NUX Avatar

[Ceka Cianci]

42 minutes ago, SabrinaCooke said:

Did they specify this  year? It might be beginning of some other year far into the future. 😁

In all seriousness, From what I remember from the most recent labgab that didn't mention any time.. I believe they said they were pretty much finished with the avatars themselves but still working on the things that come with it..

I think once we see the  Dev Kit released, we should see the Nux avatars released  not long after..

I may have even posted the latest Lab Gab where they were talking about it.. I think that one was a couple months ago maybe.. I'll look back and see if I did , or if not I'll find the video and  give the time stamp for when they talk about it..

ETA: Ok found it.. It wasn't me that posted the video, but was Modulated that posted it.. here is their post where  they have the video starting off right at that section of the Lab Gab..

 

Edited June 8, 2023 by Ceka Cianci

[SabrinaCooke]

1 hour ago, Ceka Cianci said:

In all seriousness, From what I remember from the most recent labgab that didn't mention any time.. I believe they said they were pretty much finished with the avatars themselves but still working on the things that come with it..

I think once we see the  Dev Kit released, we should see the Nux avatars released  not long after..

I may have even posted the latest Lab Gab where they were talking about it.. I think that one was a couple months ago maybe.. I'll look back and see if I did , or if not I'll find the video and  give the time stamp for when they talk about it..

ETA: Ok found it.. It wasn't me that posted the video, but was Modulated that posted it.. here is their post where  they have the video starting off right at that section of the Lab Gab..

 

Thanks! I'll check it out. 

[Flea Yatsenko]

16 hours ago, SabrinaCooke said:

Seeing as how SL20B is only a few days away, I'm going to necro this thread yet again and ask if there are any updates for the NUX project. I, for one, am hoping it will be released at the birthday event, but I'm also trying to manage my expectations, given LL's track record with the word Soon.

Still, it would be nice to get an update, even if it's a tiny one. 🙏

I don't think there's any reason for them to release it before PBR is released. Why would they have people making spec+normal content for a new body only for it to be replaced by PBR? Makes more sense to release the body after PBR is released. New body with PBR is going to really make Nux stand out.

They probably want a hard reset on avatars, i.e. using Nux means you'll get PBR clothing and stuff. No more baked shiny clothes and metal, etc. I imagine LL has a roadmap for new projects to completely bring SL's graphics up to date and it completely revolves around the new AV and PBR.

[Flea Yatsenko]

dupe post, sorry

Edited June 8, 2023 by Flea Yatsenko

[steeljane42]

6 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

New body with PBR is going to really make Nux stand out.

That's assuming other bodies won't get updated. Some dropped ones like Slink and 1st gen Belleza ones won't be, but all current ones will be most likely. So unless it'll be really amazing looking, which I doubt it will be considering LL themselves saying how they don't want to compete with the mesh body market (which makes sense as it makes them a lot of money), they won't stand out. For example you can imagine some current freebie bodies like Lucy and Ruth 2.0 PBR enabled too, it won't make them pretty.

Besides there's only two 1024x1024 textures, top and bottom, on the body's SLUV. Don't expect some drastic changes with PBR for the body skins because of that as it's two tiny textures for a rather large surface. Unless one of the market leaders will use an opportunity and introduce a custom UV like Lelutka did for their heads. Then, perhaps, PBR would make a bigger difference.

[Qie Niangao]

8 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

Besides there's only two 1024x1024 textures, top and bottom, on the body's SLUV. […]

Wait. I was thinking all along that no, with PBR there will be four times those two textures, and now suddenly I realize I don't understand (at all) how (if?) BOM works with glTF material skins. When I get a chance, I'll take my alt's mod-perm Jake body to Aditi and paint the system BOM textures all over its material maps and see what "sticks", but if it still only bakes on the diffusemap (or worse, base color), that would be the end of BOM. I know I'm missing something obvious.

Edited June 9, 2023 by Qie Niangao
"its" not "it's"

[Katherine Heartsong]

In relation to the whole "new mentor" thread going around, and to my earlier points here about the possible large business opportunities for new clothing brands to be NUX-only, I'm now thinking that the NUX avatars should also come with a basic set of four or five modern, decent, good-looking outfits already in their inventory, and a simple note card about how to change outfits.

