Materials Support and Tips

[Madeliefste Oh]

Okay, you have convinced me. I'm going to experiment a bit more with it.

[Medhue Simoni]

I think you also have to understand too, that you learned how to texture in the looks that you wanted with shading. Now, you kind of do all that in the normals and speculars. The object will look realistic, with realistic shading from all angles, and you can leave all the hard, Land impacting detail to the bump maps.

[BlackMagi Darkwatch]

Ok, just started with materials and have to say (using a plugin to generate the normal maps from a texture in Gimp) I’m really pleased with the effect. The only drawback I can see at this time is that in Ultra setting with AO enabled the textures appear really dark to me.  I wander around in Mid/High setting normally.  I added a couple of slow moving light objects to the scene and hey presto – the impression of old stone in 3D!

 

Black

[Vick Forcella]

I have made some stones. Here is one: https://my.secondlife.com/vick.forcella/snapshots/51c725e0d96c873afd000001

There appears to be a problem with the specular map. It's bitty/ boxy. The specular map I made consists of just a few shades of grey. The light reflection suggests bits of a different shade, but there aren't.

I have looked it it with different settings, from mid to ultra. I can not make that 8 bit effect go away.

[Jay Taggart]

I'm having a random problem. I have been updating some older builds with normals and specular. Sometimes the UV vertical offsets reset themselves as soon as I close the build menu. Very frustrating. Is this a known bug?

[Pamela Galli]

I decided to do a simple experiment, with  Crazybump. I made a normal and specular map out of roof shingles and also clay tiles diffuse maps. 

 

Applied them inworld using the latest viewer, as per instructions. No effect what soever.  Here are the tiles with and without. I can't tell any difference.  Same with the shingles. 

 

I had finally stopped dragging my feet on this and got a little bit excited, too. 

[Pamela Galli]

Also the offsets don't stick for me either.

 

I think I'll wait till there is a bit more bang for the buck.

[Drongle McMahon]

I would have to have the maps to play with to make accurate comments, but it's true that if you already have a texture with baked ao and highlights, it's often difficult to see differences. The exception is things with high specular and/or environmental reflection. In the case of just high specularity, the effects are very dependent on the right angles of view and lighting. I can't see how you have made this - are the tiles actual geometry, or just baked on? If they are baked onto a diffuse map, they will look wrong from different angles. If they are geometry, you could save a huge amount of LI by making them from a normal map instead, but the edges would be difficult. I think the saving of geometry by using normal maps instead is the most effective application of materials in the context of buildings. Otherwise, it's only really noticeable for very shiny or wet things. Then there is shiny glass windows, which you can't do without materials (unless you accept unvarying baked shininess).

[Pamela Galli]

There is no geometry, just flat textures.

 

However I fiddled around with it some more and now have some spec -- actually looks like dried glue -- and tho it looks not very good (color is ick), it does seem to have a little normal effect. So I will keep fiddling. :-)

 

I am up in the middle of the night drinking coffee because of all the things I can think of to try this out on, and I don't know when I am going to find the time. So, stopping wasting time sleeping is one option.

[Drongle McMahon]

Sleep well :matte-motes-smile:

[Drongle McMahon]

I think this is the real difference, plus some effect of moving the camera. The left halves are a fixed baked texture, and the right is with normal and specular. Both on a flat surface. Whether it's worth the effort is highly questionable. In fact I think I prefer the fixed texture in most, if not all of these. You would do a much better job of the texture, of course. The baked one was made with the same normal map as the one applied inworld, and I adjusted the shininess parameters to match at 9am. I didn't use a spec map, so only the tiles count, not the bits in between.

 

[BlackMagi Darkwatch]

I've created a normal map for an object that has a 512x512 texture. The question is does (or should) the bump follow the size of the original texture or can I size it down to 256x256?  It seems to me overwise there's going to be more to download by the viewer and potentially contribute to lag.

 

Thanks

Black

[Drongle McMahon]

You can use any size you want in each map. It's independent of the diffuse texture. So are the repeat, offset and rotation. It's always best to make all the maps as small as you can without ruining the appearance.

[BlackMagi Darkwatch]

Thank you Drongle

[Pamela Galli]

Thank you Drongle, those pics are enlightening -- and surprising.  :-)

 

 

[TatianaDokuchic Varriale]

---

Pamela Galli wrote:

Also the offsets don't stick for me either.

 

---

I couldn't get my offsets to stick for anything but the diffuse map either

[Madeliefste Oh]

My next experiment was with shiny textures, I took a mesh chain, I added three different textures, and use both a blanc normal map and a blanc speculair map. The effect that I would like to see, only appears when I support my material with local lights. The sun and moon just don't a very realistic effect.

