A new set of Materials work has become a Release Candidate Viewer. This Viewer includes support for Materials underwater, render support for impostors, and fixes that will address issues with transparency and alpha layers. See the Release Notes for full details.

A quick coral study with Normal and Specular maps shown underwater. Land Impact is 14.

As of today, approximately one fifth of the regions in Second Life have at least one object using Materials, and this is increasing at a rate of about 2% per week. Users with high-end graphics cards are seeing a significant increase in frames per second when Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) is turned on -- we highly recommend that those users turn ALM on. In addition, we will be updating the GPU tables to include newer graphics cards, allowing more users to take advantage of advanced graphics features like Materials.

Thanks to those who have already tried out Materials and submitted a bug report to the MATBUG JIRA project! Once this release candidate has completed the release process, we will be moving any active MATBUGs to the BUG project and track any future issues from the BUG project.

If you’d like to experiment with Materials, download the Materials Release Candidate Viewer today. And don’t forget to check the Good Building Practices wiki for more tips and tricks and the Knowledge Base for updated user documentation.