Saturday, December 29, 2012

Shiny Toys

I was watching TV, and on a Saturday morning news show they were in a festive near-New Year's mood. One woman wore a top made of liquid lamé, and I felt a brief stab of jealousy--I'd love to have a liquid lamé top or gown in Second Life.

I'm hoping that will be possible once the work on normal and specular maps makes it into Second Life, and I also hope more generally that it will mean more realistic metallic objects and drive a long overdue stake through the heart of pre-baked highlights; now you need only wear your latex catsuit at the wrong time of day, stand on your head, or step half into shadow for an instant verisimilitude wreck as your suspension of disbelief hits a huge pothole.

(Is there a competition for most tortured metaphor in a blog post? I'd like to enter...)

Normal and specular maps (specular maps are the ones pertinent to shiny things; normal maps let you efficiently make a low polygon count shape look more detailed) are among the things mentioned in "A Look Back at Improvements in Second Life in 2012 and Forward to 2013", a December 20th Linden blog post. (The mesh deformer is conspicuous by its absence from said post, and I suspect I'm not alone in being less than happy about that.)

P. S. I know there are good arguments against using song titles as blog post titles, but as a Joni Mitchell fan I couldn't pass it up. :)

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