Ball gag refinements, PBR and more!
March 28th, 2023 | 
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I’ve made what I believe is a “more realistic” version of the ball gag mouthpiece than the original “Toothchipper3000”. I think it has more character like this. I’ve also done more low-poly work on the versions I hadn’t completed yet.
Not only that, but I spent a bit of time in the GLTF PBR (which stands for Physically Based Rendering) viewer beta. To keep it brief, Linden Lab is currently in the process of adding a new type of material in SL that is more in line with current industry standard used in Blender and game engines like Unity & Unreal.
Not only that but it appears that they are finally ditching the legacy rendering mode and materials will be enabled by default. For what I can see “old” materials will coexist just fine with the new ones, and they are improving how textures are handled in memory, since PBR materials have extra texture data for metalness and roughness.
You can see a quick preview of the improvements when rendering things like latex, leather and metallic surfaces.
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Creator of BDSM and fetish content in Second Life since 2004.
I have never run into a situation where limiting complexity has been an advantage.
I wonder if they will ever fix the transparency layering bug. I’ve been trying to use a Mesh avatar, but the automatic alpha conflicts with other nice things like vision spheres.
Ah, I just saw your comment about Mask mode. Now the trick will be figuring out what object to set it on.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to complexity wise. Alpha sorting is an issue that happens in pretty much every rendering engine out there. Artists usually work around it by avoiding compositions that have too many of those in close proximity. It isn’t a new problem really, anything that doesn’t need partial transparency on pixels should be either opaque or alpha masked.