You know: a casual outfit, one that's fun and unique related to the avatar's general look/feel, one formal, a sports one, maybe swimwear, basic underwear.

Nothing risque or over the top, but the idea that a base avatar should only have one outfit at the start is silly. Explain how to "remove from outfit" and "add to outfit" and there you go. An avatar for a new user that can then fit in anywhere, know how to change their look, and feel not so overwhelmed with having to shop for things right off the bat, feeling like they don't fit in, etc.

Mentors could easily demonstrate how to change clothes in mere minutes now.

And for the love of anything .. a decent, built in AO. No more of this robot stilted crap.

Edited June 9, 2023 by Katherine Heartsong

[Krystina Ferraris]

2 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

And for the love of anything .. a decent, built in AO. No more of this robot stilted crap.

This 100% the basic “animations” in SL are pathetic, probably way more pathetic than starter avatars 

[AmeliaJ08]

22 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

In relation to the whole "new mentor" thread going around, and to my earlier points here about the possible large business opportunities for new clothing brands to be NUX-only, I'm now thinking that the NUX avatars should also come with a basic set of four or five modern, decent, good-looking outfits already in their inventory, and a simple note card about how to change outfits.

You know: a casual outfit, one that's fun and unique related to the avatar's general look/feel, one formal, a sports one, maybe swimwear, basic underwear.

Nothing risque or over the top, but the idea that a base avatar should only have one outfit at the start is silly. Explain how to "remove from outfit" and "add to outfit" and there you go. An avatar for a new user that can then fit in anywhere, know how to change their look, and feel not so overwhelmed with having to shop for things right off the bat, feeling like they don't fit in, etc.

Mentors could easily demonstrate how to change clothes in mere minutes now.

And for the love of anything .. a decent, built in AO. No more of this robot stilted crap.

Agree 100%, a 'wardrobe' of 4 outfits would go a long way.

Crucially though... make them mod, then it's a little learning opportunity on how to modify items. If all the items came in a basic white then people could learn a little about customization. If we wanted to really teach new users and have a practical creative lesson available then making the items full perm for anyone who cares would be even better.

 

[Doris Johnsky]

The Newbs of today have no freaking idea how lucky they are.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

On 6/9/2023 at 4:38 AM, Qie Niangao said:

Wait. I was thinking all along that no, with PBR there will be four times those two textures, and now suddenly I realize I don't understand (at all) how (if?) BOM works with glTF material skins. When I get a chance, I'll take my alt's mod-perm Jake body to Aditi and paint the system BOM textures all over its material maps and see what "sticks", but if it still only bakes on the diffusemap (or worse, base color), that would be the end of BOM. I know I'm missing something obvious.

BOM works by combining multiple texture files into a single file. That's pretty much what it does. So, if PBR requires multiple files per texture it won't work. And that's the name of that tune.

I don't know a great deal about PBR, so this is a sincere question - what is the advantage of PBR over the current texture/materials system for rendering humanoid flesh? And if it doesn't have a major advantage, then why use it? Your thoughts on this sound a little like someone with a hammer seeing everything as a nail.

[Qie Niangao]

52 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

what is the advantage of PBR over the current texture/materials system for rendering humanoid flesh?

This current PBR subset can be almost fully emulated by full usage of the current materials system, it just slices the information into different maps. (One big difference for me is the separation of emissivity into its own map, rather than encoding it in the diffusemap's alpha channel, which was always a kludge that prevented semi-transparent surfaces that had varying degrees of emissivity.) There's an assumption that SL will eventually pick up additional PBR-related features, notably subsurface scattering, which is simply required for realistic appearing flesh on moving avatars, but it's true that's not in the current bundle.

But it's more that I'm now baffled by how BOM is even supposed to work on surfaces with glTF materials. In the past, the skin layer's diffuse map was painted with the system BOM textures, which told the baking service to bake down successive (diffusemap) textures of skin, tattoos, underwear items, and clothes, just as on the pre-mesh system body. That was okay as far as it went but any use of materials other than diffusemap required some scripted (or manual) application directly onto the baked surface.

