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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Mesh Deformer in Action

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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.

[youtube TJ0JJXmOBwc]

Check out the Forum thread: MESH DEFORMER PROJECT NEEDS YOUR VOICE. WhiteRabbit0 posted.

While I understand the frustration, there is so much wrong with that post I’m not sure where to start.

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Second Life News 2013-15

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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.

Honour has a post about things changing in Group Management.

Server-Scripting Meeting - 560LI Flattened Sphere w?Materials
Server-Scripting Meeting – 560LI Flattened Sphere w?Materials

Server Rollouts

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. 

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