Yesterday Linden Lab announced that the materials project viewer is now available. This is something that will add some oomph to textures in Second Life and has the added advantage of meaning that people can do things with textures that they may otherwise be tempted to do with Mesh.
Now this is the sort of thing that you need to see for yourself to understand why it adds oomph. There’s a healthy discussion over at SLUniverse where a post from Imnotgoing Sideways gives an idea of what can be achieved with this viewer. Another post from Laverne Unit has a YouTube video comparing two chairs, one with the new materials system applied and the other without, you may need to watch the video at a higher resolution to see the benefits of the new system, but they are there in that video.
There’s also a post from Seven Paragorn demonstrating toadstools, with and without materials applied. In another post Orc posts an animated gif of a Damien Fate dress which exemplifies the system in action too.
The project viewer is available for download and you can get it from here. There are also release notes, which you can read here. The release notes are well worth reading because this is a project viewer, it has bugs, it’s an alpha release and you should most definitely not play around with anything you value whilst playing about with materials. I recommend you only play around with new items you don’t mind losing. The release notes also point you to the material data page, which is also important to understand.
I will emphasise again, do not try this with anything you value, indeed after reading Qie Niangao’s post about the possibility of increasing Land Impact costs, it’s probably best to play with this in a sandbox. Indeed Qie’s post raises a very interesting issue.
Continue reading “Materials Viewer May Bring New Land Impact Accounting System”