As long as no glTF materials are used, the old baking mechanism should continue to work just fine, but if they are used… I don't think the old stuff is visible at all, is it? So I was thinking the plan may be to instead paint the system BOM textures on some glTF material map and the baking service could use that—but which? One of the beauties of the new materials system is that it provides full resolution separately for base color and ambient occlusion that were collapsed into one diffusemap before (which also often included statically-lit hints of reflectivity, roughness, and surface grain that already belonged on different maps that wouldn't be seen by those without advanced lighting enabled). Point is, there's no single glTF material appropriate for baking what SL has conventionally considered a skin+tattoo+clothing texture. So I just don't know how it's supposed to work.

[Theresa Tennyson]

39 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

There's an assumption that SL will eventually pick up additional PBR-related features, notably subsurface scattering, which is simply required for realistic appearing flesh on moving avatars, but it's true that's not in the current bundle.

 

In the movie "Support your Local Sheriff," James Garner's character ends up being the new sheriff of a lawless town. He meets with the town leaders to receive the sheriff's badge and notices that it has a bullet-shaped dent in it.

"This badge saved a man's life!", he observed.

"I reckon it would have," one of the leaders replied -- "if it weren't for all those other bullets."

Given the limitations of the current Second Life avatar/mesh rigging and animation systems, subsurface scattering isn't going suddenly make a Second Life avatar look that much more realistic than it already does (or doesn't.)

Edited June 11, 2023 by Theresa Tennyson

[Qie Niangao]

4 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Given the limitations of the current Second Life avatar/mesh rigging and animation systems, subsurface scattering isn't going suddenly make a Second Life avatar look that much more realistic than it already does (or doesn't.)

Moving the camera around the face in close-up, it absolutely will.

That said, though, it's nothing compared to the change coming with PBR to force all viewers to have Advanced Lighting at all times. That means all that murky baked-in lighting that makes existing skins look so gawdawful will finally get washed off so we can see the actual (well, virtual) lighting in the scene, rather than whatever fixed light sources struck the skin artist's fancy.

Avatars will look much more realistic as a mere side-effect of the PBR project, even if they still use the old material system. It will make obsolete every skin currently on the market, though.

[Nika Talaj]

17 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

That said, though, it's nothing compared to the change coming with PBR to force all viewers to have Advanced Lighting at all times. ...

Avatars will look much more realistic as a mere side-effect of the PBR project, even if they still use the old material system. It will make obsolete every skin currently on the market, though.

It will only force Advanced Lighting if you want to see PBR materials, yes?  If you don't have Advanced Lighting on, how does a PBR surface look?  

Advanced Lighting still causes a performance hit on lower-end equipment.  Will the rendering engine be changing so that no longer will be the case?  If not, it's hard for me to believe that users will care to see PBR surfaces unless they're taking a very important picture.  

I would think that PBR avatar skins will not be coming along for quite some time?  Certainly the BOM issue has to be clarified, and I can't see existing users being excited about tossing all their skins, lol. Frankly, to my eyes, even with all graphics enabled, it's a rare scene where a skin with just the current materials looks noticeably different from a high-quality non-materials skin. In scenes where the avatar is moving through a moodily lit scene, yes.  Otherwise, not so much.  Perhaps that's a failing of my video card, or my eyes lol.

Edited June 11, 2023 by Nika Talaj

[JeromFranzic]

55 minutes ago, Nika Talaj said:

It will only force Advanced Lighting if you want to see PBR materials, yes?  If you don't have Advanced Lighting on, how does a PBR surface look?  

Advanced Lighting still causes a performance hit on lower-end equipment.  Will the rendering engine be changing so that no longer will be the case?  If not, it's hard for me to believe that users will care to see PBR surfaces unless they're taking a very important picture.  

I would think that PBR avatar skins will not be coming along for quite some time?  Certainly the BOM issue has to be clarified, and I can't see existing users being excited about tossing all their skins, lol. Frankly, to my eyes, even with all graphics enabled, it's a rare scene where a skin with just the current materials looks noticeably different from a high-quality non-materials skin. In scenes where the avatar is moving through a moodily lit scene, yes.  Otherwise, not so much.  Perhaps that's a failing of my video card, or my eyes lol.

