Are EEP water shadows still broken in LMR RC5?

[KjartanEno]

I'm on Linux, so I cannot use the LMR test viewer. I was visiting one of the editor's picks, Beira da Ribeira, using Firestorm and Singularity viewers. Singularity still uses the Windlight renderer, and I used the shared environment. The sunlight is a bit too bright, but wouldn't that be expected in a tropical jungle? I saved a few pictures and came back in Firestorm. Again, I used the shared environment. However, wanting to try to replicate that high contrast look I got in Singularity, I turned up the gamma a bit and lowered the ambient color with Personal Lighting. It struck me how poorly the water shadows on Firestorm compared to Singularity, even being completely absent in some situations. I'm not picking on Firestorm in particular. It just happens to be the EEP viewer I use the most. Also, this is not the first time that something seemed 'wrong' with the EEP water, but as you can see from the images below, it's quite a contrast in this case. No sky or water preset made in Firestorm made any difference. Using the shared environment without tweaks didn't make any difference.

Firestorm at the edge of the jungle:

Singularity at the edge of the jungle:

Firestorm at the village:

Singularity at the village:

[Lillith Hapmouche]

OT: Your feet look weirdly coloured.

[KjartanEno]

40 minutes ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

OT: Your feet look weirdly coloured.

Actually that might be related. If the water issue prevents ground shadows underwater, it's doing the same to the feet in that image.  Also, at times the reflections of objects on water are much brighter than they should be considering the objects' colors in the scene.

[KjartanEno]

If I could get some feedback on this, I'll file a bug report. Here's a composite image with the avatar standing in the same spot in Singularity and Firestorm. In both viewers the setting "automatic alpha masks (deferred)" is enabled in the Developer menu. I checked whether this setting made any difference in Firestorm, and it did not. If this has been fixed in the LMR RC viewer, then I won't need to file a bug report.

[arton Rotaru]

There are shadows on water, as well as under water in LMR 5.

[KjartanEno]

I tested the water shadows issue with the Alchemy EEP beta. With a prim on my head, I took a walk in shallow water. Of all the EEP viewers I have used, only Alchemy did it right. Alchemy's water also looks different using the same region water setting than Firestorm and Kokua viewers. So, just to be clear, it's not that there are no water shadows at all in EEP. They are simply so faint as to be practically useless no matter what water preset or custom adjustment is made.

[NiranV Dean]

On 3/26/2021 at 3:19 PM, KjartanEno said:

I tested the water shadows issue with the Alchemy EEP beta. With a prim on my head, I took a walk in shallow water. Of all the EEP viewers I have used, only Alchemy did it right. Alchemy's water also looks different using the same region water setting than Firestorm and Kokua viewers. So, just to be clear, it's not that there are no water shadows at all in EEP. They are simply so faint as to be practically useless no matter what water preset or custom adjustment is made.

This would be the original unaltered water reflections

BD however has an option to re-enable the specular component of water (which disables the faked specularity and uses the actual surface specularity), this re-enables dimming the sunlight reflection highlights and allows lights to reflect on the water surface again, however this brings other issues such as the glossiness glowing through fullbright surfaces (happens with shiny surfaces that reflect the sunlight too). Though note that i dimmed the sunlight reflection a lot to lessen the effect of the sunlight glow shining through fullbrights to an absolute minimum while still keeping the sunlight reflections.

unaltered and undampened this would look like this:

arguably a lot fancier, but also a lot buggier.

Note that BD does not have LMR 5 yet.

[KjartanEno]

4 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Note that BD does not have LMR 5 yet.

Since I was able to install Black Dragon under WINE, I went ahead and installed the LMR 5 RC viewer. It's no better with regards to water shadows than the current Second Life viewer which I have for Linux (compiled by Drakeo on a regular basis), and it's similar to the current Firestorm and other EEP viewers as well. I didn't spend much time evaluating the finer points of LMR. One difference I noticed with official viewers versus TPV is how they handle the "Refraction Scale (Above)" setting. In Firestorm and Black Dragon, using a very low setting works well for realistic looking water with subtle shadows. In the official viewer, including LMR, there is no value which brings out shadows and gives decent looking water. Keep in mind, this is just what I know from playing around with settings, trying to get something that doesn't look like TOR water gone bad.

I really like what you've done with the more accurate specularity. Your water shadows are still similar to other TPV EEP viewers and more subtle than what we had with Windlight viewer, which Alchemy's EEP beta is emulating. However, simply getting rid of that awful and out of place sun/moon reflection in the shadows makes a huge difference in the realism of any scene including water.

[NiranV Dean]

5 hours ago, KjartanEno said:

Since I was able to install Black Dragon under WINE, I went ahead and installed the LMR 5 RC viewer. It's no better with regards to water shadows than the current Second Life viewer which I have for Linux (compiled by Drakeo on a regular basis), and it's similar to the current Firestorm and other EEP viewers as well. I didn't spend much time evaluating the finer points of LMR. One difference I noticed with official viewers versus TPV is how they handle the "Refraction Scale (Above)" setting. In Firestorm and Black Dragon, using a very low setting works well for realistic looking water with subtle shadows. In the official viewer, including LMR, there is no value which brings out shadows and gives decent looking water. Keep in mind, this is just what I know from playing around with settings, trying to get something that doesn't look like TOR water gone bad.

I really like what you've done with the more accurate specularity. Your water shadows are still similar to other TPV EEP viewers and more subtle than what we had with Windlight viewer, which Alchemy's EEP beta is emulating. However, simply getting rid of that awful and out of place sun/moon reflection in the shadows makes a huge difference in the realism of any scene including water.

Yea i noticed that shadow visibility is extremely dependent on the water settings, having the sky reflect strongly basically gets rid of all shadows but then again i think that might be intentional, since i cant just go out and increase fresnel values on water and see i can only assume that that is how it would work.