[sldev] Skins, alpha layer.

[Jacek Antonelli]

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 7:19 PM, Frans <mrfrans at gmail.com> wrote:
>  "Only if the goal is to hide the agent, rather than to hide a limb that
> you're replacing with prim parts."
>
> Yes exactly, just looking to improve avatars.
>
> "I've tried making zero-level alpha patches in baked textures on libopenmv
> (was libsecondlife) bots before, and the patches were opaque on the avatar."
>
> That is sad, that might imply that the alpha layer is discarded at the
> server side.
>
> --
> Jeroen Frans
> The Vesuvius Group
> http://www.thevesuviusgroup.com
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/mrfrans
> SL: Frans Charming
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Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure this would require a significant change
to the rendering pipeline, so it's not a light undertaking. Rendering
solid/opaque objects and rendering partially transparent objects are
two different beasts.

That said, I think this would be a great boon to the creative
communities, opening up new possibilities for avatars. Off the top of
my head, I can think of: ghostly, partially transparent avatars;
robots with translucent plastic skin revealing mechanical insides;
avatars with a missing limb or a hole in their chest. There are
certainly other possibilities. So while it's not a light undertaking,
I think it would be a worthwhile one!

A related, and much easier feature to implement, would be to disable
rendering the avatar mesh at all. This would eliminate the need for
invisiprims for tinies, etc. It would also potentially simplify
rendering for giant robots and dragons and so forth, where the avatar
mesh is entirely hidden by the attachments. (Why bother rendering the
avatar mesh if you can't see it?).

Any Lindens willing to pick up the guantlet on either of these? :)

 - Jacek