So far I come to this conclusion:

Adding material to your objects will only have effect on the surface when you let light have influence on your objects. When you rez a your object inside building without local lights, you won't see any effect of the speculair map. The speculair map is a file that contains information about 'how to break the light'. When there is no light there is nothing for the speculair map to interact with, so you simply will not notice a difference on your texture.

When you rez your object outside, the material is influenced by the light from the sun or moon.  The speculair map will catch the light from this source and show the shininess according to it's settings in the texture menu.
You have control over these settings, but not over the settings from the lightsources, the sun or the moon. They won't give your objects the most realistic possible look. That is only reached when you can control both the settings of the speculair map and the light sources the object is influenced by.

When you rez local lights around your object, you have light sources that you can control. Playing with the lights can lead to highly realistic results, the brightness of the light, the color of the light, the angle from where the light comes, all have influence on the realisme of the material. 

[BlackMagi Darkwatch]

Hi Madeliefste

I noticed the same whilst trying out the materials system, the landing point at our parcel (a skybox) is our testing area for normal/specular maps and felt it necessary to add local lighting (rotating very slowly) otherwise it would be very dark indeed and it makes the fake geometry really stand out!  I can actually now see a positive use for (non-nuclear powered) face-lights where no rezzing is allowed for interior builds!

 

Black

[Coby Foden]

---

BlackMagi Darkwatch wrote:

 

I can actually now see a positive use for (non-nuclear powered) face-lights where no rezzing is allowed for interior builds!

---

Oh no!  :smileysurprised:  :smileyfrustrated:

I really do hope that no designer will go about advertizing "To better see the materials effects on our products, please do wear a facelight."

    :matte-motes-evil:  :smileytongue:

[Madeliefste Oh]

Why a facelight, when you can add for example an 'earring material lightset' to an earring that just aims to light the earring itself, same for a ring, a hanger, and so on.

[Coby Foden]

---

Madeliefste Oh wrote:

Why a facelight, when you can add for example an 'earring material lightset' to an earring that just aims to light the earring itself, same for a ring, a hanger, and so on.

---

Uff.. :smileysurprised:   Why not just let the environmental lights do their thing instead?

Depending on the lighting conditions - sometimes things look great, sometimes less great.  That's how things work RL, why not let the same happen in SL too?

 

(Please nobody say "this is SL not RL")  :smileytongue:

SL is a dynamic changing environment, not a photo studio where everything would look static and perfect at all times.  Adding lights lighting the jewellery kills the dynamics and makes them look static. The same thing as with face lights.

Lights on jewellery lighting them would look totally unnatural at night (the similar thing as with full bright stuff).

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

---

Coby Foden wrote:

 

Uff.. :smileysurprised:   Why not just let the environmental lights do their thing instead?

Depending on the lighting conditions - sometimes things look great, sometimes less great.  That's how things work RL, why not let the same happen in SL too?

 

(Please nobody say "this is SL not RL")  :smileytongue:

---

In RL the play between light and material is very different then in rl. Each material has its own way of breaking the light, depending on what kind of material it is.Silver looks like silver, and chrome looks like chrome whether it is 8 am or 8 pm. In SL this is not the case. You can imitate chrome when you support your material with the right light set.... but out in the wild, where your object is just influenced by sun or moon you will loose the chrome effect, and your metal will look like plastic in stead of like chroom.

Some creators will think that is fine, others will want to have their motor wheels look like shiny chrome, no matter what.

They will find solutions for lighting at night, you can make a menu or a hud to adjust your jewelry for night scenes. You can also offer two version: one with and one without a supporting light set.

When it looks good, it will be used by creators.

 

 

[Pamela Galli]

This is what I found, too -- unless I put a light on something, I saw no effect. This was outside, so the sun had no effect, had to be a light source nearby.

[Coby Foden]

---

Pamela Galli wrote:

This is what I found, too -- unless I put a light on something, I saw no effect. This was outside, so the sun had no effect, had to be a light source nearby.

---

Well, this is outside, just sunshine at noon, no local lights:

Clearly the sun alone has an effect. Naturally if we add many local lights there will be more specularity.  In this kind of big thing (it's 1 meter diameter sphere) it would then be obvious to the observer that there are many local light sources lighting the objects, especially so if each light had different colour.

[Drongle McMahon]

Also, the viewer (for performance reasons) will only use the six nearest local light sources. If there is a proliferation of lights on objects, they will be forever going on and off as the camera moves, and as they move relative to the camera. I would expect the result to be visual chaos.

The purpose of materials is to provide a dynamic approximation of lighting by realistically placed light sources in the environment. Attachment of lights in the attempt to produce constant light effects, which don't happen in nature, is surely directly contrary to that purpose, isn't it? Where the purpose is to take photographs, there is no need for lights to be attached to the objects.