Odd issue going on with Materials

[Phillip Aubin]

I'm helping with a build of an RP sim and I'm expereincing the weirdest thing, and it has been ongoing for the whole length of the build and I'm pulling my hair out over it.

It's focuses on Materials mainly, the surface would be textured accordingly, all is dandy until i have to offset the planar texture to line it up with another face, upon relogging, the Normal and Specular textures will be offset by 6.0 on only the axis' that offsets are present in. This hoewver doesn't affect the diffuse texture/channel.

What the heck is going on, and how to I make this issue stop?

[Pamela Galli]

Dont understand offset by 6. 1 is maximum.

[Phillip Aubin]

I know the maximum offsets are 1.0 and -1.0, but somehow. . . It happens. Not sure if it's a server-side issue or what. because it's giving me the contrains far beyond what should be there.



[Pamela Galli]

I dont know, but just dont have any negative offsets.

[Phillip Aubin]

Only negative offsets? Why, is something wrong with them?

[Pamela Galli]

Nothing wrong unless you want materials to sync.

[Qie Niangao]

What viewer is this? I don't see anything like that in the Build Tool of the Linden viewers, nor Firestorm (at least not the way I have it configured). Do you see the same effect using another viewer?

If you do, then I'd be tempted to write a little script to get the PRIM_SPECULAR and _NORMAL parameters of the surface, to establish the ground truth of whatever apparent nonsense this viewer seems to be spewing.

[Phillip Aubin]

I use Black Dragon as my main viewer. Firestorm has too much in it and it lags like something else and the Lab's viewer has washy colors, but yes, regardless of viewer, the issue persists as I have both Firestorm and Linden Lab's viewers installed as well to diagnose Viewer-specific matters if I run into any issues.

But luckily, a possible fix has been discovered. Apparently setting the offset to anything negative causes the issue, Not sure if it's a server-side matter or if recent code changes have caused the issue, but only setting map offsets to a positive value will fix the issue. Hopefully anyone else having the same problem down the road will find this thread useful.

[Whirly Fizzle]

You can't really use planar textures for material textures, it's always been broken.

Are you trying to use negative offsets for the material textures?

Same reproduces on the LL viewer too.

You dont even need to relog for it to break. Just exit and re-enter edit.

LL viewer:



 

Bug report: BUG-4936 - Cannot offset normal and specular map textures negitive

[Phillip Aubin]

Yeah, figured that out today. The build uses a large majority of planar textureing due to the massive amount or surface area it's covering, but now after having learned the solution, any texture adjustments are being strickly positive instead of negative when it come to offsets.

So yeah, we have been using planar mapping and negative offsets with said planar textures along with the normal and specular mappings. Everything is coming along smoothly now that we figured out the root cause and corrected it.

Thanks for the bug report link as well, good to know it's at least known, even after I Google searched solutions for a few days before coming here.

[Bobbie Faulds]

Just an aside, but why using materials on a big build? Roof tiles or inside for panelling where you are seeing small sections. For something as large as the whole outside of a building, your players are going to hve loading and lag issues from trying to rez the textures. At that point, they'll reduce their graphics settings and won't see the materials anyway. I'd save the materials for more intimate areas and leave the outside regular textures and skip the materials. The newest shiny doesn't have to be used on everything. 

[IvanBenjammin]

Bobbie, I don't mean to sound like I'm ranting at you, specifically, but:

???

Do people still think of Materials as 'the newest shiny'? Normal mapping is about as old as SL itself

Firstly, how long it takes for textures to load in your viewer is dependent on how many textures and their resolution - the size of the building is entirely irrelevant.

Secondly, 'materials' aren't handled the same way as diffuse textures. Any graphics card that's less than 10-12 years old has been built to handle normal mapping efficiently. They load much faster than a regular texture, and take up far less VRAM.

As always, if a user is having loading issues with SL, its almost certainly caused by avatar textures and mesh density, not their environment.