While the coming of physically-based rendering in Second Life (think reflective surfaces) is causing much buzz among SL's creative community, some well-known metaverse content creators are pushing for Linden Lab to improve the virtual world in another key area: Terrain textures.
"The textures are blurry and flat on their own," as veteran 3D artist Max Graf explains in this Plurk thread, "But up against all the newer visual quality they just look out of place, requiring extra effort to hide the ugly. The texturing method itself, for 'blending' the four textures via corner low and highs was fine in 2009, but it is so horribly dated now when there are so many additional ways it could be done better and produce a better visual on par with everything else that has evolved."
This JIRA submission (SL account log-in required to "Watch This Issue"), submitted by fellow 3D artist NeoBokrug Elytis is a bid to encourage Linden Lab to update the system.
As an example for what they're hoping to achieve, Max sent me the mountain image above.
"This is a simple multi-color terrain for viewing from far off, done using a 'splatmap' to define the areas for each color or texture. Even as plain and smooth as this is, it could not be done with the current SL system, the blending would not be possible.
"However," he goes on, "you add a normal map and some parallax occlusion to that same smooth texture and you get this instead:
