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Is it even possible to implement bom for materials?


PixelBerry
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I have just a short question, is it even possible for linden labs to implement a bom system for materials? you know normals and speculars.

I feel like it would of been very neat to be able to combine body and face materials into something more personalized, if the materials were designed for that of course, like layering a scar material or a stretch mark material over a body material for example.

I just got curious regarding that.

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If you have a mod-enabled body, you can do bom materials now, but no body-makers I know of are smart enough to set their Shininess to AUX1_BAKED and normal to AUX2_BAKED then provide a universal wearable for those slots.

ETA: Most bodies I've seen also turn up the texture scaling, so the body materials loop multiple times and look higher resolution up close. You can't layer this "high definition" technique with anything that targets a specific spot on the body.

Edited by Quistess Alpha
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Bakes of speculars and normal maps would also present implementation ambiguities that don't happen with the plain ol' diffuse texture.

Example: you have a scar tattoo that includes a normal map that causes a "groove" on the skin. The rest of the texture is neutral RGBA 128, 128, 255, 255. How should this be blended with another normal map, since all the pixels are opaque, and normal map alpha channel doesn't mean transparency in the first place? It's possible to blend normal maps together to get additive results, certainly, but what if you had some other normal map detail in the same location: does it make sense that a cut on the skin blends together with, say, bumps caused by implant jewelry? Shouldn't the cut override the bumps? How would that be accomplished while still blending the other areas of the normal maps because the alpha channel does not mean transparency? There just is no single answer that works for every situation when it comes to blending normals and speculars.

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28 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

Bakes of speculars and normal maps would also present implementation ambiguities that don't happen with the plain ol' diffuse texture.

Example: you have a scar tattoo that includes a normal map that causes a "groove" on the skin. The rest of the texture is neutral RGBA 128, 128, 255, 255. How should this be blended with another normal map, since all the pixels are opaque, and normal map alpha channel doesn't mean transparency in the first place? It's possible to blend normal maps together to get additive results, certainly, but what if you had some other normal map detail in the same location: does it make sense that a cut on the skin blends together with, say, bumps caused by implant jewelry? Shouldn't the cut override the bumps? How would that be accomplished while still blending the other areas of the normal maps because the alpha channel does not mean transparency? There just is no single answer that works for every situation when it comes to blending normals and speculars.

I don't know about all these things as I'm a consumer for the most part and have just played cluelessly around with materials myself, I'm just saying that the option to do so would be nice, would it work perfectly if it even works? Probably not. But I would prefer to have the option to do so rather than not.

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1 minute ago, PixelBerry said:

I don't know about all these things as I'm a consumer for the most part and have just played cluelessly around with materials myself, I'm just saying that the option to do so would be nice, would it work perfectly if it even works? Probably not. But I would prefer to have the option to do so rather than not.

Any solution with existing options would probably be so half-baked (pun intended) that the grief from angry customers when things don't work as expected (or at all) wouldn't be worth the effort of attempting it, as far as I see it. I haven't with my texture mods and wouldn't.

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Just now, Frionil Fang said:

Any solution with existing options would probably be so half-baked (pun intended) that the grief from angry customers when things don't work as expected (or at all) wouldn't be worth the effort of attempting it, as far as I see it. I haven't with my texture mods and wouldn't.

I guess that's true for the most part, not sure if most people would even be aware of it in the first place. If anything I rather wish that creators were more open for people being allowed to get permission to edit materials for personal use, as materials are a good way to personalize an avatar a bit more, or if anything more tutorials regarding materials or information on where to look for tutorials that would teach you more about that, I feel like I always have to throw myself into nothingness and try to figure things on my own, but that way I end up pretty much cluelessly do things half-baked or not baked at all.

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I feel the solution would be a new type of wearable that is kind of like the universal wearable but for materials instead.  It would have the same body channels but they would take the materials textures with a few sliders just like we get on a rezzed object.  Each channel would be optionally enabled and you could layer them just like other BoM layers for different effects.  It would all get baked together at the server side of course.

Edited by Gabriele Graves
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I think a major stumbling block to BoM materials is that the alpha channel of a materials texture is actually used as a data channel, not as an alpha channel - see here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Material_Data#Texture_Channel_Encoding

With that said, going with @Gabriele Graves' idea, you could just add in 2 more channels which contain the data for the alpha channel for each texture, so the existing texture encoding is preserved, and the bakes service gets the additional information it needs in order to correctly overlay and blend the textures together.

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  • 1 month later...

The answer is yes.  In early BoM betas you could indeed apply Normal and Specularity map textures to BoM surfaces.  This video is from 2018 - the magic happens around 25:30, you can see both Normal and Specularity maps applied to a BoM layer.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/17/2022 at 5:58 PM, Sean Fugazi said:

The answer is yes.  In early BoM betas you could indeed apply Normal and Specularity map textures to BoM surfaces.  This video is from 2018 - the magic happens around 25:30, you can see both Normal and Specularity maps applied to a BoM layer.

All Cathy is doing in that video is adding the normal and spec maps to the mesh itself and not to the BoM (system) layers themselves, which is what we can still do today, often through the use of appliers or body HUDs rather than directly editing the mesh itself, but it still only allows one set of materials per mesh face.

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