Advice? Advanced Lighting Model - No Effect On Materials Applied In world - Screenshots Included

[Drongle McMahon]

Just for fun. I made a similar door in Blender and baked normal and ao maps from it onto a plane, to see if that avoided the overlapping normal effects where the gaps between planks met the edges of the metal bars. You can see in the picture that the artefacts are still there, causing breaks in the highlight along the top edge of the bars. So this would need the same retouching as did the normal maps made in Gimp. In contrast, the baked ao does a much better job of supressing the specular highlights where the light can't go. Technically, I suppose this would be better if I did the retouching, but for some reason I prefer the handmade one. Not sure why.

[Drongle McMahon]

So. Now I'm not allowed to see my own posts onless I agree to be subjected to garish flashing advertisements for loan sharks and gambling dens. And that from a company who I pay a lot of money directly. That is intolerable. I'm afraid I will not be contributing any more to these forums unless they correct this ... service.

ETA - on reflection, it seems that this adblock-dependent page-blanking behavior is intermittent. Its timing is like that of the appearance of a particular advertisement. So it may be that it is coming from content of some of the ads rather than directly from LL or Google (although it does occur during the execution of a highly obfuscated google script). Therefore I will reserve judgement while awaiting clarifying information.

 

[Jenni Darkwatch]

I think it's about the best the engine can do, short of adding support for more advanced height field techniques (parallax maps or any other kind of displacement mapping)

[LillyBeth Filth]

 

Madeliefste Oh wrote:

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LillyBeth Filth wrote:

Sadly, I have never been much of a builder in SL I focus on textures and with my recent issue of not actually being able to see them with ALM turned on, on my iMac makes it impossible to create previews "in world" 

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Great pics from Jenni, indeed.

What you see here is the effect of local lights. This works so much stronger in SL for materials then the light of the sun or the moon. You might be able to see the effects as well when you rez a few local lights, and turn on local lights in your preferences. 

What makes me wonder... this new project 'Sunshine' is that changing something about the influence from the sun on materials, does any of you know?

 

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No idea.

I downloaded the viewer tonight as it said it was compulsary (Or words to that effect) but I would imagine adding Material Maps is the the first phase and I hope there will be many more to follow that will build on that.  

[LillyBeth Filth]

Superb! Looks amazing! Lot of work though!  

[Sy Beck]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

So. Now I'm not allowed to see my own posts onless I agree to be subjected to garish flashing advertisements for loan sharks and gambling dens. And that from a company who I pay directly in excess of US$1500 a year. That is intolerable. I'm afraid I will not be contributing any more to these forums unless they correct this utter travesty of customer service.

 

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Noooooooooooooooo, we'd only have to come and find you and knock on your new material door if you did.  Try this for a fix, there should be a solution for you in there somewhere, hopefully.

 

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/SL-websites-and-adblocker/m-p/2071181#U2071181

[Drongle McMahon]

"Noooooooooooooooo"

See note I added ... may not be their fault. So I might relent. Still, a rest would be good.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

So. Now I'm not allowed to see my own posts onless I agree to be subjected to garish flashing advertisements for loan sharks and gambling dens.

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Aawww...stay Drongle, there's a  fix.

If you don't see the icon, click Tools -> Adblock Plus -> Filter Preferences (or the shortcut there, Ctrl-Shift-F) then untick the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising". Works for me, Firefox 22.0 and Adblock Plus 2.2.4.

[Chic Aeon]

I admit that I didn't read through ALL those posts since I last commented, but wanted to add  my experience of the morn.

I am using textures generated by ShaderMap made from the existing textures or ones I have just made.

As far as I can tell LIGHTING IS EVERYTHING. I film and blog and such and so have a huge colletion of Windlight settings. Changing Windlight settings (mostly due to the angle of the sun I suspect) makes a terrific difference in what I see on the model. One light setting has it shining up a strom, another dark and flat.

I am currently working with stone and plants. A little bit of shine is fine, but not too much. What I found in my lengthy lighting experiment of the morn is that I needed to change the specular color to a light gray from white in order to avoid the tremendous high shine -- and turn the shine down in the build tools.

As far as I can see there is no way to insure that people will see the effects of the maps as you see them. It is all dependent on the Windlight setting. So the best we can do as designers is to text many windlight settings and to try and find a setting in the materials build tools that works well for many different lighting patterns.

I plan to sell my products with materials and without and MOD so that people can adjust the settings as needed. Beyond that I am guessing that your maps are probably fine although the ones I saw seemed fairly "flat" compared to mine. It is all about taste and style. You most likely won't be able to please everyone.