I have noticed a considerable frame drop with some PBR heavy scenes. My laptop that I use for SL has a GTX 1050 GPU. It has 4 GB of VRAM so PBR scenes still load, but they load slowly, partly due to the bandwidth limit (128 bit, faster/newer GPUs have higher limits).

I wouldn't want to be in a crowd that's dense enough for moshing with PBR turned on, unless I upgrade to a new laptop. Even then, I think there would have to be other adjustments to the SL engine to make PBR workable for most PCs and the upcoming mobile viewer.

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Nika Talaj said:

It will only force Advanced Lighting if you want to see PBR materials, yes?  If you don't have Advanced Lighting on, how does a PBR surface look?  

Advanced Lighting still causes a performance hit on lower-end equipment.  Will the rendering engine be changing so that no longer will be the case?

Advanced Lighting Model is a whole different rendering path ("deferred rendering"). With PBR, they've removed the older code that did non-ALM ("forward") rendering, so there's no way to see glTF materials without ALM. That's true on the Linden viewer, which AFAIK is the only one doing PBR at all at this point, but I think Henri has vowed to keep forward rendering alive for a while despite it being dropped from the Linden viewer source. (I'm not a viewer developer, but I gather this is a bigger deal than merely perpetuating pie menus.)

That viewer renders noticeably faster than older viewers because of other streamlining (besides removing the old non-ALM code). Linden water, for example, is slightly simpler, which means it's supposedly not quite as pretty (I haven't noticed, but sure) and maybe less buggy.

As I said, I'm not a viewer developer, nor a graphics expert, I just read stuff and try it out when I get a chance. Somebody absolutely knows how BOM works with PBR, but I don't and have been hoping to learn.

[Nika Talaj]

Sorry, derail.

Edited June 11, 2023 by Nika Talaj

[Jenna Huntsman]

Hey all,

In today's Lab Gab at SL20B, a new preview of the NUX avatars was given!

I grabbed a fair few photos, all taken in the new PBR viewer.

( Imgur Album - https://imgur.com/a/a2i4W8p )

Edited June 30, 2023 by Jenna Huntsman

[Love Zhaoying]

23 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Hey all,

In today's Lab Gab at SL20B, a new preview of the NUX avatars was given!

I grabbed a fair few photos, all taken in the new PBR viewer.

( Imgur Album - https://imgur.com/a/a2i4W8p )

Thank you!

[Craeton]

38 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Hey all,

In today's Lab Gab at SL20B, a new preview of the NUX avatars was given!

I grabbed a fair few photos, all taken in the new PBR viewer.

( Imgur Album - https://imgur.com/a/a2i4W8p )

Absolutely stunning.  Cool to see these 2 years in the making!  Thank you for the pics!  Really looking forward to the release of these along with PBR.

[Eddy Vortex]

These crocs are awesome!

[Polenth Yue]

Sounds like the release is going to be very soon. They also mentioned working on things like anthro add-ons, so people wouldn't have to be human when they started.

I like the idea as a creator of using these as a basis for some humanoid non-humans, as it's an avatar everyone will have (and if it's full perm, might even be able to include a copy of the body in the box with the other bits to make the creature).

[Katherine Heartsong]

As an artist ... almost got the proportions right.

I had hopes as I was segmenting into 8ths head down and found the crotch exactly where it should be, halfway down/up the body. However, the legs on this one are too long and need to end at 8, with the knees at the bottom of 6. Closer than some of the major body brand defaults, anyway.

[Persephone Emerald]

11 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

As an artist ... almost got the proportions right.

I had hopes as I was segmenting into 8ths head down and found the crotch exactly where it should be, halfway down/up the body. However, the legs on this one are too long and need to end at 8, with the knees at the bottom of 6. Closer than some of the major body brand defaults, anyway.

They may have gone with longer legs so these avatars will fit in with the majority of SL avatars and animations. At least the arms are long enough and the male doesn't have a small head and huge shoulders.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Persephone Emerald