Second Life Render Metadata

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You may have noticed the item in the Develop menu labeled Render Metadata. At this week’s Content and Mesh Creation user group meeting Zed Tremont asked about getting more information for items in this menu. Nyx Linden provided some insight into these items.

Second Life Viewer’s Render Metadata Menu

If you have not noticed the item look in the top menu try: Develop (Ctrl-Alt-Q – Advanced has to enabled in some viewers to see it Ctrl-Alt-D)-> Render Metadata.

These tools are more for developers than ‘for creators.’ But, creators can use some of them. Unfortunately most of the items are not explained in the Second Life™ Wiki. Nyx says, “…at the moment our documentation around this *is* the source code, most of these displays are mostly used by our graphics engineers, they’re not intended to be general-use displays (hence the lack of documentation).”

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Oskar Linden Gone?

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It seems this rumor is more fact than rumor. I think it is a tragedy. Oskar has been one of the more communicative Lindens. So, what hard evidence do we have? The best I have seen is from Jessica Lyon, the lead in the Firefox Development Team. While I often disagree with her take on facts, … Read more

#SL News 2 Week 44

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Well the roll out went nowhere near as planned. There were problems starting out that pushed the rolls back one day, from Tuesday to Wednesday. And that pushed Wednesday’s roll back a day. But, then the actual roll to the main channel rolled out the wrong version…

Server/Scripting Meeting

The Main channel was to get the code running on Blue Steel. Instead, an older version of the server code from a couple of weeks ago was rolled out. So, the main channels has regressed. I don’t know which version. Lydia Craig reported end up on version 12.10.12.265813 when the release notes said it should be 12.10.19.266079, which would be a one week regression.

Only a few people have noticed the glitch and posted in the forum Deploy thread.

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#SL Materials System Update

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This Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group is not completely dead… they are having meetings. Still Tuesdays at 3 PM in Hippotropolis.

The subject of glass materials with refractive properties came up. It is confirmed that there will NOT be any glass or refraction in the first release of a Materials System and likely not until the third stage of the Materials System. One has to wonder how long that will take.

Normal Map

I had forgotten that currently normal maps are used with water surfaces. In the Environment Settings you can add a normal map for the water surface.

It seems there are two flavors of normal maps; OpenGL and DirectX, which I didn’t know. There is more than two ways to do ‘bump’ on surfaces but, we will only get the tangent space normal maps style in the SL Materials System. The difference is in how the maps are created and used.

OpenGL uses -Z and DirectX uses +Z… or visa-versa… doesn’t really matter. By ‘-Z’ I mean the values are taken as a negative direction. That means dark is either up or down. The different types just reverse the way color values are used… sort of like a negative image that was common with old film cameras. In Photoshop press Ctrl-Shift-I to invert an image’s colors and get the negative or inverted colors.

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Flufee Shooting Stuff

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With no Metareality podcast for the last couple of weeks we will have to get by with Draxtor Dupree’s latest episode of Flufee. Watch out this has a trick plot twist. [youtube ewvbq7xSEbE] See… the meanie killed the hero…