Surface Effects (Content Creation)

Opensimulator: Content Creators: Surface Effects

In addition to textures and materials, opensim has four functions to alter the look of a model's surface. They are mostly self-explanatory but some comments might be appropriate.

Color

Color adds an even tint across a face. Subtle coloring can be quite effective to fine tune the appearance of a texture and also add variety to a scene without adding more textures. Heavier coloring can give the model a "synthetic" and unnatural appearance and although it can be very effective sometimes it should be used carefully.

Monochrome Surfaces

Monochrome surfaces are an important exception to the caution about heavy coloring. These should always be done using the default blank texture with coloring added. Using colored monchrome textures is not a big mistake but it does add unnecessary load to both server and client and is not recommended.

Full Bright

Full Bright disables all athmospheric shaders for the face. It is sometimes used to compensate for the general dark appearance of models but this should be done very carefully since Full Bright disables all shaders so the surface will appear to glow at night and tend to look rather flat. The effect of normal maps will also be seriously reduced if Full Bright is enabled.

Full Bright can only be on or off but intermediate values can be set with alpha textures and Emissive mask alpha mode.

Transparency

Can be set from 0 (no transparency) to 100 (fully transparent). The actual transparency values the viewer operates with are on a scale from 0 to 255 but the viewer operates with the coarser 0-100 scale. More precise transparency values can still be set by a script but this is rarely needed.

Alpha mode

Applies only to transparent textures. A texture with transparency (aka an alpha texture) has an "alpha" channel which sets each pixel's transparency to a value between 0 (no transparency) to 255 (fully transparent). The alpha mode determines how the viewer treats this data:

• none: The aplha channel is completely ignored.
• Alpha blending: The standard: transparency added to each pixel according to its alpha value.
• Alpha masking: Pixels are either fully transparent of fully opaque. The Mask cutoff value determines which is which; pixels with an alpha value lower than the cutoff are rendered opaque, the ones with a higher value transparent.
• Emissive mask: A special function where the alpha channel is used to set emission (similar to Full Bright). The scale is the opposite of what most people may assume: low alpha values give more emission, higb values less.