need to be fixed…
Object Area Search
It is currently thought that the Interest List upgrade has broken Area Search in third party viewers (TPV). You should probably file JIRA’s for this problem with your viewer developer.
AO’s Crashes
Some are reporting TPV AO’s are crashing viewers now that Interest List is out… I am not sure I believe the problem and cause are related. Lots of people blame whatever they have last heard changed, which is reasonable but often inaccurate. You should probably file JIRA’s for this problem with your viewer developer.
With avatars we can have texture layers. A jacket is on top of shirt, which is on top of an undershirt, which is on top of the skin with a tattoo layer in there somewhere. But, we cannot do that with prims. We have one texture on one surface/face. At some point we will have normal and specular maps. Those are not really texture layers. Those are more like effects. I doubt this process will be affected by the Materials System. So, this offers some interesting possibilities.
Back in May 2012 Kitsune Shan posted this YouTube video showing textures layered over the same polygons in a mesh object.
Penny has a region named Milk and Cream (Adult NSFW). She has been rebuilding this area and replacing sculpties and prims with mesh objects. She is finding the general FPS rate has in general increased from 15 to 30. Her prim cost (Land Impact Cost now) has been cut in half; allowing her to add more stuff. Plus mesh things can be much more detailed. When the Materials System goes live the amount of detail will increase enormously.
Penny has a thing about building to scale in Second Life. I’ve written about her articles several times. Her point is that if one builds to scale they can have more stuff in a region. Also having things properly scaled can reduce the Land Impact Cost. The LIC of mesh goes up as the scale is increased.
The main thrust of her article is about how people are scaling mesh objects up to work with the over sized avatars many SL users wear. That is significantly costing them additional tier and reducing the amount of content they can have in a region.
Check out the article and then visit Milk & Cream. See if Milk & Cream provides better performance than other areas of the same complexity.
The rollouts to the Main and RC’s should happen today and tomorrow as I reported yesterday. Simon Linden expects the maintenance package on Magnum to be promoted next week. But, that is a ways off. However, rollouts will return to the normal schedule next week.
Grey Goo – Tasty Planet Game – Read On
Maestro Linden changed the forum Deploys post to say a bug was found in the prim rez code running on Le Tigre. Also the Blue Steel performance improvements package ran into problems. Both will drop out of the RC channels and move back into QA. The crash mode code that ran on Le Tigre last week will roll to all the RC’s this week (8).
